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militant-holy-knight · 5 years

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While the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) has lost control of its statelet in Iraq and Syria, the war against the remnants of the organization is not over, despite President Trump's claim to the contrary. Anti-Assad rebels still control various parts of Syria with non-ISIS jihadis controlling Idlib in the northwest and the Kurds commanding the northeast. Fighting over these enclaves will likely occupy the immediate future. In addition, any "deescalation" agreements remain subject to collapse or cancellation at the convenience of Assad and his backers. But the longer-term question is what happens next? Will the wars in Syria and Iraq finally end, or will there be another round of insurgencies? And will ISIS again go underground to rebuild as it has before?

The Situation on the Ground

While ISIS and other groups have made preparations for going underground to resume an insurgency, the success of such efforts depends on at least two factors: how well the Syrian and Iraqi governments reestablish effective governance and security and are able to identify and root out the rebel infrastructures; and whether these governments can manage reconstruction and reconciliation, especially reintegration of Sunni Arabs.

Governance and security. Reestablishing effective governance and security requires that national governments enforce and maintain effective control over areas previously held by ISIS or other insurgents. If the governments succeed, it will be much harder for opposition groups to go underground and remain functional.

But restoring security will be extraordinarily difficult. For a start, the anti-ISIS war is not over. Though their command structure has largely been shattered, there are still residual ISIS pockets and cells to dig out. Moreover, the parts of ISIS most likely to have survived—senior commanders and the security apparatus—are the parts most able to regenerate the organization. The war against the terrorists has also been only one aspect of the multi-sided civil war in Syria. There are ample opportunities for further wars there and in Iraq. These may be driven by rival nationalisms: Turkey has demonstrated its readiness to go to war against the Kurds in Syria and has occasionally talked about enlarging its borders, and Iraqi Kurds unsuccessfully tried to do so. Factional rivalries and competing ambitions between regional states as well as Israel's sustained efforts to prevent Iran's military entrenchment in Syria could lead to a wider conflagration. Various Sunni states may be prepared to continue support of Sunni factions as a way to distract Iran and other enemies or may look the other way when factions within those states give such support.

It is also possible that the Middle East is in the opening round of multiple civil and proxy wars within Islam: between governments and movements that have weaponized Shiite and Sunni Islam; between Shiite factions allied or opposed to Iran, and among the Sunni jihadists. These wars are likely to be protracted and bloody and will further increase religious polarization and violence within the region and within Islam as a whole, and can potentially destabilize much of the Middle East.

The capabilities of both the Syrian and Iraqi governments are limited; their ability to effectively govern and conduct long-term counterinsurgencies is uncertain. While the collapse of the Iraqi security forces in the face of ISIS has been widely noted, the collapse of the Syrian military was even more comprehensive. The Baghdad government and the Assad regime have only partially recovered, with many of the forces nominally aligned with them in reality being factional militias that serve their own agendas or those of foreign sponsors. This is most prominent in Iraq where the Kurds are effectively an autonomous government and where major parts of the Popular Mobilization Forces militias created in the aftermath of the 2014 Iraqi security collapse are under Iranian control. It is also the case in Syria where its Kurds also desire autonomy and where many militias such as the Lebanese Hezbollah function independently of the Assad regime. Will these forces accept and support government policies with which they (or their patrons) disagree? Or are they more likely to pursue their own agendas, if necessary at the expense of the national governments they nominally support?

Reconstruction and reconciliation. National reconstruction and reconciliation, especially reintegration of the Sunni Arabs, will present uphill struggles. First, there is some question about how much reconstruction the Iraqi and Syrian governments will be able to undertake even with foreign aid. Much of each country has been economically, socially, and physically devastated, both by ISIS rule and by the wars to drive the organization out and their aftermaths.

Large parts of Syria have been devastated by the civil war unrelated to ISIS. There are also millions of refugees, mostly Sunnis, which the Assad regime will likely be reluctant to resettle. Meanwhile, both the Iraqi and especially Syrian governments are effectively bankrupt. Assad's war has been largely bankrolled by Tehran, and his Russian and Iranian patrons are unlikely to be inclined or able to fund the enormous reconstruction costs, estimated to be between $250-300 billion. A preliminary World Bank estimate of Iraqi reconstruction costs from February 2018 was $88 billion. The Trump administration is also unenthusiastic about nation-building, and as of March 2018, had pledged only a $3 billion line of credit. And while the Persian Gulf monarchies have made promises to Iraq, and Riyadh has cautiously opened up to Baghdad to push back against Iranian influence, it remains to be seen whether these governments will actually come up with the money.

Meanwhile, the rest of the international community is likely to experience donor fatigue. Beyond this, is the question of how much of the available money will get to the Sunnis who have been hardest hit: As of early 2019, the Iraqi government had provided virtually no reconstruction money to Ninevah province, which includes Mosul). To whatever degree Syrian and Iraqi Sunni Arabs manage—or are allowed—to recover may be in spite of policies of their governments rather than because of them.

As for national reconciliation, while the Damascus and Baghdad regimes may have made some efforts in that direction in the past, the situations do not look promising. The continuing wars against rebels in Syria will likely be hard and protracted. It is all too likely that ultimately the victors (especially the Assad regime) will pursue a vindictive peace in an atmosphere of religious polarization and widespread individual and group hatred and revenge. Even now, the Assad regime has been confiscating and selling the properties of refugees and those considered rebels.

It is unclear how much the Assad regime will even try to reconcile its Sunni subjects. The Syrian president has made clear his intent to reconquer militarily all of the country, and one must expect the same brutal tactics he has used so far. Assad prefers brutality since his aim is not only to win the war but to intimidate the survivors. The idea that one cannot kill one's way out of an insurgency is a Western conceit that others, especially the Russians and Middle Easterners, dismiss with contempt—after all, that is precisely what Bashar Assad's father did to put down a rebellion in the early 1980s.

In Iraq, the previous government of Prime Minister Haidar Abadi made efforts to reconcile the Sunni Arab minority and protect it from blood revenge and collective tribal responsibility for the actions of individual members. Current prime minister Adil Abd al-Mahdi appears to favor a moderate policy, but how much he can actually deliver remains to be seen. He has no independent power base, controls his own government only partially, and has limited or no control over many of the Shiite militias of the Popular Mobilization Forces, who are frequently supported or controlled by Tehran and have driven a sectarian agenda. Meanwhile, it is reasonable to expect that the popular sentiment of much or most of the Shiite and Kurdish populations, not to mention the surviving non-Muslim religious minorities, favor punishing the Iraqi Sunni Arabs for being pro-ISIS or insufficiently anti-ISIS. Villages and tribes often take their own retribution whether it is government policy or not.

Clearly, there are ample grounds for pessimism.

The Future of ISIS

But the situation does not necessarily favor ISIS as the requirements needed to function underground may work against it. While there remains an atmosphere of massive Sunni grievance and a power vacuum that ISIS could theoretically exploit, how well it will be able to do so is still a question.

For a start, since foreign fighters have been killed, captured, or have fled and not been replaced, ISIS has reverted to being more and more Syrian and (especially) Iraqi. Foreign fighters provided much of the core strength of ISIS and replacing them will be difficult. But even if they stayed, these foreign fighters would be ill-suited for underground resistance in their host countries. Thousands of them came from outside the Arab world, in particular the West, sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and areas of the former Soviet Union, and are likely to speak Arabic poorly and to appear non-Arab. These foreigners, as well as Arabs with non-Syrian or non-Iraqi Arabic accents, or for that matter anyone non-local, are likely to get close attention from the security authorities, hindering them going underground.

Various world, national, regional, and local security forces will also be trying to identify, locate, and eliminate ISIS holdouts gone underground. In the Mosul campaign alone, the Iraqi authorities had more than 30,000 suspects' names in December 2016, and by January 2018, had some 6,000 captured ISIS suspects awaiting execution. In addition, some factions may not be waiting on legal niceties. Local and regional services, in particular the Assad regime's, can be expected to err on the side of excess.

ISIS also made many other enemies who will be out for revenge. Syria's conflict, in particular, has been a multi-sided civil war with ISIS fighting many other anti-Assad factions, including nationalists and various other jihadists. The situation has also been complex in Iraq. Even if ISIS did have some local support that was not coerced or opportunistic, it ruled as conqueror even at the expense of local allies. Indeed, its first purge after taking over Mosul was of former allies. In particular, ISIS and al-Qaeda factions in Syria have spent extensive time and effort killing each other, and there are irreconcilable major differences between ISIS and al-Qaeda Central, particularly over leadership of the global jihadist movement. These conflicts can be expected to continue underground.

Finally, popular resentment of ISIS's brutal tactics has produced numerous personal grudges to be settled. An obvious way to settle scores will be to turn in ISIS fighters to the security forces. Financial rewards would be a further incentive. And if government screening seems too lenient, or corrupt, individuals personally may target ISIS members for revenge killings.

ISIS is thus unlikely to have the same favorable atmosphere to maintain or rebuild its underground structure as previously, especially in Mosul, where its predecessor organization, al-Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State of Iraq, was never really removed even when the U.S. military was present in force, and in Syria, where the Assad regime had tolerated, if not supported, their operations against the coalition in Iraq. ISIS may retain a degree of control in some pockets, but many of its survivors are likely to give priority to their own survival, not continuing the war. They may also turn to crime.

Another complicating factor for ISIS will be losing its claim of the right to rule. Aside from the loss of legitimacy due to losing a war and bringing vast devastation to the people on whose behalf the war was supposedly fought, as ISIS tries to return to the underground its narrative will have been discredited. It will only be able to spin defeat for so long. It is much more difficult to argue from failure than from success, and the physical and psychological attractions of the "caliphate" will no longer exist. ISIS will be unable to offer the thrill of being a warrior for God and a licensed outlaw, or promise the availability of sex slaves for unmarried young men, or the expectation of living in a truly Islamic utopia.

Much of the support ISIS received, especially foreign, was due to its claim to be a genuine state in control of territory and its apparent success in routing its enemies. Previously, ISIS could claim to be living up to its motto of "Remaining and Expanding." The self-named "caliph" Abu Bakr Baghdadi claimed his exalted position by right of conquest. Since these successes were considered manifestations of God's favor, what will happen now that those are gone? At what point will it become impossible to ignore that God is no longer intervening on their behalf or that the state Baghdadi claimed to rule is no longer on the map? Assuming Baghdadi has not fled, it will be difficult for him to claim to be ruler of much of anything. He is unlikely to find sanctuary in a neighboring state—such as al-Qaeda Central and the Taliban had in Pakistan and Iran after 9/11 and the previous iteration of the Islamic State had in Syria. However, Turkey remains a remote possibility as the Erdoğan government has been suspiciously lenient toward ISIS and may hope to use ex-ISIS fighters against the Kurds. If Baghdadi is shown to be killed, it will automatically dissolve all oaths of allegiance made to him, which will both dissolve the organization and leave the survivors up for grabs.

The Other Insurgents

While ISIS may find it difficult to recover, these difficulties may not apply to other insurgent groups, in particular Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm (HTS) in Syria and whatever Sunni nationalist groups have managed to survive in Iraq.

Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm. At one time known as al-Qaeda in Syria, Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm split off from ISIS (and also from al-Qaeda) and is, aside from the ambiguous case of the Syrian Kurds, probably the largest of the remaining non-ISIS, anti-Assad factions. Significantly, it appears to have learned from past mistakes and gradually modified its strategy and tactics from those previously standard to al-Qaeda. It may even have made these changes in spite of the policy of al-Qaeda Central, as did other al-Qaeda affiliates and branches, especially in Yemen and Mali. Among its major adaptations,

It has sought to collaborate and build alliances with existing Islamist (or even non-Islamic) rebel groups and to a degree reflects their concerns. It has thus selectively prioritized local rather than international operations, which means it can potentially tap into significantly larger reservoirs of support than ISIS, such as other jihadists that ISIS has alienated. It can also exploit latent support for jihadism and appeal to the substantial portion of Islamic opinion that is functionally radical by claiming to wage a defensive jihad rather than an offensive one.

Instead of trying to impose its version of Shari'a immediately, it has sought to do so gradually, pursuing what might be called jihadization from below, intending to cultivate a base of support and ultimately build a mass movement.

It has been more selective, or at least less indiscriminate, in targeting of terrorist attacks. In 2013, Aymann Zawahiri, leader of al-Qaeda Central, instructed al-Qaeda to avoid mass casualty attacks, especially those that kill Muslim civilians.

To deal with the collapse of governments, it has tried to set up a governing structure and enforce order. In Syria, it has assumed control of courts and law enforcement, leaving other administration to other groups.

For these reasons, and especially in comparison to ISIS, Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm has come to be considered a "moderate" extremist group, the only one that could plausibly provide other factions with protection from ISIS. These changes have the potential to make it appear less foreign, gain some local support, and at least significantly reduce the reasons for al-Qaeda's past loss of popular support. In particular, a degree of local support may enable Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm to maintain an underground organizational structure in Syria even if its current enclave in Idlib is overrun.

Iraq's Sunni Arab nationalist groups. The situation is different in Iraq. There the al-Qaeda brand has likely been profoundly damaged by ISIS as the direct descendent of al-Qaeda in Iraq/Islamic State in Iraq and the murderously bloodthirsty Abu Musab al-Zarqawi; al-Qaeda cannot claim any separation between itself and ISIS. Further, in Iraq, ISIS has pretty much monopolized the jihadists. However, this handicap does not necessarily apply to other insurgents, especially Sunni Arab nationalist groups. Prior to ISIS, the most significant of these was the Jaysh Rijal at-Tariqa an-Naqshbandia (JRTN, Army of the Men of the Naqshbandi Order /Naqshbandi Army). This is a nominally non-sectarian (though it claims some roots in Sunni-Sufi Islam) and neo-Baathist organization formed by Izzat ad-Duri, one of Saddam Hussein's top chieftains, after the Iraqi dictator was executed. Largely composed of Saddam-era military officers and officials, it aims to restore the Baathist system. In late 2014, it was considered the second most powerful Sunni insurgent force in Iraq after ISIS, with at least some degree of popular support. In the past JRTN has operated with and hired other groups, using them as a force multiplier. Initially it cooperated with ISIS (which designated a former Baathist general from the JRTN as the first governor of Mosul when it took over), but in 2016, it claimed to be attacking ISIS when coalition forces began the recapture of Mosul. However, at present, no additional information is available on the JRTN, its ties with other groups, with other Sunni nationalist groups, its present situation, or whether the group survived ISIS.

Conclusions

While ISIS may intend to resume its underground existence in Syria and Iraq, this may turn out to be much more difficult than expected. Although at first glance, the postwar environment may appear fertile for the terror group to pursue such a strategy, there are other factors that may make it difficult for ISIS fighters, especially foreigners, to go underground—in particular, widespread factional and popular hostility to ISIS and the loss of theological/ideological and functional legitimacy due to defeat.

But while ISIS may be less of a threat than commonly supposed, this does not mean it will not be a threat at all. ISIS survived and recovered from a previous massive defeat in Iraq because its enemies did not finish the job of eradicating it—a situation with ominous parallels to the present. Even more important, ISIS is not the only force of insurgents in the field, especially in Syria.

Hayat Tahrir ash-Sha'm, ambiguously an al-Qaeda offshoot, has modified its strategy and has pursued a long-game of sinking roots into Syrian society while pursuing jihadization from the ground up. Over time, the group is likely to absorb surviving jihadists from other organizations, possibly including ISIS survivors. Since there is no reason to believe that Assad will modify his murderous method of rule, one should expect at least one or more low-level insurgencies in Syria.

The present situation in Iraq is somewhat less acute, and the country has better prospects for recovery and reconciliation than Syria. But this depends on the Iraqi government effectively carrying out reconstruction and reconciliation policies. If this does not happen, it is reasonable to expect at least a continuing low-level insurgency, either by ISIS remnants or, more likely, by Sunni Arab nationalists.

There is not a great deal Washington can do to influence events in either country. If recent Middle Eastern history teaches anything, it is that one should never underestimate local players' ability to make bad situations even worse.

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workingontravel · 5 years

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If the borders refuse me, I refuse them

(You can read a Swedish translation of this text here.) I mentioned this project to a friend. She immediately said: You should talk to Ghayath Almadhoun. Ghayath Almadhoun is a poet whose poetry has touched me. He is also a poet working with several languages, living and writing in many places. Finding a time when we could meet was a challenge, due to his frequent travelling. I’m happy we managed. His account of travelling for work brings together the personal and the political, the funny and the sad, the historical and the present, in extraordinary ways.

Ghayath Almadhoun: I travel for many reasons that I hardly understand. Some of them started already in childhood. I was born in Damascus, with a Palestinian father and a Syrian mother, in the Yarmouk refugee camp for Palestinians. It was just tents when they founded it in 1948, but now it has become buildings, part of the city. The first questions in my life were: What are we? Why do they say that we are not Syrian but Palestinian? Why, then, am I not in Palestine?

It was very difficult for my father to explain to a six-year-old why land in Asia provided a solution for the antisemitism and racism against the Jews in Europe. But later, things became even more complicated. I discovered that I am not Palestinian-Syrian. I am a Palestinian from Syria. The Palestinian-Syrians are the Palestinians who arrived to Syria in 1948, when Israel occupied eighty per cent of Palestine. As the United States, the Soviet Union and Europe all accepted this, the Arabic governments understood that the land that was occupied had become Israel. As a solution, they gave the refugees all the papers they needed. So those who arrived from Palestine to Syria in 1948 have the same civil rights as the Syrian people. But our family came after the occupation of Gaza, in 1967. When Israel occupied the Gaza strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights from Syria, Sinai from Egypt and some parts of Jordan, the international community said: “This is occupation, and Israel should leave.” The Arabic nations then decided to not give any papers to these Palestinians in order to not provide any solutions for Israel. I found myself growing up without civil rights. I was not allowed to work. I was not allowed to take driving lessons. I was not allowed to leave the country, and if I did leave for any reason, I would not be allowed back. As we were not allowed to own a house, the house is in the name of my mother, who is Syrian. But if she died, the government would take the house and sell it. This, that I couldn’t inherit, was the thing that hurt me the most.

When I understood that I was already born outside, in exile, as they say, I became fascinated by the idea that there are no borders. If the borders refuse me, I refuse them. When I began to study, I also understood that my father was a poet. I began to think about poetry. I felt connected to many Surahs in the Quran, such as The Poet’s Surah, Surah 26. At the end of the Surah, it says:

“And the poets – the deviators follow them; Do you not see that in every valley they roam And that they say what they do not do?” Travelling is the reality of Arab poets, and poetry is very much connected to travelling in the Arabic tradition. Take the most famous Arabic poet El Mutanabbi. In the 800th century, he travelled, but most of all, his poetry travelled. If El Mutanabbi said a poem in Bagdad, the people in Damascus got it in a matter of hours by pigeon. From there, it went everywhere. His poem would arrive in Andalusia within a week. He himself came two months later.

So, I began to write poetry. My friends all went to Beirut, to Jordan or anywhere. They got invitations to go and read there. But I couldn’t travel, because I didn’t have a passport, papers or even an ID. So, the pressure began to build inside. This continued until I turned thirty, in 2008. Then I left the country. I made a sort of fake passport and went to Sweden. After I got a real Swedish passport, it’s: “Catch me if you can!” The travelling is also connected to my writing. For example, I could visit a place, read about it, discuss it and then I write a poem. I did it for example when Assad used chemical weapons on the suburbs of Damascus. Many people got killed in the first attack with the nerve gas sarin. There were 1,400 deaths, out of which 900 were women and children. I saw these bodies shaking. The pupils of the eyes go small. I started to think about chemicals. And I found that the first chemical attack happened in the city of Ypres in Belgium, on 22 April,1915. I went there for the 100th anniversary of that event. I visited 170 cemeteries. They counted 600,000 graves, and I visited all of them in two weeks. At one gate, they have written the names of all the dead soldiers no matter where they came from – France, England, Canada. They play music in honour of one of them every day and speak about what they know about that specific soldier. They had done this for eighty years without stopping for one single day. Even during the Second World War, they played every day. The problem is that they need 600,000 days to finish the names. I listened to such concerts for fourteen days. Then I wrote a poem that moves between the past and the present, Ypres, Syria and Palestine. Another time, I went to Antwerp to do research about blood diamonds. But during that month, thousands of people started to drown in the Mediterranean. So, my poem started with blood diamonds and ended with Syrians drowning in the sea. By the way, this is not political poetry, this is my life.

So, all in all: I travel in order to write. I’m making up for what I missed when I was without papers. I’m a travelling poet like in the Quran. And I’m born in no country, so I don’t believe in borders. But the main reason why I’m travelling like I have been doing now, 345 days a year and not even staying in Sweden for a full week, is another. When I came to Sweden, I accepted Stockholm as my city because Damascus was in the background. Every time I felt tired of being a foreigner, I remembered that Damascus was there, that one day I could go back and feel relief. In 2011, the Syrian revolution began. I really supported it, and it made my hopes of going to Damascus grow. But people I knew got killed, family members, almost all my friends. Cities I knew were destroyed. And the dictatorship won. The country was destroyed. My hopes of ever going back were lower than ever. Damascus disappeared from my background. Everything was shaken. Also, Stockholm didn’t belong to me anymore. What broke me was my brother. I lost him on 2 April 2016, killed by Assad. I was on tour: I was supposed to spend fifteen days in Holland. The second gig was with Anne Vegter, the poet of the nation. We finished our discussion. I went outside and I put the mobile on. Then my other brother called and told me. I disappeared from the universe for two hours. I woke up with people around me. We went to our friend’s house and I asked him to book me a ticket to Stockholm. The coming twenty-four hours were the most difficult in my life. While the plane was over Denmark, I understood there was something wrong. I wanted to tell the pilot to stop and let me off. Why was I going to Stockholm and not Damascus? Stockholm is even further away from Damascus. What is the difference if I cry in Amsterdam or if I cry in Stockholm? So I started travelling this way. As I see it, the best way to survive trauma is to be on the road. When you arrive, the problems will come. I noticed this in someone I know who was in Syria for four years during the bombings. He lost all his friends. People died in his arms. ISIS arrested him before he left the country. His trip here took eight months. All that time, he was doing ok. But when he got here, it took forty days and then the post trauma hit him. That made me even more scared. So, I began to ask myself: What will happen if I begin to travel and never let myself arrive? The panic attacks will wait for me to be settled. But what if I don’t settle? After the death of my brother I wrote a poem. The writing took place in maybe sixty places, twenty countries. If I would sign it with the names of the cities, that would be as long as the poem. What held me in this is that somebody else paid most of my tickets and travels. In this sense, I survived through poetry twice. On one hand, it’s about writing for survival; writing what hurts me on a paper. But then there are the festivals and the residences and the scholarships bringing me from here to there. Many of these festivals were shocked that I only needed one ticket. Germany pays my ticket from France. Belgium pays my ticket from Germany. Everyone pays only to bring me.

It happens that there are holes in the schedule, maybe even seven days empty. I fill these holes in order to not stay. I ask the festival to make my ticket longer and I pay the hotel myself before I go to the next festival. Or, if the ticket can’t be changed, I book a flight to the Arabic book fairs. In Arabic countries, the book fairs are two to three weeks long. And they schedule them in a systematic way, so they cover the whole year. Any time you want to go to a book fair in an Arabic country, you can. There are around 540 million Arabic-speaking people in the world, in 22 countries with 22 totally different cultures. So, when you go there to sign your book, there will be completely different receptions. You’re a star in Kuwait, they hate you in Libya, and you’re a bestseller in Iraq…

I don’t even remember all the places I have been to, I mix them up. The security personnel in the airport know me and say hello to me. Sometimes I see them in the morning. I go home to throw out the summer clothes and throw in the winter clothes because I’m going to the other side of the planet. Then I see them again in the afternoon. People understand after a while that if they are trying to stop me, they will lose me. If the train is fast and heavy, you should go with it, not stand in front of it. But the routine with friends is you go to their house, bring wine and cook and they come to you next time. When you are travelling again and again and don't have dinner with them, they are not your friends anymore, in a way. You lose your roots.

It is so good when you arrive in places like sunny California, cornfields and wine. And meeting people, discussing with them, having good food, having intellectual exchanges about philosophy, life, racism, patriarchy, everything I’m interested in. But physically it’s tiring. I have a theory I call The Pillow Theory. There are problems in life such as patriarchy, occupation, capitalism and the differences in the shape of pillows in the hotels. I’m fighting for the right of every person to have a size that fits them. Because of pillows and tiredness and lost friends, I’ve started to think I need a strategy to travel less. Also, my girlfriend is involved in this. Our idea is to let my mind think that I’m travelling though I’m not, by taking long residencies outside Sweden. So now I have a five-month residency in Amsterdam and after that a whole year at the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin programme, a scholarship. It works, in a way. When I went to Amsterdam, I started longing for Sweden as my country. Because I understood I would be away for long, I became homesick for the first time. And when I feel the thirst for travel I can make it subtler, because technically, I am already travelling. Through this, I started travelling less. Now, I travel only twice a month.

When I travel, I bring my laptop. They asked me in India what I would bring if the house were on fire. I said my laptop, because there is another house inside it. What is a home for a Palestinian born in a refugee camp if not language? It’s something I inherited from my father. He told me about paradise, the land of milk and honey. When I got my Swedish passport, I went to Palestine. There was nothing. No milk and no honey. It’s only in the dream of the Palestinians. The first time I went there, I was held six and a half hours at the airport. With all the happiness and sadness that I had about being there, finally the Israeli let me in. To this day, I never spoke with my father about that, because they threw him out twice, once from Ashkelon to Gaza in 1948, then from Gaza to Egypt in 1967, and he left his mother there. Until 2012 when she died, he didn’t meet her.

Home is connected to the mother tongue. I miss hearing my name. I used to say to God all the time that I miss Syria and Damascus here in Sweden. But when I asked God to connect me with Syria, he must have misunderstood me. Instead of taking me to Syria, he sent the Syrians to me.

#ghayathalmadhoun #workingontravel #trainsandboatsandplanes #english

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alexsmitposts · 5 years

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Without the I Word, Beware B and P As Nancy Pelosi struggles to contain increasing demands for the Congress to impeach President Trump, his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo ratchets up tensions in the Gulf of Oman, as it has done in countless other historical circumstances, making war with Iran look imminent. Now more than ever, Americans need to know that beyond oil, the Middle East, like the rest of the world, is divided between right and left. Iran is the leader of the left-oriented Shia version of Islam, while Saudi Arabia leads the right oriented Arab world. Meanwhile, Israel, as it continues to occupy Palestinian territory for over seventy years, has gone from being a left-oriented society in which the kibbutz played a central role, so far to the right that it often agrees with fascists. Across the Middle East as elsewhere,“Follow the money”, corresponds to the left-right divide. Unlike American ignorance of current foreign affairs, few people across the world have a false idea of the French Revolution of 1789: driven by popular hardship, the sans culottes got rid of a monarch, opening the way for an organized left that carried out the Russian Revolution of 1917, followed, in due course, by the Chinese Revolution of 1949. These three revolutions duly claimed their place in history and in the popular imagination, however, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the US installed ‘liberal’ parties in Western Europe, Eastern Europe modernized under a Soviet controlled authoritarian form of social democracy, while Iran was still a relatively poor country whose population was in need of everything from health care to education and housing. In 1953, when Iranians elected a lawyer named Mohammed Mossadegh to lead the country, the nationalization of their oil bonanza was a no-brainer. Alas, this coincided with the growing realization by the US of the crucial role of ‘black gold’, as American automobile ownership tripled, and petroleum became the magic fluid that generated prodigious development in the West. In what was to become a pattern, the CIA and M16 worked in tandem to overthrow the Iranian popular government and put the exiled Shah back in power. Twenty-six years later, in 1979, popular forces carried out a revolution against the Shah’s iron rule that has never been understood by the West, which saw the new leaders exclusively as religious fanatics. In reality, when Ayatollah Khomeini returned from exile in France, he was accompanied by a socialist theoretician. Ali Shariati had been in and out of jail while teaching high school and campaigning for change. Eventually, he was allowed to accept a scholarship to France, where he studied with Islamic scholars, earning a PhD in sociology and the history of religions in 1964, while discovering the third world political theologist Frantz Fanon, collaborating with the Algerian National Liberation Front and campaigning alongside Jean-Paul Sartre for an end to French colonialism. Returning to Iran, Shariati founded the Freedom Movement of Iran, gathering followers throughout \society. His sin was to have revived Shiism’s revolutionary claim that a good society would embrace religious values. He taught that the role of a government under a learned clergy, was to guide society according to Islamic values rather than managing it, allowing human beings to reach their highest potential rather than encouraging the West’s hedonistic individualism. Believing that Shia Muslims should not await the return of a mysterious 12th Imam, (as the Jews await ‘the Messiah’) but hasten it by fighting for social justice, even to the point of martyrdom, Shariati criticized the Shah’s clerics and translated the claims of Iranian Marxists that revolution would bring about a just, classless society into religious symbols that ordinary people could relate to. Seeing a direct link between liberal democracy and the plundering of pre-modern societies based on spirituality, unlike Fanon, he believed that people could only fight imperialism by recovering their cultural identity, including their religious beliefs, which he called ‘returning to ourselves’. (Like a growing number of contemporary leaders — such as Vladimir Putin — Shariati called religious government ‘commitment democracy’, as opposed to Western demagogy based on advertising and money. The panic that gripped the West in 1979 when 52 American diplomats were locked-into the Embassy for 444 days, was heightened by Israel’s victory in the Six Day War a few years earlier. Since that time, while continuing to deny the Palestinians a state of their own, Israel has moved closer to the most powerful Sunni (i.e., conservative) Arab nation, Saudi Arabia, which supports ISIS and its offshoot terrorist organizations worldwide, and wages an unrelenting campaign against the tiny country of Yemen, whose revolutionary Houthis are also supported by Iran, in the millennial battle between Sunni and Shia. Few Americans know that these two are strongly correlated to the left-right divide. Western media correctly attributes the conflict to attitudes toward Ali, the Prophet’s designated successor, but it features Shiites lashing themselves with chains in solidarity, without mentioning that the reason for Ali’s murder was his defense of the lower classes. In turn, that attitude was based on a disagreement over whether God had attributes, such as ‘justice’ and hence could demand that humans treat each other with respect and dignity. Arising after the Prophet’s death, the argument centered around whether the Quran was an emanation of God, or had always existed. In turn, the answer to that question depended on whether God simply ‘is’ or whether, like humans, he has attributes, one of which would be ‘justice’, or solidarity, which would imply the existence of free will. At one point, a free will defender who got up and left the discussion was labelled a Mutazilla, or ‘one who has left’. During the following centuries, and mainly under the Abbasid rulers centered in Persia, the Mutazilla movement lead to the development of Shia Islam, with a different set of laws from those of the Sunnis, who still believe that individual lives are foreordained by a God who is neither ‘good’ nor ‘evil’, but simply ‘is’, and that men must obey Him without question. Under the cleric Wahhab, that conviction led to the extreme of Sunni Islam, in whose name terrorism is carried out to this day. The notion of a ‘Shia arc’ suggests an equally threatening military entity, when in reality it is an ideological one. Although nothing could be further from the minds of those who hold Trump’s foreign policy in their hands, Ali Shariati and the Iranian revolution revived Shia Islam’s original message that men must treat each other with dignity and respect. The original seat of the Mutazilla movement was the city of Basra, located on the Persian Gulf Shat al Arab waterway, and the Shiite learning center of Najaf, near the southern Iraq/Iran border, was the headquarters of Iran’s exiled revolutionary leader, Imam Khomeini. After spreading from Iran to Iraq, Shia Islam reached Syria and Lebanon on the strength of its commitment to justice. In Syria, the life values of Islam had already led to the creation of the Baaʿth Party, which in 1953 merged with the Syrian Socialist Party to form the Saddam Hussein’s Arab Socialist Baaʿth (Renaissance) Party. Although both countries belonged to the non-aligned, anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movement, the merger failed. (The US suffered the Baath being the party of Saddam Hussein as long as he was waging an eight-year war against socialist Iran.) Syrian Shiism continues to be represented by the small Alawite sect headed by the Assad family. Reaching back to the ninth century, the Alawites, who pray sitting rather than prostrate, and celebrate some Christian holidays, had been rejected by the Shiite hierarchy until Assad’s father, Hafez al Assad, came to power in 1964. Though accused by the US of “killing its own citizens”, Assad’s son, Bashar, heads the only secular government in the Middle East (including Israel), and retains the educational system and Western social customs that prevailed under the French mandate (1923-1964). In neighboring Lebanon, the Shiite militia known as Hezbollah represents a powerful political force in a tiny nation whose population is divided among half a dozen religions and sects, including the Christian Druze and Maronites. The picture painted for Westerners is of a rabble acting on orders from Iran, while Hezbollah is allied with the Shia militia Hamas in the struggle for an independent Palestine, making Syria ‘the frontline state’. (Alastair Crooke’s book Resistance: The Essence of the Islamist Revolution, attributes Hezbollah’s victories over the Israeli army to ‘horizontal’ organization, which encourages a high level of individual initiative, and is part of the surprisingly sophisticated knowledge of Western political thought by its leader Hassan Nasrallah.) This makes the fact that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” all the more ironic. America is the only modern nation whose citizens have almost automatic access to guns, resulting in thousands of murders every year, while its leaders insist that foreign national militias must be punished by a so-called ‘rules-based’ international community. Last but not least, in this saga, like the cherry on the cake, the American public is oblivious to the decades-long ties between Iran and its neighbor, Russia, based on both a shared revolutionary commitment to ‘dignity and respect’, and to religious values. It is disquieting, to say the last, that when the two B’s threaten Iran, they are threatening Russia outside the narrative familiar to American voters.

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expatimes · 3 years

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How Turkey became a hub for Arab Spring exiles | Arab Spring: 10 years on News

As a charismatic revolutionary from a scrappy Cairo neighbourhood, Ahmed Hassan was one of the stars of Jehane Noujaim’s 2013 documentary The Square, which followed a group of Egyptian activists as they toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and then fought to keep their faltering revolution alive.

The film won three Emmy Awards and was nominated for the Oscars. But Hassan’s life got harder after it was released.

His work as a cinematographer and filmmaker dried up as production companies stopped hiring him, perhaps because he was blacklisted.

He had to abandon a film project after receiving threats. He could not carry a camera in the street without being harassed. Most of his friends were in prison, some had died.

“I felt like I was just centimetres from jail,” Hassan told Al Jazeera.

In 2018, he jumped at an opportunity to escape and went to Turkey, which has become a major hub for Arab exiles as many of the Arab Spring uprisings that first emerged a decade ago descended into violence and repression.

“You are able to carry a camera in Turkey. That is beautiful actually,” Hassan said. “Here, I’m walking and I feel free.

“I feel there is a government. I see the police but I’m not scared, it’s not like Egypt. I feel like there is law here.”

But life is also hard. Hassan says that, for him, Turkey looks like a watermelon with vivid, enticing red flesh.

“But when you bite into it, it’s salty, not sweet.”

In 2018, Hassan jumped at an opportunity to escape and went to Turkey

Place of exile

“There is no Arab city like that, with large populations from different parts of the Arab world having these tools of cultural and political expression, like Istanbul at the moment,” Mohanad Hage Ali, a research fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told Al Jazeera.

Ali said this trend first emerged from the soft power policies pursued by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party (AK Party), in power since 2002, which sought to extend Turkey’s influence and relations in the region through greater diplomacy, investment and educational projects.

It was aided by popular culture as Turkish TV series also became wildly popular across the Middle East and often glamorised Istanbul and glorified its Ottoman past.

“Look at Turkey before Erdogan, at the heart of the Arab world the way it is now,” Ali said.

The trend of Arab exiles heading to Turkey accelerated sharply with the fallout from the Arab Spring.

Turkey is now home to about four million refugees – mostly Syrians – along with activists, journalists and political figures from countries across the Arab world.

Neighbourhoods in Istanbul have been transformed by an influx of Arab communities and businesses, with the city’s Arab population likely to be well over one million. Turkey is home to an estimated 700,000 Iraqis. More than 500,000 mostly Syrian refugees live in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep.

Turkey was broadly supportive of the Arab Spring uprisings, particularly as a staunch opponent of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and a supporter of Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood-linked government of Mohamed Morsi.

Istanbul became a significant Muslim Brotherhood hub, especially after Morsi was overthrown by the military led by general-turned-President Abdul Fattah el-Sisi in 2013.

Islam Akel, an Egyptian journalist and TV presenter, almost died in August 2013 after he was shot and a bullet lodged in his lung at the pro-Morsi sit-in at Cairo’s Rabaa Square, at which at least 1,000 people were killed by the security forces.

He escaped to Lebanon, and then spent time in Sudan, before going to Turkey in 2014. He now works as a presenter at the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Watan TV in Istanbul. Akel praised Turkey for welcoming exiles.

“As an Egyptian Arab Muslim, being in Turkey was not a difficult thing for me, as being in a country where I hear the voices of the muezzins to pray and find mosques in front of me in every street is a matter of reassurance, connection and integration,” he said.

The trend of Arab exiles heading to Turkey accelerated sharply with the fallout from the Arab Spring

Hamza Zawba, a former spokesman of Morsi’s Freedom and Justice Party, arrived in Turkey in 2014 and now presents a show on the Mekameleen television channel.

“Turkey accepted us to live here as exiles, nobody else did that,” he told Al Jazeera, adding that Turkey provided them with a vital space to challenge el-Sisi’s narrative.

“ is a venue to express my views and to give some analysis, to face the claims of the media of the coup and to raise awareness over what’s going on,” he said.

The Egyptian liberal reformist politician Ayman Nour also moved to Istanbul and set up his own television channel, Al-Sharq TV.

Istanbul’s Arab Media Association has more than 800 members. Exiles from countries such as Libya, Yemen and Syria have also established media outlets, think-tanks, schools, charities and NGOs. Istanbul has also become a place where some LGBTQ Arabs feel safer and can live a more open life.

But while some exiles have thrived, others have struggled, and Turkey’s role as a safe haven has changed over the decade.

‘Shrinking space’

Bassam Alahmad is the executive director of Syrians for Truth and Justice, a non-profit organisation that documents rights violations by all parties in Syria. He came to Turkey from Syria in 2012.

“It was a good atmosphere for us to act and work in,” he said.

But he said the atmosphere became more restrictive over time, especially after Turkey’s first direct military intervention in northern Syria in 2016, and he felt he was no longer able to publish some of the human rights abuses he had documented. He says he was interrogated by Turkish security services over his work in 2018.

Turkish soldiers patrol the northern Syrian Kurdish town of Tal Abyad, on the border between Syria and Turkey

He was also threatened by someone he believes is connected to al-Assad’s security forces, but says that although he reported it to the police, they took no action. Murders of prominent activists in Turkey also unnerved some exiles and undermined the country’s reputation as a safe haven.

A Turkish government media spokesperson said they would not respond to Alahmad’s specific claims but provided a statement from a senior Turkish official that said: “Turkey provides a safe haven to nearly 4 million Syrian refugees. We take all necessary steps to ensure that asylum seekers feel at home and safe.”

Alahmad also said that attitudes in Turkey have become more resentful, hostile and racist towards Syrian refugees over time. Many Syrians also struggle to access services and education, can rarely acquire citizenship and are often exploited in informal jobs.

“We felt that it was a shrinking space,” Alahmad said. He and his wife managed to gain asylum in France and moved there in 2019.

“Here, you can say or write anything.”

Hassan praised Erdogan and Turkey for its generosity in welcoming so many refugees and dissidents, but he also mentioned anti-Arab racism as a significant problem.

“When they hear you speak Arabic, things become weird. People look at you and treat you differently. Sometimes when I’m with my friends we don’t speak in Arabic on public transport,” he said.

Turkey is now home to about four million refugees

Some exiles have also been changed by living in Turkey.

Mustafa Menshawy, a research postdoctoral fellow at the SEPAD project, University of Lancaster, told Al Jazeera that many rank and file members of the Muslim Brotherhood have become less conservative in their views or even left the movement after being exposed to a more socially liberal climate in Turkey.

But he also said that the Brotherhood become less hierarchical and more open to debate than it was in Egypt.

“The fact that Turkey, which is authoritarian in the way it treats its own media, is allowing members of the Brotherhood to have a voice, and how democratising that is, is a bit paradoxical,” he said.

“Turkey gives a voice to individuals who were not provided a voice either by the organisation itself in Egypt or by the regime, and this is very revitalising.”

But Menshawy characterises the group’s relationship with the Turkish authorities as a “marriage of convenience”, and he and others say Turkey’s status as an Arab hub is vulnerable to shifting political trends.

The next decade

“I see this presence as useful to project power and put Turkey up front as a major player in Arab politics,” Ali said.

But he said hosting so many Arab dissidents can become a problem and “very limiting for Turkey’s options” if it decides to pursue rapprochement with el-Sisi or al-Assad, who now appear entrenched in power, as well as proving unpopular domestically.

He also said Turkey’s role as such a strong Arab hub is very much contingent on Erdogan remaining in office.

“This Arab presence and this Arab experience ends with Erdogan,” he said.

Akel said exiles such as himself worry most about “political vicissitudes and fears about the rise of nationalists” at the expense of the AK Party.

Meanwhile, while Hassan has a lot of Turkish friends, most of his deepest friendships are with people back in Egypt.

“I still feel lonely in Turkey,” he said.

He is also struggling with the economic problems besetting the country, including high inflation, low wages and a lack of employment opportunities. He has been unable to get permission to shoot scenes for a documentary he is making, and says he will try to leave for a Western country when the coronavirus pandemic eases.

“I cannot stay here much longer, it’s become more complicated, it’s not easy to shoot sensitive subjects. And everything is going so slowly, I feel like I’m not stable. But it’s better than Egypt.”

#humanrights Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=15917&feed_id=24516 #arabspring10yearson #humanrights #middleeast #news #turkey

#ArabSpring10yearson #HumanRights #MiddleEast #News #Turkey

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tremendouspeachduck · 4 years

Text

7 Things Nobody Told You About Palestine-Hamas Agression.

I think I know why we turn off on the Hamas conversation. and call it boring, why?

Because it’s boring. Lol

How can I get you to eat your spinach?

Some like maps, so where is Palestine aka West Bank?

Hamas is a Palestinian Sunni-Islamist fundamentalist organization. Hamas is extremist Sunni (affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood) and operates in the Palestinian Territories. Hamas is backed by the Gulf States.

Warning – this is confusing

No negotiating, no cease fire = genocide

Fatah, Hezbollah, and Hamas - this is where it gets even more confusing = boring, right?

Hezbollah is extremist Shi'a and operates worldwide, although based in Lebanon (does some fighting in Syria).

The only reason I care -- is this: A significant reason why Hamas has not been able to export its terror activities closer to home is the Israeli counter-terror naval, air and land blockade of Gaza, which is meant to prevent Hamas personnel from importing weapons and traveling internationally.

Hamas wants to come for us. Hamas and al-Qaeda are of the same ilk. Brothers in arms, both Islamist terrorist groups are funded by Iran and theologically motivated to wage a violent jihad, or holy war, against the West. Both deadly organizations aspire to destroy those they consider “infidels.” While al-Qaeda can be credited for the deaths of thousands of Americans on 9/11 and in the Afghan and Iraq wars that followed, Hamas has murdered dozens of Americans abroad.

Israel is helping us stay alive, so we must support them as much as possible. Because of our dependence on them, Israel is seen by Hamas–and all Islamist groups–as the outpost of the West in the Middle East. Today, Israel’s soldiers are literally on the frontlines of the battle against militant Islam. Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has attacked Israel with more than 8,000 rockets. This is not because Hamas is engaged in a civil and human rights struggle for Palestinian sovereignty and freedom. We know Hamas doesn’t care about the Arab people it governs because it uses their children as human shields, child soldiers, and suicide bombers. Rather, Hamas knows that if the West abandons Israel, if we allow Israel to suffer a defeat via terrorism, then Hamas and its allies can attack and defeat us.

“First comes Saturday [the Jews], then comes Sunday [the Christians],” as the Islamist saying goes.

Israel tried an experiment in good faith, but it failed. Gaza was a testing ground for the concept of a sovereign Palestinian state. Israel and the world hoped the Palestinian people would use the opportunity to elect a government that respected their human rights and sought to live in peace with its neighbors.

All hope was obliterated when Hamas got too powerful and proceeded to destroy the economy, import weapons into Gaza, enforce a brutal version of Islamic law, advocate for the genocide of the Jewish people, and declare perpetual war on Israel, America, and the West. A cycle of armed conflict began, with Hamas launching attacks, Israel temporarily neutralizing the threat, civilian casualties and calls for restraint, followed by Hamas re-arming and firing rocket attacks again.

Palestine and Hamas are now good buddies and will most likely become another Islamist terror launching pad. Moreover, the ongoing slaughter of Muslim and Christian civilians in Syria, Iraq, and elsewhere debunks the notion that Israel’s presence in the West Bank is the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East. If anything, Israel’s presence is the one thing that may secure peace in the region, at least in the territories under Israel’s control.

No one talks about the situation in real terms, why? What’s the motive behind not reporting the truth? The media, the UN, select politicians, and NGOs are purposefully manipulating the laws of armed conflict in order to vilify a democratic ally while it is engaged in a defensive war for survival. By all objective standards, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) is unique in the world for its unprecedented measures aimed at minimizing civilian casualties in armed conflict. In Gaza, Israel has taken extreme measures to warn civilians of imminent counter-attacks. They have distributed leaflets, made phone calls, dropped non-explosive bombs on targets that make loud noises to scare away civilians, and aborted the destruction of Hamas rocket-launching sites when civilians were spotted therein.

Israel has even alerted the very terrorists they are fighting of incoming fire, a precaution above and beyond the requirements of the laws of armed conflict. It was this warning system that pre-alerted Hamas to the location of IDF ground troops in the Hamas stronghold neighborhood of Shejaiy and which resulted in the recent deaths of thirteen Israeli soldiers. When forced to choose between two evils–risking Palestinian civilian casualties to protect Israeli lives, versus compromising Israeli security to save Palestinian civilians–Israel has repeatedly chosen the latter.

Hamas, on the other hand, brags about its indiscriminate targeting of both Israeli and Palestinian civilians and has coerced Palestinians into acting as human shields for its rockets. Hamas leaders appear daily on Palestinian Authority TV, inciting genocide against the Jews and encouraging Palestinians to ignore Israel’s advance rocket warning systems. Hamas refuses to allow Palestinian civilians to take cover in its bomb shelters, permitting only Hamas leadership to enter.

Palestinian youth have taken to YouTube to tell the world how Hamas is preventing its people from evacuating their houses to seek refuge in safe areas. Hamas has rejected two ceasefire offers and has chosen to continue firing even during a temporary humanitarian pause in hostilities, impeding the delivery of medical aid to injured Palestinians. By all objective standards, Hamas is guilty of war crimes and engaged in the collective punishment of the Palestinian people by holding them hostage to its deadly jihad.

Yet no matter how far Israel bends to adhere to the laws of armed conflict (while Hamas thwarts them), Israel’s Operation Protective Edge is portrayed by the Western media and the UN as a criminal enterprise. Even the Arab world has come out strongly against Hamas. Egypt has publicly criticized Hamas for failing to save Palestinian lives and refusing to accept the ceasefire offers. In an unprecedented act, the Palestinian Authority’s own representative to the UN, Ibrahim Khraishi, condemned Hamas for perpetrating war crimes, stating on Palestinian Authority TV. “[T]he missiles that are now being launched against Israel, each and every missile, constitutes a crime against humanity, whether it hits or misses, because it is directed at civilian targets.”

The West has failed to show the same moral courage. The UN remains silent on Hamas’s targeting of Israeli and Palestinian civilians, instead opting to hold an emergency session focusing on Israel, and only Israel, which is expected to produce the regular anti-Israel vitriol and implicitly grant Hamas immunity. The media routinely refers to Hamas as “militants”, though they are a U.S.-designated terrorist group, and places the organization on equal moral footing with the Israeli Defense Forces, even though the latter is a military held to the highest ethical standards in human history. World leaders, save Canada’s Prime Minister Steven Harper, have found it difficult to criticize the Iranian-backed Islamist terror organization Hamas without, in the same breath, criticizing Israel though Israel is in fact exercising great restraint.

This double standard teaches us that no matter how strictly a democracy adheres to the laws of armed conflict, that democracy will nonetheless be vilified if the terrorists they are fighting flout the same laws. There is a telling absence of any UN General Assembly resolutions condemning Hamas’s use of Palestinian children as suicide bombers and human shields. There has been no International Criminal Court prosecution of Iranian leaders for incitement to genocide, and no International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion on the Assad regime’s ongoing slaughter of over two hundred fifty thousand of its own civilians. Instead, war crimes charges have been filed against American, British, and Israeli officials in numerous countries, while leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and Syria are seemingly above the law. Such precedent sets a dangerous disincentive for coalition forces engaged in the asymmetric battlefield to risk their lives in order to adhere to the laws of armed conflict.

Brooke Goldstein is a human rights attorney and the Director of The Lawfare Project who wrote and researched most of this article. If you want to read the rest of the article - CLICK HERE

Please leave message below, then Go To top, nav to previous or next

#foreign #israël #palestine #hamas #fatah #hezbollah #rashida tlaib #tlaib

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fapangel · 7 years

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Thoughts on Thomas Wictors musings on some kind of middle eastern wunderkin spec ops force? I'm unsure it even exists.

The contention of it certainly makes sense.

For starters, we must remember that the well-known truth about Arabs being terrible at warfare applies due to social and cultural norms that simply cripple their ability to compete against modern liberal democracies for a wide variety of reasons, prime among them being a complex social honor code that hamstrings both hierarchical command structure, honest criticism and junior officer initiative - the very cornerstones that make modern liberal democracies armies so effective. That’s in addition to the totalitarian nature of these theocratic shitholes, where the army itself is the greatest threat to the rulers, and thus are carefully limited in equipment, training, and operational assignments, based on relative trust in their loyalty - and of course, loyalty takes precedence over competence.

None of this really applies to comparatively small special operations forces, especially for the filthy-rich, Western-allied nations like the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. These countries have been rolling in shit-tons of oil money for decades - and they intelligently invested it in various overseas businesses to prepare for the oil glut we’re in currently, so they’re still sitting pretty. They have the US/NATO selling them all the weapons they want in exchange for regional bases to counter the Soviet - er, Russian Federation, they’re screwing us over with OPEC, and in general they’ve got everything they want.

The psychopathic jihadists in Iran and Syria threaten to spoil everything for them - especially with Iran pointing chemical-tipped missiles at everyone in sight and shoveling money and weapons into the pockets of every miserable murdering fuck in the region. The Saudis et al have everything, everything to lose by ignoring them, and everything to protect by fighting them. They don’t buy those shit-tons of American weaponry for grins and giggles - it’s logical to assume that anything they can do to fight these people, they will do. So the idea of the western-aligned Arab coalition forming a special operations group that they absolutely stagger with money, gear and training - augmented by co-operative training from the US (their ally) and Israel (who desperately needs allies, what with their backs to the sea and surrounded by bloodthirsty Arabs) isn’t far-fetched at all.

As for Saudis and their motives, this thread of Wictor’s is one of the most insightful I’ve seen in a long time - he explains, at length and in detail, how the current leadership of Saudi Arabia is very, very different than the people who were in charge when Sept. 11th happened. For the reasons Wictor advances, as well as my own point vis a vis jihadists above, the reason why their leadership changed is pretty damn clear-cut - it was in their best interest not to piss off their sugar daddy and patron, the United States. An anti-western coalition exists in the Middle East, defined roughly by NATO/US and the UAE/Egypt/Saudis et al on one side, and Iran/Syria/Pakistan/Turkey/Russia/China on the other - with North Korea backed by both Russians and Chinese, and serving as a long-distance arms trader/tech collaborator with Iran and Syria. Saudi Arabia is filthy rich, but tiny - they’re basically one guy in white robes with a nice credit card facing down a massive horde of savages. If the gun store won’t sell him LMGs and ammo, he’s hosed, simple as that - and we own the best gun store in town. You can always buy from Le Jaques Discount Arms Emporium, but his stuff can be knocked over by a few advanced toys from Russia - unlike American gear, which does the same to Russia’s best tech. The last time this came up (vis a vis tensions between Saudis and Quatar) I pointed out that Qatar is well-known as an active and ideologically motivated supporter of terrorists, and alleged that Saudi Arabia, by contrast, simply doesn’t care about what their citizens do as long as it doesn’t threaten their safety and stability.

What Wictor’s saying is something I should’ve concluded myself - that after 9/11, with a very angry America looking to break off their foot in someone’s ass, anyone with jihadist sympathies very much qualified as a threat to Saudi Arabia, which needs a positive long-term relationship with America to survive.

Now, Wictor’s evidence might be so-so, but when you’re working with what you’d call “open-source intel,” you’re mainly working on logical suppositions and gut instincts anyways. The evidence at best hints in the direction you’re looking, and at worst demonstrates a conspicuously constant failure to disprove your theories, or even hint in the other direction. You can certainly quibble with his eyeball analysis of various propaganda videos of jihadis firing TOW missiles at people and tanks in the desert - I have, myself - but those criticisms are entirely aside from the point, which is that they’re propaganda videos. For instance, the video of a Syrian T-90 (newly gifted from Russia) being hit by a TOW before the gunner bails out at high speed struck Wictor as suspicious enough to be staged (tankers motto is “death before dismount,” because dismount usually IS death,) but I thought it could be legitimate - a poorly-trained Syrian recruit used to explosion-prone T-72 monkey models losing his nerve in his first real engagement….

… but that doesn’t mean the whole video wasn’t spliced together out of a few different clips by Russian propagandists before adding the appropriate jihadist graphics in the corners. Remember who benefits from videos of ebil terrorists using US-supplied TOW missiles against the Righteous Assad Regime - that’d be Russia, who’s openly and loudly accusing America of “supporting ISIS” every chance they get. Apply this also to our views of Saudi Arabia in general - never forget that Russia is turning its well-honed and experienced propaganda machine against them, as they’re a regional proxy of the United States (their enemy.) Additionally, Wictor’s arguing from the weight of evidence - he’s pointed out plenty of videos that are indubitably laughably bad fakes made strictly for propaganda. It’s not just the incompetence on display, but the lack of urgency - we all had a good giggle at the hapless idiots in the Abu Hajaar video, but I personally stopped laughing at the end, when two men (cameraman included) copy a third they see trying to roll his way out of the firefight. That’s exactly how untrained, panicking irregulars fleeing for their lives usually respond - and as the video shows, it’s also how they die. There’s nothing funny about that. That’s what combat looks like, and the gormless, bored assholes in the artillery shelling videos Wictor criticized (who’re engaging with direct-fire missions, i.e. well within range of the ever-present ZU-23s and Dushkas) reflect none of that. They don’t even have the energy for Aloha Snackbars after every shot. And that reflects the overwhelming majority of the videos I’ve personally seen in /wsg/ “war threads” and elsewhere.

So, to review:

1. There’s every reason to believe the western-allied Arab coalition would create a force like this: it’s in their best interests to fight jihadists, and it’s the same tactic used by their regional enemy, Iran (through their own spec-ops proxies like Hezbollah.)

2. There’s no reason to believe they’d be as incompetent and incapable as Arab armies in general tend to be, since spec-ops is a very different beast.

3. There’s clear-cut evidence of major Saudi leadership changes away from jihadi sympathizers, and correspondingly very good reasons for Saudi Arabia to treat jihadists as a threat to their very existence (as exemplified by Saudis recent pressure on Qatar.) In turn this means NATO and Israeli governments would be much more likely to provide spec-ops training to them - and they’re the best in the world, hands-down.

4. The above is doubly reinforced by the threat Iran poses to Israel - consider this latest tirade from the zealous fundamentalist run government armed with chemical-tipped IRBMs that warns the Zionists that they’re absolutely going to be wiped out in 25 years, but they might be wiped out much sooner, so they should just sit back and quietly accept their doom, lest their final days be cut short. This, right here, is why Israel just nailed an Iranian missile factory in Syria with cruise missiles - a factory that was parked right under the defensive umbrella of that S-300VM unit Russia shipped in to Tartarus late last year (which is precisely why Israel was publicly warning Russia not to try shielding their asshole buddies with those AA systems.) Israel won’t tolerate Iran on their doorstep, since it’s life-and-death for them, and Russia needs Iran’s help in Syria, which is precisely why Israel and Russia are on a collision course concerning Iran’s proxy, Hezbollah. The Israelis have the best reason of all to team up with Saudi Arabia to fight these bastards - their very survival.

4. There’s both direct evidence of, and very good reasons for, most of the combat imagery we see coming out of the middle-east war zones being faked propaganda footage. This doesn’t prove that Arab spec-ops are looting and shooting over there, but it does tell us what is not happening - the superficially accepted narrative of the war as it’s presented to us.

5. Ergo, if the Syrians aren’t doing the real fighting against ISIS, who is?

Conclusions? The Arab coalition has the means to create these spec-ops forces, they have very strong motivations, and they’ve had the opportunity for years now. On the balance, it’s harder to believe that the western-aligned Gulf states haven’t created a force like this. What you see on Twitter is Wictor pointing out ripples on the surface and telling you there’s a shark in the tank - but that’s only because he’s watched people dumping whole sides of beef into it for a decade or better.

We don’t know what’s in there exactly, or just how big it is - but we do know that it sure as hell isn’t a goddamn guppy.

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itsfinancethings · 5 years

Link

CEYLANPINAR, Turkey (AP) — Syrian forces on Wednesday night rolled into the strategic border town of Kobani, blocking one path for the Turkish military to establish a “safe zone” free of Syrian Kurdish fighters along the frontier as part of its week-old offensive.

The seizure of Kobani by forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar Assad also pointed to a dramatic shift in northeastern Syria: The town was where the United States military and Kurdish fighters first united to defeat the Islamic State group four years ago and holds powerful symbolism for Syrian Kurds and their ambitions of self-rule.

The convoys of government forces drove into Kobani after dark, a resident said. The resident, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal, was one of the few remaining amid fears of a Turkish attack on the town. Syria’s state-run media confirmed its troops entered the town.

Syria’s presence in Kobani puts a firm limit on Turkish ambitions in its offensive. The town lies between a Turkish-controlled enclave farther west and smaller areas to the east that Turkey seized in the past week.

Turkey had talked of creating a 30-kilometer (19-mile) deep “safe zone,” driving out Kurdish fighters from the border region. Turkish forces had shelled Kobani in recent days as part of the offensive but had not advanced ground troops on it.

The battle for Kobani turned the once-nondescript town into a centerpiece of the international campaign against IS, with TV cameras flocking to the Turkish side of the border to track the plumes of smoke rising from explosions in the besieged town. Then-U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry declared it would be “morally very difficult” not to help Kobani.

The IS extremists were finally driven out in early 2015 in their first major defeat, and an alliance was cemented that would eventually bring down the group’s “caliphate” in Syria.

Now the Kurdish authority agreed to allow Damascus to deploy its military in the town and other parts of northeast Syria to protect them from Turkey’s offensive launched after U.S. President Donald Trump pulled back American troops working with the Kurds.

On Wednesday, the U.S-led coalition said it had vacated a cement factory south of Kobani, which had served as a coordination center with the Kurdish-led forces. Coalition spokesman Col. Myles Caggins said that after troops left the base, two U.S. fighter jets launched pre-planned airstrikes to destroy ammunition that was left behind.

The coalition also said its forces had left Raqqa, the former capital of the Islamic State that was liberated in 2017, and Tabqa, a town to the west.

“Coalition forces continue a deliberate withdrawal from northeast Syria,” Caggins tweeted.

After being effectively abandoned by the U.S., the Kurds’ turn to the Syrian government for protection has allowed Damascus’ ally, Russia, to step in as the biggest power player.

Moscow further asserted that role Wednesday, offering to mediate a resolution to the conflict, one day before U.S. Vice President Mike Pence was to begin a mission to press Turkey for a cease-fire.

On Monday, Trump imposed limited economic sanctions on Turkey to raise the pressure on Ankara. The move came five days after Trump raised the specter of sanctions in a letter to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in which he also said that if the Turkish leader invaded Syria he would be remembered as a “devil.” Trump told Erdogan he wouldn’t want to be responsible for “slaughtering thousands of people,” and warned, “don’t be a tough guy. Don’t be a fool!”

Erdogan defied the sanctions, saying the only way its military offensive would end was if Syrian Kurdish fighters leave a designated border area.

Erdogan also said he had “no problem” accepting an invitation from Russian President Vladimir Putin to visit Russia soon to discuss Syria. But he threw into doubt a planned Nov. 13 meeting with Trump, citing anger over the sanctions that Washington imposed Monday on the NATO ally.

Despite an outcry among both Democratic and Republican lawmakers over the pullout and the Turkish invasion, Trump insisted a fight between Turkey and the Kurds was not a U.S. problem and that things are “very nicely under control” in northern Syria.

“Syria’s friendly with the Kurds. The Kurds are very well-protected. Plus, they know how to fight. And, by the way, they’re no angels,” Trump told reporters at the White House while meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella.

Trump added that U.S. troops are “largely out” of the region, adding that if Russia wanted to get involved with Syria, “that’s really up to them. It’s not our border. We shouldn’t be losing lives over it.”

Still, the repercussions from America’s abrupt withdrawal were expanding. Assad’s forces are returning to regions of northern Syria they abandoned at the height of the 8-year-old civil war. Moscow has taken a more prominent role as an interlocutor among Assad, the former U.S.-allied Kurds and Turkey.

Erdogan’s office confirmed the Turkish leader would meet Thursday with Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and said he would travel to Sochi, Russia, for talks on Tuesday.

Erdogan said he was not concerned by the U.S. sanctions. He told reporters that chances for his November trip to Washington are “something to be assessed” after the talks with the American delegation, he said, adding that the sanctions and criticisms in the U.S. constituted “great disrespect toward the Turkish Republic.”

In an address to his ruling party legislators, Erdogan said Turkey would not be coerced into halting its offensive or accepting offers for mediation with the Kurdish fighters, which Turkey considers to be terrorists.

“Our proposal is for the terrorists to lay down their arms, leave their equipment, destroy the traps they have created, and leave the safe zone we designated, as of tonight,” Erdogan said. “If this is done, our Operation Peace Spring will end by itself.”

In a speech to Parliament, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkey won’t be affected by “sanctions and threats.” He also said Turkey would “give the appropriate answer to these sanctions.”

Turkish forces and Kurdish fighters also battled over the border town of Ras al-Ayn. Turkey said it had captured the town days ago, but its hold appeared uncertain.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in remarks carried by Russian news agencies that Moscow is committed to mediating between Syria and Turkey.

Russia already has announced it had deployed troops outside the flashpoint town of Manbij to keep apart the Syrian military and Turkish-led forces. Syrian forces took control of Manbij as U.S. troops completed their pullout from the town Tuesday.

Lavrov also said Moscow will also continue to encourage Syria’s Kurds and government to seek rapprochement following the U.S. withdrawal. The Kurds are hoping to reach a deal with Damascus that preserves at least some degree of the autonomy they seized for themselves during the civil war.

Lavrov also blamed the U.S. and the West for undermining the Syrian state, saying this pushed “the Kurds toward separatism and confrontation with Arab tribes.”

In another sign of Moscow’s rising profile, France suggested it will also work more closely with Russia in Syria.

French Foreign Minister Jean Yves Le Drian said told French TV channel BFM that France is now looking to Russia, given their “common interests” in defeating the Islamic State group in Syria.

A U.N. Security Council meeting concluded with no call for Turkey to end its military offensive against the Kurds. Instead, the diplomats issued a brief statement expressing concern about the dispersal of “terrorists” from the region and the humanitarian impact.

___

Mroue contributed from Beirut. Associated Press writer Suzan Fraser in Ankara, Turkey, and Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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newsnigeria · 5 years

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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/kurds-face-stark-options/

Kurds face stark options after US pullback

By Pepe Escobar : Posted with Permission

Forget an independent Kurdistan: They may have to do a deal with Damascus on sharing their area with Sunni Arab refugees

In the annals of bombastic Trump tweets, this one is simply astonishing: here we have a President of the United States, on the record, unmasking the whole $8-trillion intervention in the Middle East as an endless war based on a “false premise.” No wonder the Pentagon is not amused.

Trump’s tweet bisects the surreal geopolitical spectacle of Turkey attacking a 120-kilometer-long stretch of Syrian territory east of the Euphrates to essentially expel Syrian Kurds. Even after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan cleared with Trump the terms of the Orwellian-named “Operation Peace Spring,” Ankara may now face the risk of US economic sanctions.

The predominant Western narrative credits the Syrian Democratic Forces, mostly Kurdish, for fighting and defeating Islamic State, also known as Daesh. The SDF is essentially a collection of mercenaries working for the Pentagon against Damascus. But many Syrian citizens argue that ISIS was in fact defeated by the Syrian Arab Army, Russian aerial and technical expertise plus advisers and special forces from Iran and Hezbollah.

As much as Ankara may regard the YPG Kurds – the “People’s protection units” – and the PKK as mere “terrorists” (in the PKK’s case aligned with Washington), Operation Peace Spring has in principle nothing to do with a massacre of Kurds.

Facts on the ground will reveal whether ethnic cleansing is inbuilt in the Turkish offensive. A century ago few Kurds lived in these parts, which were populated mostly by Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians. So this won’t qualify as ethnic cleansing on ancestral lands. But if the town of Afrin is anything to go by the consequences could be severe.

Into this heady mix, enter a possible, uneasy pacifier: Russia. Moscow previously encouraged the Syrian Kurds to talk to Damascus to prevent a Turkish campaign – to no avail. But Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov never gives up. He has now said: “Moscow will ask for the start of talks between Damascus and Ankara.” Diplomatic ties between Syria and Turkey have been severed for seven years now.With Peace Spring rolling virtually unopposed, Kurdish Gen. Mazloum Kobani Abdi did raise the stakes, telling the Americans he will have to make a deal with Moscow for a no-fly zone to protect Kurdish towns and villages against the Turkish Armed Forces. Russian diplomats, off the record, say this is not going to happen. For Moscow, Peace Spring is regarded as “Turkey’s right to ensure its security,” in the words of Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov. As long as it does not turn into a humanitarian disaster.

No independent Kurdistan

From Washington’s perspective, everything happening in the volatile Iran-Iraq-Syria-Turkey spectrum is subject to two imperatives: 1) geopolitically, breaking what is regionally regarded as the axis of resistance: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah; and 2) geostrategically, breaking the Chinese-led Belt and Road Initiative from being incorporated in both Iraq and Syria, not to mention Turkey.

When Erdogan remarked that the trilateral Ankara summit last month was “productive,” he was essentially saying that the Kurdish question was settled by an agreement among Russia, Turkey and Iran.

Diplomats confirmed that the Syrian Constitutional Committee will work hard towards implementing a federation – implying that the Kurds will have to go back to the Damascus fold. Tehran may even play a role to smooth things over, as Iranian Kurds have also become very active in the YPG command.

The bottom line: there will be no independent Kurdistan – as detailed in a map previously published by the Anadolu news agency.

From Ankara’s point of view, the objective of Operation Peace Spring follows what Erdogan had already announced to the Turkish Parliament – that is, organizing the repatriation of no fewer than two million Syrian refugees to a collection of villages and towns spread over a 30km-wide security zone supervised by the Turkish army.

Yet there has been no word about what happens to an extra, alleged 1.6 million refugees also in Turkey.

Kurdish threats to release control of 50 jails holding at least 11,000 ISIS/Daesh jihadis are just that. The same applies to the al-Hol detention camp, holding a staggering 80,000 ISIS family members. If let loose, these jihadis would go after the Kurds in a flash.

Veteran war correspondent and risk analyst Elijah Magnier provides an excellent summary of the Kurds’ wishful thinking, compared with the priorities of Damascus, Tehran and Moscow:

The Kurds have asked Damascus, in the presence of Russian and Iranian negotiators, to allow them to retain control over the very rich oil and gas fields they occupy in a bit less than a quarter of Syrian territory. Furthermore, the Kurds have asked that they be given full control of the enclave on the borders with Turkey without any Syrian Army presence or activity. Damascus doesn’t want to act as border control guards and would like to regain control of all Syrian territory. The Syrian government wants to end the accommodations the Kurds are offering to the US and Israel, similar to what happened with the Kurds of Iraq.

The options for the YPG Kurds are stark. They are slowly realizing they were used by the Pentagon as mercenaries. Either they become a part of the Syrian federation, giving up some autonomy and their hyper-nationalist dreams, or they will have to share the region they live in with at least two million Sunni Arab refugees relocated under Turkish Army protection.

The end of the dream is nigh. On Sunday, Moscow brokered a deal according to which the key, Kurdish-dominated border towns of Manbij and Kobane go back under the control of Damascus. So Turkish forces will have to back off, otherwise, they will be directly facing the Syrian Arab Army. The game-changing deal should be interpreted as the first step towards the whole of northeast Syria eventually reverting to state control.

The geopolitical bottom line does expose a serious rift within the Ankara agreement. Tehran and Moscow – not to mention Damascus – will not accept Turkish occupation of nearly a quarter of sovereign, energy-rich Syrian territory, replacing what was a de facto American occupation. Diplomats confirm Putin has repeatedly emphasized to Erdogan the imperative of Syrian territorial integrity. SANA’s Syrian news agency slammed Peace Spring as “an act of aggression.”

Which brings us to Idlib. Idlib is a poor, rural province crammed with ultra-hardcore Salafi jihadis – most linked in myriad levels with successive incarnations of Jabhat al-Nusra, or al-Qaeda in Syria. Eventually, Damascus, backed by Russian airpower, will clear what is in effect the Idlib cauldron, generating an extra wave of refugees. As much as he’s investing in his Syrian Kurdistan safe zone, what Erdogan is trying to prevent is an extra exodus of potentially 3.5 million mostly hardcore Sunnis to Turkey.

Turkish historian Cam Erimtan told me, as he argues in this essay, that it’s all about the clash between the post-Marxist “libertarian municipalism” of the Turkish-Syrian PKK/PYD/YPG/YPJ axis and the brand of Islam defended by Erdogan’s AKP party: “The heady fusion of Islamism and Turkish nationalism that has become the AKP’s hallmark and common currency in the New Turkey, results in the fact that as a social group the Kurds in Syria have now been universally identified as the enemies of Islam.” Thus, Erimtan adds, “the ‘Kurds’ have now taken the place of ‘Assad’ as providing a godless enemy that needs to be defeated next door.”

Geopolitically, the crucial point remains that Erdogan cannot afford to alienate Moscow for a series of strategic and economic reasons, ranging from the Turk Stream gas pipeline to Ankara’s interest in being an active node of the Belt & Road as well as the Eurasia Economic Union and becoming a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, all geared towards Eurasian integration.

‘Win-win’

And as Syria boils, Iraq simmers down.

Iraqi Kurdistan lives a world apart, and was not touched by the Iraqi protests, which were motivated by genuine grievances against the swamp of corrupt-to-the-core Baghdad politics. Subsequent hijacking for a specific geopolitical agenda was inevitable. The government says Iraqi security forces did not shoot at protesters. That was the work of snipers.

Gunmen in balaclavas did attack the offices of plenty of TV stations in Baghdad, destroying equipment and broadcast facilities. Additionally, Iraqi sources told me, armed groups targeted vital infrastructure, as in electricity grids and plants especially in Diwaniyah in the south. This would have plunged the whole of southern Iraq, all the way to Basra, into darkness, thus sparking more protests.

Pakistani analyst Hassan Abbas spent 12 days in Baghdad, Najaf and Karbala. He said heavily militarized police dealt with the protests, “opting for the use of force from the word go – a poor strategy.” He added: “There are 11 different law enforcement forces in Baghdad with various uniforms – coordination between them is extremely poor under normal circumstances.”

But most of all, Abbas stressed: “Many people I talked to in Karbala think this is the American response to the Iraqi tilt towards China.”

That totally fits with this comprehensive analysis.

Iraq did not follow the – illegal – Trump administration sanctions on Iran. In fact it continues to buy electricity from Iran. Baghdad finally opened the crucial Iraq-Syria border post of al-Qaem. Prime Minister Adel Abdel Mahdi wants to buy S-400 missile systems from Russia.

He also explicitly declared Israel responsible for the bombing of five warehouses belonging to the Hashd al-Shaabi, the people mobilization units. And he not only rejected the Trump administration’s “deal of the century” between Israel and Palestine but also has been trying to mediate between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

And then there’s – what else? – China. On a state visit to Beijing on September 23, Mahdi clinched a proverbial win-win deal: plenty of oil supplies traded with investment in rebuilding infrastructure. And Iraq will be a certified Belt & Road node, with President Xi Jinping extolling a new “China-Iraq strategic partnership”. China is also looking to do post-reconstruction work in Syria to make it a key node in the New Silk Roads.

It ain’t over till the fat (Chinese) lady sings while doing deals. Meanwhile, Erdogan can always sing about sending 3.6 million refugees to Europe.

What’s happening is a quadruple win. The US performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO alley Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of its oilfields and the entire northeast.

#Kurdistan #Syria

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militant-holy-knight · 5 years

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Why ISIS Was Ahead of the Curve

ISIS is defeated on the battlefield, but looking back we need to understand what set it apart from other terrorists.

As I write this article, some people are prematurely celebrating the fall of the Caliphate, believing that the war is over since the worst side of the conflict is now defeated in the field. Ignoring that terrorists don’t need to hold territory and they can carry a long and sustained insurgency from foreign donors (specially considering the countries that surround Iraq and Syria), there is the fact that the conflict in Syria is far from over since there are other minor Islamist groups like al-Nusra operating that are fighting both Assad and the Kurds, while Iraq is still pretty scarred by the war, resentment against Iraqi Sunnis still lingers because of collaboration with ISIS and it will become worse while Iraq is under Iranian sphere of influence. But looking back, we need to understand what set ISIS apart from other terrorist groups and why did they managed to get into power so fast.

The most alarming thing about ISIS is how quickly they managed to rise and take power among the chaos during the Arab Spring. Even more baffling is that despite being denounced worldwide, a very significant number of foreigners still wished to join them and become part of an monstrous nightmare. There was a legitimate concern that they could quickly collapse the local governments if there was no outside intervention from either the West, Russia or Iran, and a carnage on unprecedented level would soon follow: The mass exile of Assyrian Christians, the rape of the Yazidis and the genocide of Shias was terrible enough to behold, in the event that nobody came to help them their people would have likely disappeared. Yet somehow they managed to gain rogue Western support more so than say, groups like al-Qaeda.

A mistake made by the public is that groups like al-Qaeda oppose ISIS on a moral level or found them too violent. There is a degree to truth to it, but assuming that ISIS is morally worse to al-Qaeda is wrong. I am sure that if they were in ISIS position, al-Qaeda would have been just as brutal as they were. Their differences did not come down to ideology - they are both Salafi/Wahhabi Sunni groups that hates Christians, Jews, Shias, the West and modernity in general that want to establish their own caliphate. They differed in methods and personal politics.

al-Qaeda’s plan was essentially do the same thing that they did in Afghanistan, but on a much larger scale: trap the superior power into an war of attrition and tire them out to the point they could no longer carry out their war, allowing them to colapse the local governments just like they did with Ahmad Shah Masoud. ISIS realized this would take too much time to do throughout the world and decided to establish their caliphate right away, which al-Qaeda opposed because they thought they couldn’t secure their territory while still at war with the entire world. While al-Qaeda was proven right in the long run, at the time of their declaration ISIS proved itself to be more than capable of taking and holding territory than they did which gave them more legitimacy in the eyes of jihadists everywhere. Also al-Qaeda couldn't accept submitting their authority to one of their renegade factions, so this is why they oppose them.

Most importantly, the al-Qaeda leadership objected to ISIS antagonism towards Shia Muslims not because of moral reasons (since the Shias are infidels in their eyes) but because they knew that would cause harm their cause in the eyes of the community. Its in al-Qaeda’s agenda to deal with Shias sooner or later, but the Western Crusaders “occupying their lands” take precedence. The founder of ISIS, al-Zarqawi, loathed the Shias. He thought they sabotaged Islam during its history - if it wasn’t for the Persians, the Ottomans likely would have managed to conquer Europe, but they were bogged down in continuous conflict with them for too long allowing Christendom to unite and drive back the Turks. There is also a small fact that al-Qaeda did cooperate with Iran on a small scale, but their alliance could only go so far. Bin Laden personally believed all Muslims, regardless if they were Sunni or Shia, were united by their hatred of the infidel.

And finally, while the al-Qaeda leadership has publicly disavowed any ties with ISIS, it hasn't stopped their local affiliates like al-Nusra from forming temporary alliances with ISIS members to fight against the Assad regime, the Iraqi security forces, the Western coalition, the Kurdish, Assyrian and Shia militias that oppose them. So don't think that al-Qaeda is really serious about being sworn enemies to ISIS.

While ISIS was capable of appealing to the public crowd due to their effective propaganda in creating the perfect Islamic propaganda, they made many mistakes by highlighting their atrocities and making Islamism a deterrent ideology. Even Wahhabis feel that they did a great harm to their cause and alienated many people from their cause. Make no mistake though - while ISIS is pretty much beaten, they are going to be hard to extirpate. Look at the Taliban in Afghanistan which is comparatively less dangerous because their goals are more nationalistic while ISIS demanded the total submission of Muslims worldwide - it has been almost 20 years since they were overthrown yet they haven’t been defeated. I blame this on Pakistan covertly assisting them because a stable Afghanistan means a threat to them, which is incidentally the same reason I believe Turkey will be the same towards Syria so long as they are determined to oust Assad.

So while ISIS is pretty much gone now, their dream is far from over. So long as foreign powers whether America, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey or Iran will use the Levant as their table to play their proxy conflict with each other, there will be no peace and I am sure that there are other countless factions eager to fill in the void left by ISIS. Even though they were unrecognized by no country in the world, they managed to gain enough legitimacy in the eyes of individuals eager to kill, rape and die in the name of Allah that most worryingly of all could have been anyone we personally knew. Time will tell if the crimes committed by ISIS will discourage people from following the same path. I pray they do before its too late.

#terrorism

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bountyofbeads · 5 years

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US to let Turkish forces move into Syria, dumping Kurdish allies

White House reveals policy shift following conversation between Trump and Erdoğan

Julian Borger in Washington and Bethan McKernan in Istanbul | Published:09:34 Mon October 7, 2019 | Guardian | Posted October 7, 2019 2:44 PM ET |

The White House has given the green light to a Turkish offensive into northern Syria, moving US forces out of the area in an abrupt foreign policy change that will in effect abandon the Kurds, Washington’s longtime military partner.

Kurdish forces have spearheaded the campaign against Islamic State in the region, but the policy swerve, after a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday, means Turkey would take custody of captured Isis fighters, the White House said.

It has also raised fears of fresh fighting between Turkey and Kurdish forces in Syria’s complex war now the US no longer acts as a buffer between the two sides.

Trump defended his decision, saying the Kurds were “paid massive amounts of money and equipment” to fight and that he was leaving the fight against Isis to others for the time being.

“We are 7,000 miles away,” he tweeted, while vowing to crush the extremist movement “if they come anywhere near us”.

The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) said on Monday its US partners had already begun withdrawing troops from areas along Turkey’s border. Footage aired on Kurdish news agency Hawar purportedly showed US armoured vehicles evacuating key positions near the towns of Ras al-Ayn and Tal Abyad in the border region. Erdoğan also confirmed the development in remarks to reporters in Ankara.

The SDF spokesman, Mustafa Bali, accused the US of leaving the area to “turn into a war zone”, adding that the SDF would “defend north-east Syria at all costs”.

A statement from the Turkish foreign minister, Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu, said Ankara had “supported the territorial integrity of Syria since the beginning of the crisis and will continue to do so … [We are] determined to ensure survivability and security of Turkey by clearing the region from terrorists.”

The decision represents the latest in a series of erratic moves by Trump, who is fighting impeachment at home, apparently taken without consultation with, or knowledge of, US diplomats dealing with Syria, or the UK and France, the US’s main international partners in the country.

Senator Lindsey Graham, a staunch Trump loyalist on most issues, told Fox News the move represented “a big win for Iran and Assad [and] a big win for Isis”.

He vowed that Congress would pass a resolution reversing the decision. “Isis is not defeated. This is the biggest lie being told by this administration,” Graham said.

Brett McGurk, a former US special envoy for the fight against Isis, said the White House statement demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding of anything happening on the ground”.

McGurk pointed out that the US was not holding any Isis detainees. They are being held by the SDF, “which Trump just served up to Turkey”.

“Turkey has neither the intent, desire, nor capacity to manage 60,000 detainees, which State and [Pentagon inspectors general] warn is the nucleus for a resurgent Isis. Believing otherwise is a reckless gamble with our national security,” McGurk said on Twitter.

The US and Turkey came to an agreement in August to create a “safe zone” in northern Syria, by which the US-backed Kurdish-led SDF would pull back from the border.

The safe zone deal was due to forestall a Turkish military offensive that has been threatened since Trump announced last December the 2,000 US special forces stationed in Syria would leave. Ankara sees the SDF as indistinguishable from Kurdish insurgents inside Turkey and views it as a serious security threat.

In the White House statement issued just before 11pm on Sunday, however, that agreement was not mentioned.

“Turkey will soon be moving forward with its long-planned operation into northern Syria,” the statement said. “The United States armed forces will not support or be involved in the operation, and United States forces, having defeated the Isis territorial ‘caliphate’, will no longer be in the immediate area.”

The statement suggested that in return for US acquiescence in a Turkish offensive, Erdoğan had assured Trump that Turkey would take over the detention of Isis militants captured by the SDF, on the battlefield.

The custody of Europeans and other foreign fighters has long been one of Trump’s preoccupations, and he has lambasted European governments for not taking responsibility for their own nationals in Isis’ ranks.

Syria experts have warned that the US abandonment of the SDF would lead to another new front in the eight-year Syrian conflict, and could push the Kurds into seeking an arrangement with the Assad regime in Damascus. The Kurdish leadership has long been in talks with Damascus to ensure a level of Kurdish autonomy in north eastern Syria in the event of a US pullout.

After accusations of betrayal, many from US conservatives, following Sunday’s late night announcement, Trump attempted to justify the decision in a series of tweets on Monday morning, pointing the reluctance of European governments to accept custody of captured Isis fighters from their countries.

“The US was supposed to be in Syria for 30 days, that was many years ago. We stayed and got deeper and deeper into battle with no aim in sight,” Trump tweeted. He said Europeans wanted the US to keep the Isis detainees and “hold them in US prisons at tremendous cost … thinking, as usual, that the US is always the ‘sucker’ on Nato, on trade, on everything”.

As for the Kurds, Trump was unsentimental: “The Kurds fought with us, but were paid massive amounts of money and equipment to do so. They have been fighting Turkey for decades. I held off this fight for almost 3 years, but it is time for us to get out of these ridiculous Endless Wars, many of them tribal, and bring our soldiers home.”

Two weeks ago, at the UN general assembly, the US special envoy for the global coalition to defeat Isis, James Jeffrey, stressed that the US had an agreement with Turkey on a safe zone, in recognition of Ankara’s security concerns, that obviated the need for an Turkish incursion.

“We listen to the Turks’ concerns. We try to respond to them when we can,” Jeffrey said. “And we have made it clear to Turkey at every level that any unilateral operation is not going to lead to an improvement in anyone’s security.”

Ankara says the planned safe zone could allow up to 2 million Syrian refugees living in Turkey to return, although international observers and the SDF say such a move would amount to demographic engineering. Turkish presidency spokesperson Ibrahim Kalin said on Monday that Turkey has “no interest in occupation or changing demographics”.

Another outcome of the Trump-Erdoğan call is that the Turkish leader is expected to visit the White House next month.

'We deserve support': Reinvented north-east Syria strives for stability

As tensions with Turkey continue unabated, officials in the region say western indifference is part of the problem

By Dan Sabbagh in Qamishli | Published:06:00 Wed October 2, 2019 | Guardian | Posted October 7, 2019 2:45 PM ET |

Traffic is light on the two creaking pontoon bridges over the Tigris that mark the only official crossing into the autonomous region of north-east Syria, a little known area of 5 million people engaged in a radical political experiment.

At the border post stands a distinctive billboard: a martyrs’ memorial to the men and women who died eradicating the Islamic State (Isis), as well as those killed fighting what has become a more serious threat – Turkey.

“Our martyrs are our honour,” the poster says, depicting 40 foreign fighters, including a Briton, Anna Campbell, who was killed in March last year, aged 26, defending the city of Afrin against a Turkish incursion.

An estimated 12,000 fighters from the north-east region died in the territorial struggle against Isis, which ended in March, and a further 20,000 were wounded. What was initially a Kurdish force of ground troops with air and logistical support from a US-led coalition has expanded into an administration controlling 30% of Syria, east of the Euphrates river.

North-east Syria is the largest part of the country outside the control of President Bashar al-Assad. Once a Kurdish area, it is now governed under a communal structure involving a complex set of committees representing seven “cantons” – including Sunni-Arab dominated areas – with each post jointly held by a man and a woman.

Westerners in the area still travel under armed guard in fast-driven vehicles, and there are obvious signs of war damage, decaying infrastructure and only the most basic economy. According to the local military, Isis sleeper cells remain active. The administration says it holds 6,000 Isis prisoners, although the figure may be higher, and over 100,000 displaced persons in overcrowded prisons and increasingly lawless camps, which officials admit they are struggling to control.

Local politicians are concerned about what they say is western indifference. Amina Omar, the co-chair of the Syrian Democratic Council in the desert town of Ain Issa, said “we deserve to be supported” in the light of the sacrifices of the eight-year war against Isis.

Omar said: “We have had no political support from the international community to begin working towards our aims” and accused Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, of wanting “to initiate a war”.

At the UN general assembly in New York last week, Erdoğan called for the creation of a 30km deep “safe zone” on the Syrian side of the border that could resettle up to 3 million refugees currently in Turkey, a proposal that the fledgling administration has already rejected. “This is blackmailing the refugees,” Omar said.

A cross-party British parliamentary delegation, led by Labour backbencher Lloyd Russell-Moyle, visited north-east Syria in September to begin a process of rallying political support. “Global civilisation owes them a debt, both of honour and of practical assistance to rebuild their damaged region,” he said.

Until now, UK participation has been limited to an unacknowledged presence of British special forces, with whom commanders of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) say they enjoy “a good relationship”. The UK forces are based with 1,000 US troops who provide ultimate support to the fledgling administration.

Political engagement has been minimal. On a visit to London in February, Îlham Ehmed, the co- of the “executive council” of the Syrian Democratic Council, was only met by mid-ranking civil servants in a cafe away from the Foreign Office building.

North-east Syria’s leftist ideology was inspired by Abdullah Öcalan, one of the founders of the separatist Kurdish PKK in Turkey, where he has been imprisoned since 1999. It is particularly visible in the country’s male YPG and female YPJ militias, key components of the SDF, whose list of martyrs highlights their defence against Isis and “Turkish fascism”.

But as the fighting has drawn to a conclusion, north-east Syria has sought to reinvent itself. It is no longer a solely Kurdish region: about 1.5 million of the population are Kurds, clustered near the Turkish border where the safe zone is proposed, while the rest are mostly Sunni Arabs from former Isis centres in the Euphrates valley.

Polygamy and underage marriage have been outlawed as part of a “law of women” but while this has been observed in Kurdish areas, implementation in newly taken Arab areas has been patchy.

Relations with Assad’s Russian-backed regime are relatively calm, although limited, with officials even acknowledging privately that they sell some of the oil they control west of the Euphrates, in defiance of US sanctions. “There is no serious fight and there is no serious dialogue,” said Gen Mazlum Kobane, the commander of the SDF.

Instead the focus is on placating Turkey. The Öcalan connection has been dramatically toned down. Once ubiquitous posters of the jailed leader are in shorter supply, although are still found inside some public buildings as well on the martyrs’ billboard. “We are willing to do whatever it takes not to threaten the national security of Turkey,” Kobane said.

The militias are integrated into the 70,000 strong SDF, which is also 35% female, and politicians claim that there is little or no PKK influence. “Our project has nothing to do with the PKK at all,” Omar argued, although she acknowledged that many

North-east Syria is careful not to describe itself as independent, at a time when there is no international appetite for partition. But US military support has become critical.

Last December, Donald Trump announced a plan to withdraw all ground troops from Syria in the belief that Isis was defeated. After intense lobbying the decision was reversed, and local politicians diplomatically said that Trump had been “wrongly briefed” on the military situation.

Instead, north-east Syria agreed to withdraw SDF and YPJ forces away from the Turkish border and allow US and Turkish soldiers to patrol, creating a border buffer zone 5km deep between the Tigris and the Euphrates, and 20km deep for heavy weapons.

The concern locally is that the deal has not proved to be enough to placate Turkey. “President Erdoğan seems to regret what has been agreed,” Kobane said, warning the Turks to brace themselves “for a long war” if they try to invade.

Mindful of Turkish sensibilities, last week Brig Gen Christian Wortman, the deputy director of operations in the US-European command, heaped praise on the Turks as he talked up the new security arrangement. “The intention of this security mechanism is to address Turkey’s legitimate security concerns,” Wortman said.

Memories, however, linger of Turkey’s 2018 occupation of Afrin, historically a Kurdish area, and the ensuing population displacement which has seen thousands of Kurds leave.

Photographs circulate in Kurdish political circles showing the destruction of agricultural areas and the desecration of cemeteries, and it is estimated that 30% of SDF leaders come from Afrin, the bulk of whom are opposed to the border zone settlement that has been agreed with Turkey.

Dr Abdulkarim Omar, the co-chair of foreign affairs of the SDC, accuses Turkey of human rights violations, and says that the occupation was allowed to take place through a deal between Turkey and Russia, and “amid the silence of the international community, so there was a kind of international cover”.

They hope that by rallying western support that won’t happen again.

Latest betrayal of Kurds risks undermining defeat of Isis

It is unclear whether Turkey has the will or capacity to take over detention camps

Martin Chulov Middle East correspondent | Published:09:05 Mon October 7, 2019 | Guardian | Posted October 7, 2019 2:45 PM ET |

In early 2015, as Islamic State trampled over armies of the Middle East and menaced the west, the US turned to the Kurds for help. It was a familiar call, having been repeated over the decades whenever Washington needed a friend in the region. The outcome has been similar too.

Four years on, the people who helped safeguard the global order have been abandoned by the US on the eve of a Turkish push into Kurdish lands across north-eastern Syria. Betrayal has been an enduring theme whenever the US and the Kurds have partnered, but never before as nakedly as this.

As US armour and troops started to leave the region on Monday, a frantic Kurdish leadership was demanding explanations and readying for an invasion that could change the map of the region and prove hugely consequential in other ways too, including undermining the security gains achieved in the war on Isis.

Since the battlefield victory, Syrian Kurds have swapped roles from fighters to jailers, detaining 90,000 suspected Isis supporters in four camps across the province. Guards remained loyal to the cause on the promise of ongoing patronage from Washington. They have far less incentive to do so now.

European states, deeply invested in what happens to the Isis camps, were blindsided by Trump’s announcement that Turkey would take control of them and sceptical that Ankara has either the will or capacity to do such a thing.

For its part, Ankara also appears to be surprised. The site of one camp, al-Hol, is not on maps it has prepared for its operation. Inheriting a headache on this scale seems to be part of a quid pro quo imposed on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. A state dinner at the White House may well hinge on him agreeing.

Among the camp detainees are hard-wired ideologues who would be central to an Isis resurgence if given the chance. The spectre of a jihadist juggernaut once again roaming the plains of Iraq and Syria after using captivity to regroup – think the US-run detention centres in Iraq writ large – now hangs heavy over a region still grappling with the seismic regional power shifts that have defined Trump’s three turbulent years in office.

The abandonment of the Kurds is perhaps the most impactful of all. The debt owed to Kurdish forces is acknowledged by western security partners who realise Isis remains unfinished business. Trump’s US had found itself atop a world order it no longer wanted to lead and, more consequentially, no longer seemed to believe in. In the eyes of some bewildered regional allies, Iraq and Saudi Arabia in particular, the US has nothing left to offer but a chequebook.

Trump’s transactional worldview offers no place for history or morality. His ruthless short-term realism ignores the fact that the regional interests he does want to secure – containing Iran and securing Israel – are jeopardised by such a blatant betrayal.

For all the US president’s talk of taking on Iran, the Iranian attack on Saudi Arabia’s oil supply last month received no response from the US and has instead sparked a detente between Riyadh and Tehran that will inevitably lead to new trade openings and puncture US efforts to crush Iran’s economy.

When Trump first flagged a withdrawal from north-east Syria last December, his advisers were able to turn him around, partly by explaining that it would give Iran unfettered access in the province and make a coveted pathway to the Mediterranean Sea an easier bet. That logic stands 10 months on and has been reaffirmed by Iran’s activities near the Syrian border and in the Syrian port of Latakia.

Serving US interests is hardly a Kurdish priority now. Instead, allying with the Syrian regime in Damascus to ward off the Turks seems to be one of the few ploys open to Kurdish leaders, who would struggle to combat a full-scale Turkish invasion.

The prize for Turkey is significant: moving Kurds away from nearly the full length of the border and scaling back the gains made over the last six years by its arch-foe, the Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK), which dominates administrative positions in the region.

This would be a triumph for Erdoğan, who throughout the war against Isis prioritised Ankara’s enmity with the PKK over that with the jihadists – a stance that drew US distrust. In Turkey’s eyes, the US had partnered with its worst enemy, claiming a false distinction between local Kurds and the PKK itself, forcing it to look elsewhere for friends.

Whether Turkey has a new friend in Trump will remain an open question. Whether the Kurds can trust the US has already been answered. Vanquished yet again, the Kurds must be wondering what they need to do to secure any sort of loyalty.

'There will be chaos once again': Kurds respond to Trump's Syria decision

Kurdish-held territories of north-eastern Syria prepare for assault by Turkish forces – and insist they will resist

Mohammed Rasool in Irbil | Published

Mon 7 Oct 2019 13.57 EDT Updated Mon 7 Oct 2019 14.06 EDT | Guardian | Posted October 7, 2019 2:45 PM ET |

Across the Kurdish-held territories of north-eastern Syria, people are steeling themselves for a long-threatened assault by Turkish forces – which now seems imminent after Donald Trump withdrew US forces from the area.

The Kurds took advantage of the chaos which has reigned in Syria since 2011, fighting off the Damascus regime to build their own autonomous statelet, known as Rojava.

Despite the threats posed by Bashar al-Assad, the Islamic State and Turkey – which views the local Kurdish forces as terrorist groups affiliated with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ party (PKK) – the region has thrived compared to the rest of war-torn Syria.

Many now wonder if the independence must be sacrificed in a deal with Assad to ward off the Turks: Trump’s decision to abandon his Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) military partners has been keenly felt as a betrayal. More than 11,000 men and women of the SDF gave their lives fighting Isis before the group was defeated in March this year.

“America’s attitude will create a negative impact on the whole region, and what has been built up here, the peace and the stability in this region – this American decision will destroy all the advances, particularly with regards to security,” said Amjed Osman, a spokesperson for the Syrian Democratic Council.

“We have always said that Erdoğan’s threats are serious. There is no serious international will to bring an end to the Syrian crisis. The Turkish threats mean that the situation in this region will return to point zero. There will be chaos once again,” he added.

There is much speculation that the impending attack has been prompted by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s domestic troubles: in important local elections this year the Turkish president lost control of four of Turkey’s major cities, including the capital, Ankara, and economic centre Istanbul. The rejection of his Justice and Development party (AKP) by voters all over the country – including crucial Kurdish blocs – was widely viewed as a recrimination for the government’s handling of Turkey’s economic crisis.

The last time Erdoğan’s grip on power slipped, in 2015’s general election, the president restarted the war with the Kurdistan Workers party (PKK). The attempts at a new Turkish incursion into Rojava are seen by many as a fresh attempt to shore up support by rallying Turks around a nationalistic cause.

“The [Turkish] government is in the middle of a deep crisis and they are gradually falling from power. Thus, Erdoğan is seeking every opportunity to fulfil his Ottoman fantasies,” said Bahoz Erdal, a member of the PKK executive committee, on an affiliated radio station.

“Erdoğan has nothing but the war on the Kurds to maintain his power. It was proved in the latest elections that the [party] the Kurds back would come to power.”

The idea of a US exit was first floated in December last year. Since then, across hundreds of kilometres of border, the SDF has been digging defensive ditches and tunnels to slow any incoming Turkish vehicles.

Small Turkish incursions in 2016 and 2018 incurred large territorial losses for the SDF: a new Turkish assault, a Nato ally with a powerful air force, is a bigger threat in the minds of many than that posed by Isis.

“Resistance is life” is the Syrian Kurdish mantra– one that Osman echoed on Monday.

“We are here on the ground, in our own land. We have a military force, we have a political will, we have a people who support our military and political forces.

“We will not just wait here for the Turks to come – our military forces will resist.”

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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The Uyghur Wuc Is Used by the West – to Detonate the World You were told, by Western mass media outlets, to pity Uyghurs, an ethnic Chinese minority group from Xinjiang Province. You were instructed to ‘stand by them’, and to “defend their rights”. They told you that Uyghurs are being discriminated against, and that China is, unfairly, trying to destroy their culture. What you are not supposed to know is that many seemingly unrelated occurrences that you are following on your television screens or from the pages of your newspapers, are actually directly connected to the Uyghurs and their militant, pro-Western “World Uyghur Congress (WUC).” You read about the Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan suddenly exploding, antagonizing Russia, even provoking the European Union, and sending more and more occupation troops into neighboring Syria. You could be forgiven for thinking that he has gone insane. But no, there is actually a steely logic to his actions. For decades, Erdogan has believed that the Turkic minority ethnic group, mainly found in China’s Xinjiang Province, is the proverbial birthplace of the Turkish nation. When he was the mayor of the city of Istanbul, he even erected a small statue of a Uyghur, in the historical Sultan Ahmed neighborhood. After the war in Syria erupted, or more precisely, after the West began an attempt to overthrow President Assad, Turkey brought militant Uyghurs from China, and began using them inside the Syrian territory. I described this in my lengthy essay “March of the Uyghurs”, published by this magazine (New Eastern Outlook). The longer version of the essay will soon be published as a book. Turkey dragged Uyghur jihadi cadres and their families through Indonesia and other countries, supplying them with Turkish passports, for the length of the journey. It trained them in so-called refugee camps, mainly in the Hatay area (historically Syrian territory, arguably grabbed by Turkey after WWI)), eventually injecting them into Idlib (a Syrian province). There, often under the influence of combat drugs, Uyghur combatants committed crimes against humanity, murdering hundreds of men, women and children, while de-populating entire villages and towns. They have been cooperating with various terrorist groups, mainly from the Arab countries, which are still holding the area. I interviewed several Syrian families who had fled in horror from the slaughter. I also interviewed Syrian commanders on the borders of the areas held by the terrorists, in 2019. Both the civilians and armed forces testified that they had never encountered such brutality in their entire lives. Turkey, a NATO member, was basically doing a favor for its Western allies. The Uyghurs were injected into the Syrian jihadi battlefields, in order to get hardened even further, and eventually to return to China, disrupting peace as well as the vital “Belt and Road Initiative” – the great internationalist project of President Xi Jinping. The restive Indonesian island of Sulawesi has also been used, although to a lesser extent, for the training of the Uyghur combatants. Now, Turkish forces are holed up in the Idlib Governorate, directly engaging the Syrian army, while threatening the Russian military with yet another war. Russia complains that Turkey has failed to separate terrorists from the legitimate opposition. This is actually defining the situation in extremely mild terms. Turkey is directly supporting terrorists in the Idlib area, and that includes several offshoots of what used to be known as ISIS, and by all means the Uyghurs and their contingents. Ankara wants to rule over the region, once again, as it used to, in the past. But now it is playing an extremely complex game; it wants to re-build its empire by pitching NATO, the U.S., Europe, the terrorists, Islamists and Russia against each other. For Turkey, the Uyghurs have just been another pawn in its brutal imperialist game. * Even in Afghanistan – the new momentum is directly and indirectly related to the Uyghurs. Syria is being liberated by its armed forces, and the terrorists are being gradually and silently evacuated by the Western allies, mainly Turkey. Where do they go? One of the countries is, of course, Afghanistan. Already two years ago, I was told in both Kabul and Jalalabad that ISIS were moving in huge numbers, to Afghanistan, where they operate predominantly in the rural areas. There is no doubt that Uyghur jihadis are in Afghanistan, too. Now that thy are well-trained and hardened, they are ready to re-enter China, but also the former Soviet republics, even Russia. All this goes in accordance with the U.S. and NATO plan. Plus, the West recently, has been adding various distorted ‘sentimental elements’ to the conflict, portraying the Uyghurs living in Xinjiang as “victims”, twisting reality and suddenly playing what could be described as the “Muslim card”. China has, historically, no issues with the Muslim people (it is the West that does, through colonialist and neo-colonialist adventurism). A visit to the old Chinese capital of Xi An would clearly illustrate how the Han and Muslim cultures have been inter-connected. Xi An is where the ancient “Silk Road” used to originate from, connecting China with Central Asia, and what is now defined as the Middle East, as well as the rest of the world. * In December 2012, Global Times reported: “The World Uyghur Congress (WUC), an organization that is reportedly found to be linked to terrorist groups and receives money from Western political organizations, has long played an important role in smearing China’s policies in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region and cementing Western media stereotypes of China. Some Western media and politicians, together with the WUC, have hyped and smeared China’s policies in Xinjiang but remain silent about information released by the Chinese government or its media. The WUC is headquartered in a low-rise building in Adolf-Kolping-Strasse near the railway station and commercial district of Munich in Germany. The building, with an unnoticeable exterior, has become the heart of separatists from China’s Xinjiang and the mastermind behind many separatist activists in Xinjiang. WUC’s core aim to split Xinjiang from China has never changed, Weinsheimer, a German scholar on China’s ethnic groups, told the Global Times.” Reports like this are usually dismissed by Western propaganda and mass media as an attempt of the Chinese pro-government newspapers to cover up human rights violations against the Uyghurs in Xinjiang. However, from my first-hand investigation in Turkey, Europe, Syria, Indonesia and several other parts of the world, it has become clear that China is using an even-handed approach, while facing an extremely dangerous terrorist threat on its own territory. Even in Hong Kong, the “Uyghur issue” has been used by the West and Taiwan, as recently as in December 2019. I covered it, and as always, I have clear photographic proof. What Global Times reported was actually only a soft reaction to the brutal policy of the West, which is aimed at breaking the most populous country on earth – PRC – into pieces. That is why I periodically address this topic, which is so unpopular, even hidden, in the West. * The Uyghurs are at the frontline of the West’s combat against China. Washington, London, Berlin have several fronts open against Beijing. Various different types of fronts, too: economic, political, ideological, and even military. To harm China (and Russia, Iran, Venezuala and others) is the main goal of Western foreign policy. The World Uyghur Congress (WUC) is ready to assist the United States, Europe and NATO (particularly Turkey) in their efforts to hurt China, and to disrupt BRI (Belt and Road Initiative). Why? It is because BRI is the worst nightmare for Western neo-colonialism. I explain it in my recent book: “China’s Belt and Road Initiative: Connecting Countries Saving Millions of Lives”. China is deeply involved in this tremendous project which I often describe as the final stage of global de-colonialization. Russia is increasingly participating, too; in various cases even taking the lead. The West cannot offer anything positive, optimistic. It is smearing China and Russia, and overthrowing or intimidating governments which do not want to sacrifice millions of their people on the altar of brutal extreme capitalism and Western imperialism. The Western mass media is warning writers not to use such “outdated terms”. Rubbish: they are not outdated; they are real! Imperialism never ended. Colonialism is still plundering and ruining dozens of countries on all continents. China and Russia, as well as Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Cuba and others, are fighting for the wretched of the world. As simple as that. * The WUC and its ‘president’, Dolkun Isa, have clearly decided to take the money and accept the diktat of the West. Simultaneously, by hosting the headquarters of the WUC on its territory, Germany, once again, has decided to play an extremely negative role in global politics. No wonder, German flags are now flying all over Hong Kong, alongside the U.S. and U.K. ones, whenever the rioters decide to hit the streets. Germany foolheartedly backs the Hong Kong rioters, as well as the WUC. By now, both Germany and Turkey have made up their minds, by joining forces with Washington and London, against the People’s Republic of China and its right to live a safe existence. It is a very dangerous situation, but it is real, and there is no reason to hide the reality. The Uyghur extremists were designated to detonate both China and the progressive part of the world. China is trying to calm the situation down, to negotiate in good faith. It is not easy. The West, Turkey and the extremist Muslim forces operating all over the world, are pressing the radical Uyghurs and their WUC into a horrendous and bloody confrontation with Beijing. It is time to make the situation known. The West’s game, deadly and enormously dangerous, must be exposed.

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opedguy · 6 years

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Rebels Panic Ahead of Syrian Offensive

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Aug. 31, 2018.-- Confirming 54-year-old Secretary of State Mike Pompeo April 26, 72-year-old President Donald Trump didn’t realize that the two shared such different views on Syria. Trump advocated during the campaign to end U.S. support for various rebel group seeking to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Agreeing with Russian President Vladimir Putin that toppling al-Assad would spread more chaos in the Middle East, Trump was accused of being a Putin “puppet” by former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton during the campaign. No, Trump can’t win. If he opposes backing Syrian rebel group, he’s accused of Kremlin collusion. Trump now has a Secretary of State aligned with the late Sen. John McCain (R-Az.) who wholeheartedly backed toppling al-Assad. With Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah help, al-Assad has beat back a seven-year-old Saudi proxy war against him.

Pompeo now blames Russia for supporting al-Assad’s right to sovereignty in Syria. Al-Assad’s battled various terror and rebel groups since March 15, 2011, fighting hard to stay in power. When Putin joined the fight Sept. 30, 2015, he turned the tide against various terror and rebel groups, helping al-Assad stay in power. Pushing terror and rebel groups out of various regions, they’ve all fled to Idlib Province where Syrian, Russian. Iranian and Hezbollah seek to purge Syria of insurgents trying to topple the Damascus government. Hiring Pompeo, Trump didn’t realize he was selected an Iraq War backer, much like former President George W. Bush and of course McCain. “The Russians and Assad agreed not to permit this. The U.S. sees this as an escalation of an already dangerous conflict,” said Pompeo, urging Syria, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah to suspend Idlib military operations.

Why Pompeo believes for one minute that al-Assad accepted terrorists, insurgents, rebels and sabateurs on Syrian soil is anyone’s guess. Would any nation tolerate armed rebel groups seeking to topple a sovereign government? Pompeo knows the answer is no. Yet when it comes to Syria, the U.S. under former President Barack Obama joined the seven-year-old Saudi proxy war attempting to oust al-Assad. Pompeo provided al-Assad or Russian President Vladimir Putin no assurance whatever that he accepted Syria’s sovereignty with al-Assad. However many civilians live in Idlib, various rebel groups have taken over the area, making it dangerous for residents. “The three million Syrians who have already been force out of their homes and now in Idlib, will suffer from this aggression. Not good. The world is watching,” tweeted Pompeo. Pompeo needs to clarify the U.S. position on Idlib.

Al-Assad has made clear to various rebel groups that they cannot seek safe havens in Idlib or any other part of Syria without giving up their armed struggle. If Syrians have suffered from military dislocation, it’s because various Saudi-backed rebel groups have funded a proxy war to oust al-Assad for seven years. Unlike dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, al-Assad put up a fight. Pompeo has just reintroduced a “Neocon” policy into the Trump administration, something that Trump opposed in the 2016 campaign. Trump ran on a promise to avoid more Mideast wars, certainly avoiding the next Iraq. Pompeo doesn’t see or admit that the Saudi proxy war in Syria, backed by Obama, has failed, leaving Trump no choice but to let warring factions figure things out without U.S. intervention. Pompeo seems to be warning Syria of a U.S. “escalation” if al-Assad moves against terrorist and rebel groups.

Various rebel groups seeking refuge in Idlib knew that they couldn’t stay there indefinitely without giving up their arms. Saudi’s U.S.-educated Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said his country would never give up on ridding Syria of al-Assad. When you consider the 12 million displaced Syrians 500,000 dead, you’d think the U.S. would have a better strategy than trying to oust al-Assad. U.N. 71-year-old Special Peace Envoy Staffan de Mistrua backed the Saudi position 100%, promising the Saudi High Negotiation Commission that he too sought to get rid of al-Assad. But since the facts on the ground show al-Assad beating baking the Saudi proxy war, it makes zero sense for the U.S. policy to continue beating a dead horse. No matter how distasteful al-Assad, he’s preferred to the kind of chaos that followed in Iraq, Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during the Saudi’s Arab Spring.

If and when the final assault occurs in Idlib, terrorist and rebel groups have no one to blame but themselves, having been duly warned by the Syrian government. Before Pompeo pushes a Syrian policy at odds with Trump, the president needs to get on the same page with his Secretary of State. Whether admitted to or not by Saudi Arabia, Saudi’s Defense Minister, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has lost the proxy war against al-Assad in Syria. If more casualties take place in Idlib, it will be the Saudi’s fault for continuing to back the insurgency to oust al-Assad. If Russia, Iran and Hezbollah wish to be helpful in Idlib, they’ll help terror and rebel groups find safe haven in another country. If there’s concern of another Syrian massacre, the U.N. needs to find a way to get terror and rebel groups out of Syria. As long a Saudi-backed groups stay to fight, they can expect more casualties.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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