Fadil Murat Shamo, 22, is still struggling to rebuild his life after ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, also known as Daesh) militants killed most of his family when they took over the predominantly Yazidi district of Sinjar in northern Iraq more than a decade ago. As a child, he spent five years in ISIS captivity and was indoctrinated to become a soldier. It was a fate that befell…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Opposition forces backed by NATO member Turkey launched an offensive in Syria, in coordination with Israel and the United States, on November 27, 2024.
Within 11 days, the government of the Syrian Arab Republic was toppled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), a group led by Abu Mohammad al-Julani, who now uses his birth name Ahmed al-Sharaa.
Sharaa, who was appointed the unelected “president” of Syria, was previously leader of Al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of Al-Qaeda. He was also an emissary of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder of ISIS.
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A newly formed Syrian resistance faction, calling itself the Islamic Resistance Front in Syria (IRFS), has claimed responsibility for an attack on 31 January against Israeli occupation forces in the southern governorate of Quneitra.
With this attack, the new resistance group announced the start of its operations “against the Israeli enemy alongside our operations against the terrorist gangs of Julani,” referring to self-appointed transitional President Ahmad al-Sharaa – the former deputy commander of ISIS and founder of Al-Qaeda in Syria.
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Syria – The following is on the hell of the “new Syria” ruled by al-Qaeda/ISIS terrorist Joolani, where his co-terrorist thugs run around hunting down minorities, torturing and killing them.
There are countless such videos, and worse, being shared on Telegram & social media, from Syrians who film these terrorists’ attacking civilians (because media in Syria is now under control of HTS/al-Qaeda, you won’t see reports there…nor from the influencers chirping about how great & free Syria is now, and hey, ISIS are very helpful people…)
Following are just some examples of the lawlessness and pure terrorism that has been unleashed on Syria, on Syrian civilians.
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Outgoing CIA director William Burns stated in an interview on 10 January that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, following a decision it made in 2003, and that the US is concerned about the revival of ISIS.
In an interview with state broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR) to discuss his time as director of the notorious spy agency under President Joe Biden, Burns was asked whether Iran may accelerate its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons given the setbacks the Islamic Republic and its allies in the regional Axis of Resistance have sustained over the past year.
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New Orleans- Our condolences go out to the families and friends of those killed and injured in the horrific attack in the French Quarter of New Orleans. We condemn it completely.
We also call upon all people of conscience to be skeptical of the official FBI account. We especially warn against this attack being used as a pretext for the persecution of Middle Eastern people, Muslims and immigrants or to repress protests against the Israeli genocide of Palestinians or justify martial law enforced by National Guard troops as requested by Governor Jeff Landry.
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When Seattle-based journalist and activist Arthur Pye visited North and East Syria in 2023, he was stunned by what he observed at an organizing meeting in Serdem, a refugee camp of internally displaced people. Many of the refugees had been participants in the Rojava Revolution — a Kurdish-led, multiethnic, feminist, directly democratic movement involving more than 4 million people — in the…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
For most of the time since its 1946 independence from France, Syria has resisted all attempts to make it a vassal state. It has paid dearly, as a target of subversion, war, occupation and the most onerous economic sanctions in the world, for its anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, its support for resistance to the occupation of Palestine and its participation in the Axis of Resistance, consisting of the Palestinian resistance groups, Hezbollah, Syria, the Iraqi resistance, Iran, and Yemen (Ansarallah), as well as allied countries and movements in the Arab, Muslim and anti-imperialist world. In this axis, Syria has been a keystone, both geographically and strategically. Removal of this keystone will mean a withering and weakening of the axis to the east and west of Syria, most dramatically in the case of Hezbollah, which loses its most essential lifeline for supplies and support, chiefly from Iran. And it is also why this loss becomes a life preserver thrown to an otherwise floundering state of Israel.
Until November 26, 2024, Israel was failing in almost every way. Even after enduring more than a year of genocide against the civilian population of Gaza, Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance in Gaza remained as effective a force as ever, despite its reliance on weapons made in its own underground workshops from recycled and captured Israeli ordnance and other materials. In fact, the genocide assured a constant flow of volunteers to its doors, a supply of materials for its workshops, and a network of eyes and ears throughout Gaza.
The result was a guerrilla war of attrition for which the Israeli military, built and structured to deliver rapid, overwhelming blows to destroy its adversaries, was not prepared, nor to which it adapted. Losses were not huge, but they were more than Israel had previously suffered, and it seemed without end, including both soldiers and major ground equipment, such as tanks, armored personnel carriers and lightly armored bulldozers. Furthermore, Israel was simultaneously engaged in a second protracted armed conflict with a well-armed, well-trained and battled-hardened (in Syria) Hezbollah force in Lebanon, which had driven out the Jewish settler population in the north of Israel and had struck numerous military and intelligence gathering targets in the same area and beyond, with considerable effect.
In the meantime, Yemeni Ansarallah “Houthi” forces interdicted shipping from Asia through the Red Sea to the Israeli port of Eilat, and attacked the port with missiles, forcing it to close, and the ships to go around Africa and back through the Mediterranean, restricting and delaying the supply of goods and spare parts and making them more costly – or making them unprofitable to ship at all.
Much of the rest of the world also lost its taste for trade with Israel due to the stigma of its genocide in Gaza. The relatively important tourist industry dried up, as did investment. Even the arms industry slackened. A blank check from the US allowed Israel to keep its citizens supplied with paychecks and with sufficient products and services to buy, but at least 48,000 businesses closed, including agriculture in the north and in the Gaza “envelope”.
The toll on Israel was the greatest and longest in its history of warfare. Israel keeps most of its casualty figures hidden, but it admits to more than 27,000 removed from combat due to wounds suffered. Including deaths on all fronts, the casualty total is, therefore, necessarily above 30,000, almost all military, while Israel’s targets in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon are overwhelmingly civilian and more than half women and children. The Israeli military has complained that it is 20% short of the number of combat troops needed, and increasing numbers of exhausted reservists are refusing to serve. Although Gaza has lost an estimated 10% of its population to genocide, Israel has lost a similar proportion to emigration since October 8, 2023.
This was the state of Israel on November 25, 2024. Would Israel still exist after another year of this? There was reason to doubt its stamina. But the following day a truce was declared with Lebanon. There is no doubt that both Hezbollah and the Israeli military were exhausted and heavily damaged. The truce was not directly with Hezbollah but rather with the Lebanese government, because Hezbollah, in addition to its role as a defender against its aggressive neighbor to the south, participates in what is in practice a loosely consensus government, and it wants to be seen as respecting the will of all the parties.
Initially, the truce only stanched the blood on both sides of the border, and allowed both sides to halt their losses. Unfortunately, its true purpose had been determined months and even years earlier, by Turkiye, the US, Israel and their mercenary and mostly takfiri proxies in Syria. It was to make way for resumption of the war against the Syrian government, which started in 2011 but had been largely on hold since 2020. As we know now, the takfiri mercenaries, backed by Turkiye, US/NATO and Israel and furnished with the latest electronic and drone technology, quickly overwhelmed the Syrian forces, which had been weakened by years of debilitating economic sanctions and the flight of largely economic refugees, such that only half of its original population of 23 million remained. There are some reports that the operation was planned for the spring of 2025 but had been moved forward because of the losses being suffered by Israel, both economically and on the battlefield, and its internal political turmoil, as well as abandonment by a significant proportion of Zionist supporters, both through departure from Israel and from the international Jewish community.
Each of the participants in the plan had its own objectives, which are now coming to fruition in greater or lesser measure. For the takfiri forces, subsidized, trained and armed by Turkiye, the CIA, the Pentagon, and to a lesser extent Ukrainian military advisors, the Israeli military, Mossad, and radical Islamist groups in the Arabian and other countries, the objective was to conquer Syria and create a regime based on a radical and racist version of Islam shunned by most of the Muslim world. They had been recruited from at least 82 countries around the world, with the largest number from central Asia and the Arab world, including Syria, where they and their families formed a radical militant minority of 5-10% of the Syrian population allied with the Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaeda and its affiliates and offshoots, such as ISIS/ISIL, that had been attempting for decades to establish a regime in Damascus that would enforce its Draconian laws on the rest of the population. In the areas of Syria that they had captured off and on since 2011, they showed what such rule might be like, by slaughtering and enslaving much of the non-Muslim, non-Sunni and more secularized Muslim population. Some of that has recommenced in the newly “liberated” territory during the last two weeks, despite attempts in the Western media to make them appear more tolerant. It remains to be seen how useful their sponsors will consider them to be now that their main role has been completed.
In the case of Turkiye, one of the major sponsors, the goals are to resettle its 3.5 million Syrian refugee population back in Syria, to capture the northern portion of Syrian territory for itself, and to reward the Turkmen and Uyghur fighters, which it recruited from central Asia, with land inside Syria, displacing the existing population with one loyal to Turkiye. In addition, Turkiye seeks to crush and displace the Syrian Kurdish population along the northern and northeastern Syrian frontier, which it considers to be terrorists in league with Turkiye’s own suppressed Kurdish population. Turkiye already is calling Aleppo its 82nd province and taking military action against the Syrian Kurds, especially in the western Kurdish communities.
Syria’s Kurdish population is itself a complex participant in the fighting. Although it has maintained a largely autonomous enclave in the northeast portion of Syria under the protection of US occupying forces, it has had nonbelligerent relations with the Assad government, which asked the Kurds to help defend Syria in the early years, and on at least one occasion offered to defend them against Turkish and takfiri forces that were invading Kurdish areas. The aim of the US sponsors of the Kurds, on the other hand, was to deny Syria sovereignty over its petroleum fields and wheat production area, in order to destroy the economy and ultimately replace the government with a compliant puppet regime. In their otherwise desperate situation, the Kurds could hardly turn away the US offer of support. The US has tried to restrain the Kurds from attacks against Turkiye, a NATO ally, but not entirely successfully, and the Kurdish leaders are drawn more from the recent immigrants/refugees from Turkiye rather than the more established population, which had stronger ties to the Assad government. Unfortunately for the Kurds, the US government now has somewhat less reason to support them after the fall of the Assad government, since that was the main reason was for their backing. Nevertheless, the larger neighboring Kurdish community in Iraq is a strong ally of the US and NATO, which may be reason enough for the US to continue support. In addition, the US may consider the Syrian Kurds to be a useful tool in restraining Turkiye’s obvious regional ambitions under Erdogan.
There is no doubt that Israel and its US patron gained the most from the fall of Syria, which had been an objective for many decades, and which was a very high priority for Israel, as described at the beginning of this piece. It arguably rescued Israel from total collapse. Besides removing the major remaining frontline belligerent state with Israel, the loss of Syria severed the supply line between Iran and Iraq on the east from Lebanon and the Mediterranean on the west. This means that troops and supplies can no longer easily pass from Iran to Hezbollah. Although Hezbollah retains much of its still unused formidable capability for the time being, it is likely to degrade over time, enabling Israel to reinstate the security of its border with Lebanon and making it safe for the refugees from the northern settlements, currently living in temporary housing, mostly in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, to return to their homes, as soon as they are repaired and rebuilt.
The takfiri seizure of Syria has also enabled Israel to destroy most of Syria’s stored weaponry and munitions in a massive aerial bombing campaign, using the vast quantity of bunker-buster and other bombs and missiles supplied by the US during the last 14 months. The Syrian stores are not only a supply that Hezbollah might have been able to use, but also one that the unpredictable takfiris might eventually decide to use against Israeli forces, should they be so inclined. It has also been an opportunity for Israel to capture additional territory, including the “disputed” Lebanese Shebaa farms region along the border of Lebanon, as well as much of the hitherto unoccupied portion of the Golan Heights, with strategic Mt. Hermon (Jabal al-Sheikh), the highest peak in the region, that has remained under Syrian control until now.
From Israel’s point of view, the disappearance of a very strategic member of the Axis of Resistance and the weakening of Hezbollah also means that Israel regains control of its northern border and will not have to devote as many troops to its defense. This in turn means that the refugee Israeli population that had to abandon its homes along the frontier can now return, although many of them will have to be repaired or rebuilt.
These developments are also likely to reduce or stop the flight from Israel, and perhaps restore confidence in Israel’s leadership and its aims. Foremost among these is the depopulation of the Gaza Strip, using some of the military forces released from the northern frontier, and its repopulation with Israeli settlers. Although Israel’s genocidal policies have alienated much of the world, as well as a growing portion of the Jewish diaspora, Israel retains a hardcore Zionist faithful who encourage and approve of its actions, and its network of sayanim and influencers in the US and other societies and governments, coordinated by the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, continues to be enormously effective in delivering to Israel whatever it may need to accomplish its goals, regardless of the views of the electorate in these countries, which are in any case heavily influenced by pro-Zionist media and censorship.
There is, finally, yet another potential benefit to Israel in the not-so-distant future. In 1967, General Moshe Dayan proclaimed at the end of the June war that Israel had achieved all of its [immediate] territorial aims – except in Lebanon. This objective, and especially southern Lebanon, had been a coveted Zionist territory since before the founding of Israel in 1948, not least because of its access to the Litani river, the largest in the eastern Mediterranean. At least four times since then, Israel has invaded the region, emptying it of most of its population of more than a million inhabitants. Each time, the resistance in Lebanon eventually repelled and defeated the incursion. With the fall of Syria, however, and the probable reduction of strength of Hezbollah, this objective now becomes more realistic and more likely in the coming years.
For the United States, the fall of Syria means a major realignment of power in West Asia, a highly important part of the globe, both strategically and for its energy production. It empowers Turkiye, Israel and other US allies in the region. It disempowers Russia, Hezbollah and Iran, and it opens the possibility of assuring that the Gulf monarchies remain in its stable, while discouraging resistance. It also potentially allows the US to reduce its forces in the region and to send them to East Asia, where it has been postponing its planned confrontation with China. For Yemen and the Ansarallah movement, little changes immediately. Its partnership with Iran will undoubtedly remain, but over time its support of the Palestinian resistance may be affected if and when that resistance weakens.
The loss of Syria is therefore a major victory for Zionism and imperialism in West Asia, and a major defeat for the Axis of Resistance and the independence, self-determination and sovereignty of nation states, both in the region and potentially across the globe.
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The US and Israel bear joint responsibility for the current situation in Syria, Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei said during a public event in Tehran on Wednesday, December 11. This was the first time Khamenei addressed the topic following the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government and the establishment of a Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-backed administration in Syria.
While acknowledging Turkey’s role in supporting HTS, a designated terrorist organization that seized power after President Assad left the country on Sunday, Khamenei said that “the main conspirator, the main planner and the command centre lie in America and the Zionist regime,” IRNA reported.
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Democracy Now!
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Syria, where tens of thousands of people gathered at the Great Mosque of Damascus for the first Friday prayers since longtime authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad was toppled by opposition fighters.
DAMASCUS RESIDENT: [translated] Hopefully this Friday is the Friday of the greatest joy, a Friday of victory for our Muslim brothers. This is a blessed Friday.
AMY GOODMAN: Syria’s new caretaker Prime Minister Mohammed al-Bashir was among those at the mosque. He’ll act as prime minister until March.
This comes as the World Food Programme is appealing to donors to help it scale up relief operations for the approximately 2.8 million displaced and food-insecure Syrians across the country. That includes more than 1.1 million people who were forcibly displaced by fighting since late November.
Israel’s Defence Minister has told his troops to prepare to spend the winter holding the demilitarized zone that separates Syria from the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Earlier today, Prime Minister Netanyahu toured the summit of Mount Haramun in the UN-designated buffer zone. Netanyahu said this week the Golan Heights would “forever be an inseparable part of the State of Israel”.
On Thursday, UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for an urgent deescalation of airstrikes on Syria by Israeli forces, and their withdrawal from the UN buffer zone.
In Ankara, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Turkey’s Foreign Minister and the President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Blinken said the US and Turkey would [work] to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State group in Syria. Meanwhile, Erdoğan told Blinken that Turkey reserves the right to strike the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers “terrorist”.
For more, we go to Damascus for the first time since the fall of longtime authoritarian President Bashar al-Assad, where we’re joined by the Associated Press investigative reporter Sarah El Deeb, who is based in the Middle East, a region she has covered for two decades.
Sarah, welcome to Democracy Now! You are overlooking —
SARAH EL DEEB: Thank you.
AMY GOODMAN: — the square where tens of thousands of Syrians have gathered for the first Friday prayers since the fall of Assad. Describe the scene for us.
Report from Damascus: Searching for loved ones in prisons and morgues. Video: Democracy Now!
SARAH EL DEEB: There is a lot of firsts here. It’s the first time they gather on Friday after Bashar al-Assad fled the country. It’s the first time everyone seems to be very happy. I think that’s the dominant sentiment, especially people who are in the square. There is ecstasy, tens of thousands of people. They are still chanting, “Down with Bashar al-Assad.”
But what’s new is that it’s also visible that the sentiment is they’ve been, so far, happy with the new rulers, not outpour — there is no criticism, out — loud criticism of the new rulers yet. So, I’d say the dominant thing is that everyone is happy down there.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah El Deeb, you recently wrote an AP article headlined “Thousands scour Syria’s most horrific prison but find no sign of their loved ones.” On Tuesday, families of disappeared prisoners continued searching Sednaya prison for signs of their long-lost loved ones who were locked up under Assad’s brutal regime.
HAYAT AL-TURKI: [translated] I will show you the photo of my missing brother. It’s been 14 years. This is his photo. I don’t know what he looks like, if I find him. I don’t know what he looks like, because I am seeing the photos of prisoners getting out. They are like skeletons.
But this is his photo, if anyone has seen him, can know anything about him or can help us. He is one of thousands of prisoners who are missing. I am asking for everyone, not only my brother, uncle, cousin and relatives.”
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about this mad search by Syrians across the country.
SARAH EL DEEB: This is the other thing that’s been dominating our coverage and our reporting since we arrived here, the contrast between the relief, the sense of relief over the departure of Bashar al-Assad but then the sadness and the concern and the no answers for where the loved ones have gone.
Thousands — also, tens of thousands of people have marched on Sednaya [prison]. It’s the counter to this scene, where people were looking for any sign of where their relatives have been. As you know really well, so many people have reported their relatives missing, tens of thousands, since the beginning of the revolt, but also before.
I mean, I think this is a part of the feature of this government, is that there has been a lot of security crackdown. People were scared to speak, but they were — because there was a good reason for it. They were picked up at any expression of discontent or expression of opinion.
So, where we were in Sednaya two, three days ago, it feels like one big day, I have to say. When we were in Sednaya, people were also describing what — anything, from the smallest expression of opinion, a violation of a traffic light. No answers.
And they still don’t know where their loved ones are. I mean, I think we know quite a lot from research before arriving here about the notorious prison system in Syria. There’s secret prisons. There are security branches where people were being held. I think this is the first time we have an opportunity to go look at those facilities.
What was surprising and shocking to the people, and also to a lot of us journalists, was that we couldn’t find any sign of these people. And the answers are — we’re still looking for them. But what was clear is that only a handful — I mean, not a handful — hundreds of people were found.
Many of them were also found in morgues. There were apparent killings in the last hours before the regime departed. One of them was the prominent activist Mazen al-Hamada. We were at his funeral yesterday. He was found, and his family believes that — he was found killed, and his family believes his body was fresh, that he was killed only a few days earlier. So, I think the killing continued up until the last hour.
AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you can tell us more about —
SARAH EL DEEB: What was also — what was also —
AMY GOODMAN: — more about Mazen. I mean, I wanted to play a clip of Mazen’s nephew, Yahya al-Hussein.
YAHYA AL-HUSSEIN: [translated] In 2020, he was taken from the Netherlands to Germany through the Syrian Embassy there. And from there, they brought him to Syria with a fake passport.
He arrived at the airport at around 2:30 a.m. and called my aunt to tell her that he arrived at the airport, and asked for money. When they reached out to him the next day, they were told that air intelligence had arrested him.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s Mazen’s nephew, Yahya al-Hussein. Sarah, if you can explain? This was an activist who left Syria after he had been imprisoned and tortured — right? — more than a decade ago, but ultimately came back, apparently according to assurances that he would not be retaken. And now his body is found.
SARAH EL DEEB: I think it’s — like you were saying, it’s very hard to explain. This is someone who was very outspoken and was working on documenting the torture and the killing in the secret prisons in Syria. So he was very well aware of his role and his position vis-à-vis the government. Yet he felt — it was hard to explain what Mazen’s decision was based on, but his family believes he was lured into Syria by some false promises of security and safety.
His heart was in Syria. He left Syria, but he never — it never left him. He was working from wherever he was — he was in the Netherlands, he was in the US — I think, to expose these crimes. And I think this is — these are the words of his family: He was a witness on the crimes of the Assad government, and he was a martyr of the Assad government.
One of the people that were at the funeral yesterday was telling us Mazen was a lesson. The Assad government was teaching all detainees a lesson through Mazen to keep them silent. I think it was just a testimony to how cruel this ruling regime, ruling system has been for the past 50 years.
People would go back to his father’s rule also. But I think with the revolution, with the protests in 2011, all these crimes and all these detentions were just en masse. I think the estimates are anywhere between 150,000 and 80,000 detainees that no one can account for. That is on top of all the people that were killed in airstrikes and in opposition areas in crackdown on protest.
So, it was surprising that at the last minute — it was surprising and yet not very surprising. When I asked the family, “Why did they do that?” they would look at me and, like, “Why are you asking this question? They do that. That’s what they did.” It was just difficult to understand how even at the last minute, and even for someone that they promised security, this was — this would be the end, emaciated and tortured and killed, unfortunately.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, you spoke in Damascus to a US citizen, Travis Timmerman, who says he was imprisoned in Syria. This is a clip from an interview with Al Arabiya on Thursday in which he says he spent the last seven months in a prison cell in Damascus.
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN: My name is Travis.
REPORTER: Travis.
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN: Yes.
REPORTER: So, [speaking in Arabic]. Travis, Travis Timmerman.
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN: That’s right.
REPORTER: That’s right.
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN: But just Travis. Just call me Travis.
REPORTER: Call you Travis, OK. And where were you all this time?
TRAVIS TIMMERMAN: I was imprisoned in Damascus for the last seven months. … I was imprisoned in a cell by myself. And in the early morning of this Monday, or the Monday of this week, they took a hammer, and they broke my door down. … Well, the armed men just wanted to get me out of my cell. And then, really, the man who I stuck with was a Syrian man named Ely. He was also a prisoner that was just freed. And he took me by the side, by the arm, really. And he and a young woman that lives in Damascus, us three, exited the prison together.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah El Deeb, your AP report on Timmerman is headlined “American pilgrim imprisoned in Assad’s Syria calls his release from prison a ‘blessing.’” What can you share about him after interviewing him?
SARAH EL DEEB: I spent quite a bit of time with Travis last night. And I think his experience was very different from what I was just describing. He was taken, he was detained for crossing illegally into Syria. And I think his description of his experience was it was OK. He was not mistreated.
He was fed well, I mean, especially when I compare it to what I heard from the Syrian prisoners in the secret prisons or in detention facilities. He would receive rice, potatoes, tomatoes. None of this was available to the Syrian detainees. He would go to the bathroom three times a day, although this was uncomfortable for him, because, of course, it was not whenever he wanted. But it was not something that other Syrian detainees would experience.
His experience also was that he heard a lot of beating. I think that’s what he described it as: beating from nearby cells. They were mostly Syrian detainees. For him, that was an implicit threat of the use of violence against him, but he did not get any — he was not beaten or tortured.
AMY GOODMAN: And, Sarah, if you could also —
SARAH EL DEEB: He also said his release was a “blessing.” Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: If you could also talk about Austin Tice, the American freelance journalist? His family, his mother and father and brothers and sisters, seem to be repeatedly saying now that they believe he’s alive, held by the Syrian government, and they’re desperately looking for him or reaching out to people in Syria. What do you know?
SARAH EL DEEB: What we know is that people thought Travis was Tice when they first saw him. They found him in a house in a village outside of Damascus. And I think that’s what triggered — we didn’t know that Travis was in a Syrian prison, so I think that’s what everyone was going to check. They thought that this was Tice.
I think the search, the US administration, the family, they are looking and determined to look for Tice. The family believes that he was in Syrian government prison. He entered Syria in 2012. He is a journalist. But I think we have — his family seems to think that there were — he’s still in a Syrian government prison.
But I think, so far, we have not had any sign of Tice from all those released. But, mind you, the scenes of release from prisons were chaotic, from multiple prisons at the same time. And we’re still, day by day, finding out about new releases and people who were set free on that Sunday morning.
U.N. Calls on Israel to Stop Bombing Syria and Occupying Demilitarized Zone https://t.co/iHNIkKKOrs
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) December 13, 2024
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Sarah El Deeb, you’ve reported on the Middle East for decades. You just wrote a piece for AP titled “These Palestinians disappeared after encounters with Israeli troops in Gaza.” So, we’re pivoting here. So much attention is being paid to the families of Syrian prisoners who they are finally freeing.
I want to turn to Gaza. Tell us about the Palestinians searching for their family members who went missing during raids and arrests by Israeli soldiers in the Gaza Strip. And talk about the lack of accountability for these appearances. You begin your piece with Reem Ajour’s quest to find her missing husband and daughter.
SARAH EL DEEB: I talked to Reem Ajour for a long time. I mean, I think, like you said, this was a pivot, but the themes have been common across the Middle East, sadly. Reem Ajour last saw her family in March of 2024. Both her husband and her 5-year-old daughter were injured after an Israeli raid on their house during the chaotic scenes of the Israeli raids on the Shifa Hospital.
They lived in the neighborhood. So, it was chaotic. They [Israeli military] entered their home, and they were shooting in the air, or they were shooting — they were shooting, and the family ended up wounded.
But what was striking was that the Israeli soldiers made the mother leave the kid wounded in her house and forced her to leave to the south. I think this is not only Reem Ajour’s case. I think this is something we’ve seen quite a bit in Gaza. But the fact that this was a 5-year-old and the mom couldn’t take her with her was quite moving.
And I think what her case kind of symbolises is that during these raids and during these detentions at checkpoints, families are separated, and we don’t have any way of knowing how the Israeli military is actually documenting these detentions, these raids.
Where do they — how do they account for people who they detain and then they release briefly? The homes that they enter, can we find out what happened in these homes? We have no idea of holding — I think the Israeli court has also tried to get some information from the military, but so far very few cases have been resolved.
And we’re talking about not only 500 or 600 people; we’re talking about tens of thousands who have been separated, their homes raided, during what is now 15 months of war in Gaza.
AMY GOODMAN: Sarah El Deeb, we want to thank you for being with us, Associated Press investigative reporter based in the Middle East for two decades, now reporting from Damascus.
Next up, today is the 75th day of a hunger strike by Laila Soueif. She’s the mother of prominent British Egyptian political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah. She’s calling on British officials to pressure Egypt for the release of her son. We’ll speak to the Cairo University mathematics professor in London, where she’s been standing outside the Foreign Office. Back in 20 seconds.
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This content originally appeared on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and was authored by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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Kurdish militants in northern Syria have been reaching out to Israel for “assistance” after their villages were stormed by extremist groups who were involved in the assault that resulted in the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s government, according to a 12 December report by Hebrew newspaper Israel Hayom.
“Senior Kurdish militia figures are turning to Israel for urgent help, in light of the seizure of territories from them by Islamist militias backed by Turkiye,” the report said.
The daily added that the Israeli security establishment is deliberating on whether or not it should respond to these Kurdish requests for aid, highlighting there has been ongoing communication between Tel Aviv and the Kurds, which has increased since Assad’s government fell on 8 December.
The post US Proxies In Syria Plead With Israel For Help appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
If there’s one thing fascists love it’s using the threat of terrorism to rile up their base. The largest terrorist attack in Moscow in decades signals a resurgent ISIS, one that Trump and his MAGA cult will no doubt campaign off of, to “scare out” the vote. (The independent voter needed to win close states like Pennsylvania and Wisconsin may not care about Netanyahu’s terrorism, only that committed by brown people). How will Trump and his longtime crime-partner Paul Manafort, rumored to officially join the campaign soon (Manafort never left!), capitalize off the growing terror threats, worsened by Trump and Putin ally Netanyahu and his genocidal war to cling to power?
In this week’s Gaslit Nation, Russian mafia expert Olga Lautman and analyst Monique Camarra of the Kremlin File podcast join Andrea to discuss the Crocus theater attack in Moscow and why Russia is a favorite target of ISIS, the latest reporting on the Kremlin’s Havana Syndrome electronic warfare that has attacked around 1,500 people serving in the U.S. government and their families, and whether Trump will unleash violence if he loses, or wins.
Our bonus episode this week features a debate among Gaslit Nation and Kremlin File over MAGA Ken doll Mike Johnson. Is he actually serious about bringing Ukraine aide up for a vote, or is he stringing us along as ammunition runs dangerously low and more Russian missiles make it through? As Congress comes back into session next week, we discuss all the ways they could actually do something to stop Russia’s genocide in Ukraine–a laboratory for Russian aggression that eventually reaches us. Be sure to apply pressure by calling your representatives in Congress, and use this handy tool made by a Gaslit Nation listener to contact your rep today: https://helpukrainewin.com/
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Show Notes:
How ISIS has Europe and the US in sights after deadly Moscow attack
New in SpyWeek CIA and Moscow terror, Havana Syndrome, rogue diplomat Ric Grenell, Paul Manafort’s return, a creepy Army Psyops recruiting ad & more
https://www.spytalk.co/p/new-in-spyweek-7e9
Trump may enlist Paul Manafort, who was criticized for Russia ties The former campaign manager was pardoned by Trump for bank and tax fraud convictions and accusations he hid millions he made consulting for pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/18/trump-manafort-2024-campaign/
Feds seek $3M from Paul Manafort over failing to disclose offshore accounts A civil lawsuit signals the Justice Department views penalties as not covered by President Donald Trump’s pardon of his former adviser.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/28/paul-manafort-trump-lawsuit-00028717
What to know about Havana Syndrome after investigation links illness to Russia
https://www.axios.com/2024/04/01/havana-syndrome-russia-attacks-us-officials
How the conflict between Hamas and Israel fuels terror threats in the West
https://www.icct.nl/publication/how-conflict-between-hamas-and-israel-fuels-terror-threats-west
Subscribe and Listen to the Kremlin File Podcast https://pod.co/kremlin-file
Subscribe to Olga Lautman’s Trump Tyranny Tracker https://trumptyrannytracker.substack.com/
This content originally appeared on Gaslit Nation and was authored by Andrea Chalupa.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
Domestic and international terrorism have caused havoc in several nations. Each nation exhibits a unique approach to combatting terrorism; each nation exhibits a unique outcome from its approach. Examining types, causes, approaches, and outcomes of wars on terrorism in four nations — United States, Israel, China, and Russia — discloses successful strategies, self-destructive strategies, and strategies that deceive the public and terrorize others with impunity. The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are not always allied; terrorist actions are not always due to terrorists.
Depending on perspective, the word “terrorism” ─ the unlawful use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a civilian population or government ─ can be falsely labeled and falsely applied. Those who exhaust peaceful protests against oppression and provocation lash out at their oppressor and inflict damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. Not understanding the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed have unfavorably skewed the responses and led to more terrorism.
United States
United States administrations exhibited a strange method for repelling terrorists — let them enter an area, establish themselves, become strong, and commit atrocities, and then attack them — the spider approach. Muhammad Atta and his eighteen partners freely entered the United States, studied how to go up and not come down, and did their dirty deeds.
After facing several terrorist situations during the 1990s, the September 11, 2001 bombings compelled the United States government to wage a War on Terrorism. The U.S. government used one strategy to respond to terrorism ─ brute force.
Twenty-three years after the 9/11 attack the U.S. breathes easier, no terrorism on its mainland, and the major terrorist organizations — al Qaeda and ISIS — decimated. From appearances, the U.S. applied an effective counter-terrorism strategy and contained terrorism. Not quite. U.S. strategy expanded terrorism and moved terrorism into parts of Africa. The reduction in terrorism came mainly from the efforts of other nations.
By blending its battles against terrorism with preservation of American global interests, the U.S. initially expanded terrorism. The battles to overcome terrorism evolved into conflagrations in Afghanistan and Iraq; the former beginning and ending with undefined meaning and the latter having no relation to terrorism.
U.S. assistance to Pakistan intelligence during the Soviet/Afghan war indirectly supplied weapons to Osama bin Laden, financed his activities, and helped create the al-Qaeda network.
U.S. manufacture of terrorists continued during Clinton’s administration. Battles between U.S. and Somali forces weakened Somali leadership. From an imposed anarchy in Somalia, al-Shabaab eventually emerged. In 2023, the militant group continues its violent insurgency in Somalia.
The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in moving bin Laden from a grim and arduous perch in a rugged and isolated mountain to a comfortable villa in Pakistan, from where he was eventually captured and killed. Other than that accomplishment, the 20-year incursion into Taliban territory accomplished nothing positive — the Taliban returned to power and, thanks to the U.S. counter-terrorism strategy, other terrorist groups operate within its boundaries. In August 2022, the U.S. government located al-Qaeda leader Aimen al-Zawahiri residing in Kabul and killed him in a drone strike.
By invading and occupying Iraq, the U.S. extended the battle against terrorism rather than confining it. Except for Ansar al-Islam, a northern radical Islamic group close to the Iran border, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq contained no Al-Qaeda affiliated elements. After the U.S. invasion destroyed the Iraqi armed forces and policing functions, Al Qaeda members moved into Iraq from Pakistan and formed ‘Al-Qaeda in Iraq’ (AQI ).
AQI was responsible for its downfall. Sunni tribes revolted at al-Qaeda’s indiscriminate violence and the “Iraqi surge,” with assistance from U.S. troops, inflicted heavy losses on the al-Qaeda organization. Stability returned to Iraq until the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), under the leadership of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, emerged from the remnants of AQI, and took advantage of growing resistance to U.S. troops in Iraq and discontent with Bashar al-Assad’s Syria. Baghdadi formed a force that captured about a third of Syria and 40 percent of Iraq, including the cities of Raqqa and Mosul.
Islamic State of Iraq and Syria
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Contributed by Sémhur, Flappiefh – Own work from Near East topographic map-blank.svg by Sémhur ; data from the New York Times.
President Barack Obama and his administration share blame for the creation of ISIS, allowing its recruitment throughout the world, not preventing recruits from entering Syria, its rapid capture of territory, and expansion into a caliphate. Former President Donald Trump exaggerated the claim that his administration was the primary force in defeating ISIS. U.S. airpower, which killed too many civilians and was not always welcome, helped; other groups liberated the ISIS dominated areas.
· Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), mainly composed of Kurdish Popular Protection Units (YPG) militia, backed by U.S. airpower, liberated Raqqa.
· Forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russian airpower, recaptured Aleppo.
· Iraqi soldiers, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, Sunni Arab tribesmen, and Shia militiamen, assisted by US-led coalition warplanes, drove ISIS from Mosul.
Amnesty international lists 1,600+ civilians dead from the war in Raqqa and between 9,000 to 11,000 civilians killed in the battle for Mosul, mostly from U.S. air attacks. Foreign Policy estimates that “8,000 buildings were destroyed or heavily damaged in Mosul’s Old City. Include other parts of the city where the battle raged and the estimates of buildings damaged or destroyed are as high as 138,000.”
The irony of Trump’s Trumpism is his assassination of a person responsible for ISIS’ defeat, Iranian Major General Qassim Soleimani. The U.S. contributed to ISIS’ initial successes by training an inept Iraqi army that fled Mosul and left the city to a small contingent of ISIS forces that equipped itself with captured weapons. Showing no will and expertise to fight, Iraq’s debilitated military permitted ISIS to rapidly expand and conquer Tikrit and other cities. The disasters energized Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Force (PMF). With cooperation from Iran and leadership from Major General Qassim Soleimani, the PMF recaptured Tikrit and Ramadi, pushed ISIS out of Fallujah, and eventually played a role in ISIS’ defeat at Mosul. Instead of receiving praise for his efforts, Major General Qassim Soleimani, who was never responsible for any terrorist activity, was eliminated as an arch-terrorist. Who committed the terrorism in his death? Israel’s PM, Benjamin Netanyahu dropped out of the joint assassination plan at the last minute and left President Chump holding the bag.
NATO, with the U.S. providing air force and ballistic missile support, played the decisive role in overthrowing Moammar Gadhafi, a leader who constrained Radical Islam and its terrorist activities. Militants from Libya flowed east, through friendly Turkey into Syria and Iraq, and added to ISIS ranks. Weapons captured from Gadhafi’s stockpiles flowed west to equip al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). AQIM led the 2013 attack on a gas facility in southern Algeria; individuals trained in Libya attacked tourists at beaches and museums in Tunisia; and Boko Haram spread havoc throughout northern Nigeria.
Another defect in U.S. strategy ─ Osama bin Laden left no doubt that America’s unqualified support of Israel provided terrorists with a reason to augment its ranks.
During the 1990s, two documents,”Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places” and the “Declaration of the World Islamic Front,” retrieved from Osama bin Laden, jihad, and the sources of international terrorism, J. M. B. Porter, Indiana International & Comparative Law Review, provide additional information on bin-Laden’s attachment of his terrorist responses to Zionist activities.
[T]he people of Islam have suffered from aggression, iniquity, and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist/Crusader alliance … Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon, are still fresh in our memory.
So now they come to annihilate . . . this people and to humiliate their Muslim neighbors. … if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula
From Pakistan, through Egypt to North Africa and Nigeria, and South to Somalia and Kenya, al-Qaeda, Daish, and a multitude of terrorist organizations perform daily bombings, killings, and insurrections, a result of policies of all U.S. administrations since the “gipper” assumed the presidential office.
Israel
Israelis have been victims of many terrorist attacks; few of these attacks have been performed by terrorists. The great magnitude has been done by Palestinians who had exhausted the means to overcome their oppression. To express their oppression and popularize their cause, they have lashed out at their oppressor and inflicted damage on the civilian population that keeps the oppressor in power. The terrorist actions are mostly revenge attacks due to provocations, succeeding Israeli military and civilian terror attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians.
Depicting Israel as a nation that has suffered excessive terrorism is a mischaracterization. More correct is that by magnitudes more than any nation, not even close, Israel is the major terrorist nation in the world. Look at the record. In almost every country of the world, apartheid Israel has committed terrorist actions.
Begin with the 1948-49 war against the Palestinians. From Wikipedia:
According to several historians, between 10 and 70 massacres occurred during the 1948 war. According to Benny Morris the Yishuv (or later Israeli) soldiers killed roughly 800 Arab civilians and prisoners of war in 24 massacres. Aryeh Yizthaki lists 10 major massacres with more than 50 victims each.
The newly established Israeli government continued its aggression against the Palestinians by terrorizing Palestinian communities, ethnically cleansing 1.1 million Palestinians, and forcing them into displaced persons and refugee camps.
Israel followed the ethnic cleansing by instituting apartheid and continually terrorizing West Bank and Gazan Palestinians with provocative terror attacks.
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Gaza before Oct. 7-Courtesy of ABC News
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Gaza after Oct. 7-Courtesy of Aljazeera
Going beyond its borders, Israel drove the PLO out of Lebanon and used terror attacks on the Lebanese population.
Going worldwide, Israel uses its intelligence service, Mossad, to assassinate foreign scientists, military hardware suppliers, Palestinian activists, and those who harmed Israelis.
Israel displays a dual strategy in the war on terrorism. Building walls to separate Israel from the West Bank and Gaza, restricting travel between Israel and its occupied territories, scrutinizing entry at checkpoints, and cleverly surveilling all Palestinians have prevented terrorism within Israel. Provoking Palestinians into committing terrorist acts and stimulating settlers to make revenge “price tag” attacks against Palestinian communities and the military to wage war against the terrorists is the other side of the coin.
The violence committed against the Palestinians emits a backlash from worldwide supporters of the Palestinians and causes harm to Jews. The backlash is converted into spurious charges of anti-Semitism and used to justify Israel’s actions.
Add it up and Israel is an apartheid country, the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people, a triple combination that no nation in all history has been able to equal. The Israeli government and its worldwide public relations machine convince the world it is an innocent victim of Hezbollah terrorists, Hamas terrorists, anti-Semites, surviving Nazis, liberal misfits, and disoriented people who cannot get out of the way of bullets and bombs. Western governments pay no heed to the triple play.
Russian Federation
A reported 1,312 terrorist attacks caused 1,179 Russian deaths between 2007 and 2021 and gripped the Russian Federation. After peaking in 2009, attacks and deaths in Russia consistently declined to only one attack and two deaths in 2021. Three of the major attacks happened when Chechen insurgents attacked apartment buildings in Moscow in September 1999, killing 200 people and injuring several hundred; on October 23, 2002, when Chechen insurgents attacked the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow and an estimated 129 people were killed during the rescue operation, and during September 1–3, 2004, when Chechen and Ingush insurgents attacked a school in Beslan, North Ossetia, and held more than 1,100 hostages. A careless rescue operation caused more than 300 deaths, including 186 children.
Terrorism arose from a combination of extremist ethno-nationalist and Islamist militants from North Caucasus’s republics of Chechnya, Dagestan, Ingushetia, and Kabardino-Balkariya. The dual nature of terrorism ─ people seeking more autonomy and extremists seeking more Islam complicated the Kremlin’s strategy to combat terrorism.
In retaliation for Chechnya terrorist attacks in Moscow, Russian troops invaded the Republic of Chechnya, a name whose roll from the lips has an endearing quality. Massive and indiscriminate bombings of cities and villages that caused high civilian casualties, herding of people into camps, extra-judicial killings, torture, and disappearances occurred from both sides and made it difficult to ascertain, who were the ‘good guys’ and who were the ‘bad guys.’ Which side was more guilty of terrorism?
Vladimir Putin registered his name, ruthlessness, pragmatism, and authority by resolving the Chechnya terror crisis. He followed Abraham Lincoln’s pattern of using force and making friends with the enemy. Putin convinced Akhmad Kadyrov, Chief Mufti of the Chechen Republic of Ichkeria in the 1990s, to switch sides. Kadyrov later became the President of the Chechen Republic. Grozny has been rebuilt and Chechnya exists on multi-billion-dollar subsidies from Moscow.
Grozny
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Recognizing that Islamist insurgents in the North Caucasus were loosely allied with al-Qaeda’s network and many traveled to Syria and Iraq to join the Islamic State, the Russian president realized that joining Syria in its civil war against ISIS was a means of preventing the Islamic extremists from extending their reach. Decimating the central authorities of the terrorist campaigns would subdue the morale and incentives of the al-Qaeda “look-alikes” on Russian soil. Without having to use Russian ground troops, and air force pilots not facing challenges in the sky, support of the be-sieged al-Assad regime was a “win-win proposition for Moscow. Putin’s strategy to combat terrorism has been successful — ISIS and al-Qaeda are mostly gone from the Arab lands of the Middle East (still in Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa) and the Russian Federation has had no terrorist attacks in the last two years.
China
A shadowy and shifting group of Uyghur separatists is responsible for terrorism committed against Chinese authorities and citizens. Incomplete statistics from The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China show that “from 1990 to the end of 2016, separatist, terrorist, and extremist forces launched thousands of attacks in Xinjiang, killing large numbers of innocent people and hundreds of police officers, and causing immeasurable damage to property.” From 1990 to 2001 the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Movement, which proposes the establishment of a fundamentalist Muslim state, “was responsible for over 200 acts of terrorism, resulting in at least 162 deaths and 440 injuries.”
Two of the reported and more serious terrorist attacks.
On May 22, 2014, five terrorists drove two SUVs through the fence of the morning fair of North Park Road of Saybagh District, Urumqi, into the crowd and detonated a bomb that claimed the lives of 39 and left 94 injured.
On 1 March 2014, a group of 8 knife-wielding terrorists attacked passengers in the Kunming Railway Station in Kunming, Yunnan, China, killing 31 people, and wounding 143 others. The attackers pulled out long-bladed knives and stabbed and slashed passengers at random.
A more complete description of the terrorist attacks is available in an article by The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China.
As the terrorist attacks rose, Beijing had one strategy ─ ruthlessly seek out the perpetrators. “In the period 2013–2017 police arrested 330,918 in the province, 7.3 percent of total arrests in China. This compares to 81,443 arrests in the previous five years. In March 2019, Chinese officials said that they had arrested more than 13,000 militants in Xinjiang since 2014.”
Realizing their strategy had developed into a “tit-for-tat” operation, where each blow against the terrorist apparatus was countered by a blow against Chinese, the Chinese government changed its strategy. In 2014, China launched the Strike Hard Campaign Against Violent Terrorism in Xinjiang and combined the use of force with initiatives that integrated the Uyghur populations into Chinese society and improved their standard of living. The new strategy has been successful — no reported terror attacks in recent years, the GDP of a stagnant Xinjiang province increased from 963 billion yuan in 2016 to 1,774 billion yuan in 2022, and the unemployment rate decreased from 2.48 percent to 2.04 percent during the same interval.
While Western media accuses China of destroying mosques, the Xinjiang Islamic Association states, “There are some 24,400 mosques in Xinjiang. Many in the region were built in the 1980s and 1990s or earlier, but some of these mud-and-brick structures (ED: the demolished Kargilik’s Grand Mosque was a mud-and-brick structure) or small buildings were not well maintained or repaired. They became unsafe for religious activities and posed a serious threat in the event of an earthquake. The mosques were also inadequately designed, making worship difficult.”
Kashgar’s Id Kah Mosque
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Before Renovation
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After Renovation
Conclusion
Terrorism’s principal strategy is to inflict pain, pain, and more pain on a civilian population until the civilian population’s government agrees to their demands. Governments may care but always place national interests above that of the local population. The struggle to overcome terrorism has had two principal strategies
(1) Give ‘em nothing and fight them until the death, and
(2) Use force to keep terrorism contained and offer benefits that will satisfy some grievances and lower the temperature until the heat becomes normal.
The United States pursued the ‘fight until death’ strategy. After excessive deaths from the ongoing terrorism and civilians caught in the battles, the U.S. appears to have won the war; terrorism in the Middle East has declined to an acceptable level.
Israel has pursued a strategy of “we can outdo all terrorist attacks by being more terrorist than the terrorists.” Pushing the oppressed Palestinians into terrorist attacks enables Israel to respond tenfold to the attack on its populace. Terrorizing opposition in other nations is neatly performed by false charges of anti-Semitism, cyber attacks, and, when necessary, Mossad hitmen.
Russia went from ‘fight until death’ to offering the leaders of domestic terrorism a good bribe and letting them take care of it. Total force was used against international terrorism. Both strategies have been successful.
China departed from brute force to a more conciliatory strategy that recognized the wants of the Uyghurs and devised plans to satisfy the population. Most successful of all of the strategies.
Each nation that confronts terrorism may have unique characteristics that shape the terrorism and the response to it. This investigation shows that Chinese President Xi-Jinping eventually realized the exact nature of the terrorism his country was experiencing and accepted a plan that quickly solved the problem. Russian President Vladimir Putin also was pragmatic and changed his stance as events unfolded. Soon afterward, Russia had no more terrorism.
For Israel, terrorism is part of the daily diet. Israel commits terrorism, Israel invites terrorism, Israel commits terrorism, Invites terrorism, on and on until there will be none.
The United States invited terrorism by helping Pakistan’s intelligence fortify Osama bin Laden, not listening to the al-Qaeda leader’s grievances, and invading Iraq. In 1998, bin Laden demanded the expulsion of all American soldiers from the Arabian Peninsula and voiced objections to a U.S. foreign policy that armed Israel. Did U.S. troops need a base in Saudi Arabia? Why has the U.S. had close ties with the apartheid country, which is the world’s foremost sponsor of terrorism, and planner of the genocide of the Palestinian people? Assuredly, the date 9/11 would just be another day on the calendar if U.S. administrations understood the origins of terrorism and the reasons it is committed.
This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
Twin explosions in the Iranian province of Kerman killed dozens and injured hundreds Wednesday at a memorial for top Revolutionary Guards general Qassem Soleimani, who was assassinated in a U.S. drone strike four years ago in Iraq. No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, but Iran has placed blame on Israel and the U.S, while U.S. officials and regional experts have suggested ISIS as…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A formerly classified document published Friday by NPR revealed how the Pentagon dismissed highly credible evidence of civilian deaths caused by the October 2019 U.S. assassination of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria. In a raid hailed by then-U.S. President Donald Trump as “impeccable,” U.S. special forces stormed al-Baghdadi’s hideout just outside Barisha in Idlib province on…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The so-called “war on terror,” initiated by the U.S. and its global allies in response to the 9/11 attacks in 2001, did not so much change the rules of warfare as throw them out of the window.
In the aftermath of 9/11 and the ensuing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war was virtually abandoned when the U.S. and its allies detained hundreds of thousands of men, women and children, mainly civilians. The use of torture and indefinite arbitrary detention became defining features of the war on terror.
Intelligence yielded from the use of torture was not particularly effective, and experimentation on human subjects was an element of the process. Guantánamo Bay, which currently holds 36 prisoners, is viewed by many human rights defenders as a final remnant of the policy of mass arbitrary detention.
The little light shed on these practices has largely been the result of hard and persistent work by international and civil society organizations, as well as lawyers who continue to sue states and other parties involved on behalf of victims and their families, some of whom are still detained.
A report presented earlier this year by Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on counterterrorism and human rights, following up on a 2010 U.N. report on secret detention, found that the “failure to address secret detention” has allowed similar practices to flourish in North-East Syria and Xinjiang Province in China.
How to deal with arbitrarily detained alleged ISIS (also known as Daesh) militia supporters and fighters in Syria and Iraq is an issue that goes back to the Obama era, but gained traction in 2018-2019, when ISIS lost its last major stronghold and significant territory, leading existing detention camps, like Al-Hawl, to swell in size. Al-Hawl was set up as an Iraqi refugee camp by the U.N. in 1991 with capacity for around 15,000 people. In 2018, it held around 10,000 Iraqi refugees. The majority of the 73,000-plus residents of this camp since 2019 are women and children, around 11,000 of whom are nationals of countries other than Syria or Iraq, living in poor shelter, hygiene and medical conditions.
All are detained by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and the Syrian Defense Force (SDF), which are not state entities. Their efforts to investigate and prosecute possible ISIS fighters are still at the early stages, lack formal and widespread recognition and do not look at potential war crimes. With some prisoners detained for over six years, without charge, trial or formal identification, the situation is pretty much as it was in Afghanistan and Iraq.
According to Ní Aoláin, “No legal process of any kind has been established to justify the detention of these individuals. No public information exists on who precisely is being held in these camps, contrary to the requirements of the Geneva Conventions stipulating that detention records be kept that identify both the nationality of detainees and the legal basis of detention.”
She further states that, “These camps epitomize the normalization and expansion of secret detention practices in the two decades since the establishment of the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The egregious nature of secret, incommunicado, harsh, degrading and unacceptable detention is now practised with impunity and the acquiescence of multiple States.”
In addition, around 10,000 men and 750 boys (of whom 2,000 and 150 are respectively not from Syria or Iraq) are held in some 14 detention centers in North-East Syria, accused of association with ISIS: “No judicial process has determined the legality or appropriateness of their detention. There are also reports of incommunicado detention.”
Efforts have been made, with varying success, to repatriate and release Iraqi refugees and Syrians internally displaced by the regional conflict: Around 2400 Iraqis have been repatriated over the past year or so.
European and other Western states were initially reluctant to repatriate their nationals — with former President Trump threatening to force them to — and some, such as the U.K., introducing measures to strip them of citizenship to prevent that. More recent efforts by European states have taken on a gendered approach, aimed at repatriating women and children in the camps. This approach, however, ignores the practice of the SDF to separate boys as young as 9 from their families and detain them, as a security risk, with men in prisons. Concern was only expressed during a prison break in early 2022 when it was feared these children would fall into ISIS’s hands, as though they were somehow safe with their original captors.
The gendered approach to repatriation of detainees plays into long-standing orientalist and imperialist views, framing Western powers as saviors of these women and children, whereas the men and boys left behind remain “ISIS fighters” without investigation and substantiation of this status.
In spite of the recent U.S. conviction of two former British ISIS fighters for their role in the kidnapping and deaths of Western hostages, the value of such a detention policy must be questioned. As in Afghanistan and Iraq, arbitrary detention and cruel punishment of hundreds of thousands of people, sometimes in conditions worse than those they are associated with, is unjustifiable.
Ní Aoláin’s report also found that no war on terror detainees have “received a complete and adequate legal remedy,” and the lack of due process has resulted in the continuing stigmatization and persecution of prisoners upon release from Guantánamo.
Two decades on, the absence of justice at Guantánamo remains a recurring theme. Prosecutors are now seeking a plea deal settlement with defense lawyers in the 9/11 case that would avoid trial — and thus torture revelations — and the death penalty, as the case continues to drag over a decade on.
The farce of “justice” is also amply demonstrated by the failure to release Majid Khan, who, following a plea bargain and several years of torture in secret CIA prisons, completed his sentence on March 1; the military jurors at his sentencing hearing decried the torture he faced and petitioned for clemency for him. However, he remains at Guantánamo as it is too unsafe for him to return to Pakistan and the U.S. has found no safe country for relocation. After being sued to take action, the U.S. Department of Justice has responded by opposing his habeas plea and claiming that he is still not subject to the Geneva Conventions.
The outcome of two decades of secret and arbitrary detention has been to deny justice to the victims of war crimes and terrorist acts, and create new victims — detainees and their families — who are also denied justice.
After two decades, the failure to close Guantánamo and end such secret and arbitrary detention and the secrecy that continues to surround them (such as the refusal to disclose the full 2014 Senate CIA torture report) are not errors or oversight but deliberate policy. It affords impunity for states and state-backed actors while tarring detainees with the “terrorist” label for the rest of their lives without due process, effectively leaving them in permanent legal limbo in many areas of everyday life.
A year after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, justice still evades the Afghan people. With the International Criminal Court (ICC) seeking to restart its investigation, but excluding the U.S. and its Afghan allies from its scope, effectively granting them impunity while focusing on the Taliban, “the ICC has so far come to represent selective and delayed justice to many victims of war in Afghanistan,” according to Shaharzad Akbar, former chair of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. In addition, “a year after the withdrawal of international forces and many ‘lessons learned’ exercises, key troop contributing countries such as the United States, the U.K., and others in NATO are yet to reflect on the legacy of impunity they left behind.”
Addressing her report to the U.N. in April, Ní Aoláin stated, “It is precisely the lack of access, transparency, accountability and remedy that has enabled and sustained a permissive environment for contemporary large-scale detention and harm to individuals.”
Ní Aoláin expresses concerns in her report over the “lack of a globally agreed definition of terrorism and (violent) extremism, and […] the widespread failure to define acts of terrorism in concrete and precise ways in national legislation.” The vague definition has meant that any form of dissent and resistance against the state can effectively be labelled terrorist activity.
The focus on Guantánamo and mass detention of alleged terrorism suspects has drawn the attention away from the carceral practices of states. Torture, lengthy solitary confinement, rape, and other prisoner abuses in federal jails has not prompted the same criticism or action. The focus on ISIS prisoners also draws away attention from the mass detention and abuse of those incarcerated in Syrian prisons.
At the same time, mass arbitrary and secret detention of alleged terrorists has helped to justify the expansion of the prison-industrial complex, with the involvement of private contractors. Over the past two decades, the use of torture has grown worldwide. Perhaps most worrying has been the boom in the mass arbitrary detention and abuse of men, women and children worldwide without due process and few legal rights known as immigration detention, with the reframing of migration and asylum as a security issue over the past two decades.
That such reports and monitoring of the situation continue at the highest level and by civil society organizations means that the prisoners have not been obscured and forgotten or their situation normalized as much as the states involved would like them to be. The need for justice for all victims is on the path to any kind of peace, and thus it remains essential to keep pressing and supporting Ní Aoláin’s call for “access, transparency, accountability and remedy.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
In February 2015, three girls – Shamima Begum (15), Kadiza Sultana (16), and Amira Abase (15) – from South London made their way via Turkey to ISIS-controlled Syria. A story that emerged in March of that year was how the three were smuggled into Syria by a man who claimed he worked for the Canadian Security intelligence Service (CSIS). Moreover, there were claims that UK intelligence were aware of this dimension.
Now, with the publication of a book that examines some of those claims, there is revived interest.
There are still many unanswered questions – in particular about the alleged cover-up by UK police regarding the part played by the CSIS in human trafficking.
The Canadian intelligence angle received significantly less media coverage than other aspects of the story. There were, however, a few exceptions.
On 13 March 2015, an article by the Guardian referred to a Syrian man – but not by name – who helped the girls. It noted that he worked for Canadian intelligence.
Two days later the pro-Turkish government Daily Sabah published more details. This included the name of the man who conducted the trafficking operations as Mohammed al-Rashed.
According to Canadian media outlet CBC, Rashed was also known as Dr Mehmet Resit. Rashed claimed that he trafficked for ISIS in order that he could pass intelligence to Canada in exchange for Canadian citizenship.
A Reuters article quoted a Canadian government source in Ottawa, who said Rashed did not hold Canadian citizenship and “was not employed by CSIS”. According to CBC, a Turkish ‘intelligence report’ claimed there was evidence of texts Rashed had sent to officials working for Canadian intelligence.
Daily Sabah further pointed out that:
Michel Juneau-Katsuyo, a former agent for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), told Canada’s iPolitics that Rashed may be a “human source” for the agency, noting that they are not considered employees of the CSIS.
Rashed’s trafficking of the three girls was seemingly not a one-off. Daily Sabah reported that:
based on information discovered on Rashed’s laptop computer, he helped 140 Britons travel to Syria to join ISIS apart from the three girls.
The Daily Sabah article included a video, filmed by the Turkish TV channel HBR (A Haber), of Rashed being arrested by Turkish authorities. There was also a video, covertly recorded by Rashed with the three girls at Gaziantep, of him helping them with their luggage and referring to the Syrian passports he would give them:
Daily Sabah reported that according to Turkish police Rashed’s handler worked out of the embassy in Amman and was referred to as “Matt”. It was also reported that Turkish police suspected “Matt” worked for British intelligence.
In a tweet on 31 August 2022, investigative researcher David Miller raised the matter of Rashed’s mysterious handler:
Was anyone else in the British state aware of the trafficking of under age girls (inc Shamima Begum) into Syria? In 2015 the Turkish police believed it "likely" the handler for the smuggler was a British intelligence officer working in the Canadian embassy in Jordan. https://t.co/pE19BXXgiW pic.twitter.com/KU6oAiyBDT
— David Miller (@Tracking_Power) August 31, 2022
Miller’s tweet was posted in response to a tweet by the Begum family’s lawyer Tasnime Akunjee. He noted the claim that Met police officer Richard Walton, a former head of counter-terrorism, had been briefed by CSIS about their role in the trafficking of Begum.
A new book titled The Secret History of the Five Eyes by Richard Kerbaj (a security correspondent for the Sunday Times) published on 31 August claims the Met police’s counterterrorism branch was approached by the CSIS on this matter. Also, he claims that Canada asked the British to cover up its role in the trafficking operations.
As for Walton, The Canary previously reported that he was linked to the Special Demonstration Squad – now the subject of an inquiry into undercover policing.
With the publication of the book by Kerbaj, the story has now attracted broader media coverage.
For example, on 1 September 2022 the BBC published an article on this via its website and via its regular news bulletins.
There was also a video, which mentions a podcast by Josh Baker on what happened to the three girls, in particular Begum. Baker added that a senior intelligence officer confirmed Rashed was providing intelligence to the CSIS:
As with the earlier 2015 reports, the BBC claimed that Rashed, who is in jail in Turkey, was providing intelligence to Canada while at the same time trafficking people to ISIS. The BBC added that Rashed:
gathered information about IS, mapping the locations of the homes of Western IS fighters in Syria, identifying IP addresses and locations of internet cafes in IS-controlled territory, and taking screenshots of conversations he was having with IS fighters.
The role of the CSIS has been known since 2015, and this aspect was raised by Begum’s lawyer four years later when he wrote to then-home secretary Sajid Javid. Akunjee requested that the decision to revoke Begum’s citizenship be reversed.
#shamimabegum – Just a reminder that we wrote to @SajidJavid on the 29th May 2019 specifically pointing out the involvement of the Canadian Spy as an agent involved in the trafficking of Shamima. This letter was published in full in The Times :- https://t.co/B1JL3D2Fth pic.twitter.com/CsBdNntANl
— Tasnime Akunjee
(@mohammedakunjee) August 31, 2022
But Shamima has remained stateless.
Meanwhile, it’s reported that Canada will be conducting an investigation into the spy smuggling scandal. Whether that investigation extends beyond the role of the CSIS to examine a potential UK link to what happened is unlikely.
Ever since those 2015 reports, a number of unanswered questions remain.
In particular about the mysterious “Matt”, his connections with Rashed, and who he worked for. UK police tried – unsuccessfully – to warn the parents of all three girls of the danger of travelling to Syria. The girls were given letters from the police to give to their parents, but hid them. The families of the three girls have since accused the police of a catalogue of failures.
Begum is currently detained in a camp in north-east Syria. She gave birth to three children who have all since died. As for Sultana and Abase, their fate is unknown, though Sultana is believed to have died following an attack by the Russian air force in 2016.
Akunjee poignantly commented:
Intelligence-gathering looks to have been prioritised over the lives of children.
Shamima and her two friends were vulnerable, trafficked, and subsequently sexually exploited. Had they been white and middle class, their fates would likely have been very different.
As can be seen, the three girls were failed by UK politicians, UK police, and border authorities, as well as by the intelligence services of possibly two countries. They were also failed by a media that did not suitably emphasise the role of intelligence services in this debacle. That collective failure has seen the death of at least one of the girls, to say nothing of the damage it’s caused to the lives of their families.
Akunjee commented:
Britain has lauded its efforts to stop Isis and the grooming of our children by spending millions of pounds on the Prevent programme and online monitoring. However, at the very same time we have been co-operating with a western ally, trading sensitive intelligence with them whilst they have effectively been nabbing British children and trafficking them across the Syrian border for delivery to Isis all in the name of intelligence-gathering.
Former World Health Organisation director Anthony Costello summed it up in one tweet:
British by birth Shamima Begum was a 15yo child who was targeted, manipulated by a Canadian spy and trafficked to Syria. She suffered greatly and saw 3 of her infants die. The case to restore her citizenship and bring her home to a safe place is overwhelming. pic.twitter.com/EjRfoe6Ju5
— Anthony Costello (@globalhlthtwit) September 2, 2022
In November, a hearing is to take place arguing that Begum’s citizenship should be restored. In addition, Akunjee has called for an inquiry into what UK intelligence services and the police knew.
Justice is yet to be served.
Featured image via YouTube screenshot
By Tom Coburg
This is part of a series of reported essays describing how 9/11 and the “war on terror” that followed changed the lives of people outside the United States.
On Sept. 11, 2001, I was between jobs and living in Washington, D.C. I woke up a few minutes before 9 a.m. and, as I always did, I turned on the television to watch the news. Still drowsy, I stared at the looping videos from New York on my screen, trying to make sense of what I was looking at. When the third plane struck the Pentagon half an hour later, I was jolted out of my state of shock and frantically tried to call my brother, who worked at a bank inside the Pentagon complex. He’d left his cellphone at home that day, which, of course, added to the general sense of panic I was feeling until I spoke to him that evening. And slowly, we digested the news that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from our home country, Saudi Arabia.
In the hours after the attacks, it was apparent that war was coming, but who would be the target? President George W. Bush made it clear to leaders across the world: Either you were with the United States or with the terrorists. And with that, governments in the Middle East and North Africa saw the opportunity for billions of dollars to fund counterterrorism operations. I didn’t know it then, but I would end up spending much of the next two decades reporting on how many of them would expand and adapt the framing of the so-called “war on terror” to suit their own needs.
Nowhere was this more obvious and devastating to me than in Yemen, a country I fell in love with on my first visit in the late 2000s. Sanaa, the capital city, was everything I had wished Riyadh, the Saudi Arabian capital, could be. Women in Sanaa were an integrated part of society, visible, active and vocal. While women in Saudi Arabia were still banned from driving, here, women drove everywhere. I found the vibrant journalism and media scene exhilarating and was inspired by how well it represented the full spectrum of political parties and opinions in the country. Most of all, I loved the ease with which I could wander the streets of old Sanaa, buying books from Hadda Street and drinking Adeni tea while talking openly with friends about politics, religion and history.
Of course, Yemen was no paradise. Yemenis had endured political repression, corruption and the legendary kleptocracy of President Ali Abdullah Saleh since 1990. But the more time I spent in Yemen, the more stories I heard about how much worse the repression had gotten after 9/11, after Saleh became an important ally in America’s war on terror.
But Yemen had been caught up in American counterterrorism priorities even before that. Almost a full year before the 9/11 attacks, two al-Qaida members on a dingy loaded with explosives carried out a suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole, an American warship docked in Aden, in southern Yemen. They killed 17 U.S. sailors, making it unavoidable in some ways that Yemen would have to align with the United States.
Saleh visited the White House in November 2001 and in exchange for millions of dollars, he promised to crack down on suspected terrorists and al-Qaida activity. But over the next several years, Saleh would use the war on terror to fight his own battles, regardless of whether they had any connection to al-Qaida. This included waging six brutal wars against an insurgency by the Houthis, a militia in northern Yemen, as well as repressing al-Hirak al-Janoubi, a nonviolent movement calling for southern independence.
Since at least late 2009, Washington was aware of how Saleh was using American weapons and U.S.-trained counterterrorism units to fight the Houthis, according to leaked diplomatic cables. A Senate Foreign Relations Committee report in early 2010 expressed “serious concerns” that Saleh had “diverted” American counterterrorism assistance to fight the Houthis rather than al-Qaida. Indeed, while Yemen’s security forces were focused on defeating the Houthis and shutting down protests in the big cities, al-Qaida expanded its presence in more isolated parts of the country. This Yemeni offshoot came to be known as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
And yet, throughout this period, U.S. support for Saleh never waned.
In 2011, a massive popular uprising sprang up against Saleh, part of the so-called Arab Spring protests. After 33 years in power, he was ousted in 2012. In the chaos that followed, the country was fractured between multiple warring factions, and AQAP seized large parts of the south.
That’s when I went to southern Yemen to film a FRONTLINE documentary about the AQAP takeover. At one of the AQAP checkpoints, I met a young man whose life choices I still think about today. He used to be an activist with al-Hirak but told me the repression he witnessed left him completely disillusioned with nonviolence as a political strategy. He said he was tired of every protest march ending in a funeral.
I immediately thought of the icon of the al-Hirak movement, a 25-year-old activist named Ahmed Darwish, who had been tortured to death by Yemeni security forces in 2010. His family refused to bury him until there was an impartial investigation into his death, and when thousands of people gathered for his funeral a year later, security forces opened fire on them.
The young man who had joined AQAP told me he didn’t agree with al-Qaida’s ideology, nor did he hate the Americans. He said he joined al-Qaida only because they seemed better equipped to fight their common adversary, the Yemeni government.
This was the landscape in which President Barack Obama increased military aid to Yemen and escalated drone strikes against alleged al-Qaida targets. Some of these were strikes against known AQAP leaders like the American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was killed in a drone strike in 2011. But some others targeted unidentified groups of men and boys over 16 simply because their behavior bore the “signature” of military activity. Nearly 1,800 Yemenis are estimated to have died from U.S. drone strikes and other counterterrorism operations in Yemen. Yet there’s no accounting for how many of them might be civilians. That’s because of the persistent lack of transparency around drone strikes, as well as a controversial method of counting “military-age males” as combatants.
In a country torn apart by multiple warring factions and where allegiances have been shifting at a dizzying pace, it’s extremely difficult to pinpoint who exactly is AQAP or the Islamic State group. By 2014, the Houthis had taken over Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and al-Hirak had turned into a fully armed movement fighting the Houthis. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates labeled the Houthis a terrorist group backed by Iran, but the Houthis are also sworn enemies of al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. And since the Obama administration started backing a Saudi-led coalition in its war against the Houthis in 2015 – a war that has turned Yemen into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis – the battle lines have gotten even more blurred.
To get a sense of how this all played out on the ground, I visited parts of southern Yemen that had been pounded by drone attacks in 2017 and 2018, when President Donald Trump further expanded the war on terror in Yemen. The highways were littered with the remnants of cars that had been struck by drones. But it wasn’t just the drone attacks that left people traumatized.
In a small village called Adhlan in Marib province, 50 Navy SEALs had landed on the hilltops around the village in May 2017. It was the largest known ground raid on Yemen. The goal was to capture al-Qaida leaders. Ultimately, the Pentagon said seven militants had been killed. But there were also five civilian casualties, among them a 15-year-old boy and a man in his 70s. When I got there in early 2018 to interview villagers for another FRONTLINE documentary, it was several months after the raid, but the families were still traumatized, struggling to understand what had happened to them.
Mujahid, a boy of 7 at the time, was clearly affected by the raid. He had lost his brother and his uncle, as well as his hearing in one ear. I was filming on the hilltop where the Navy SEALs had landed, and Mujahid’s father was gently teasing his son, “Look, it’s an American!” The boy looked panic-stricken, his eyes darting across the landscape, searching for the American. When his father pointed at me, Mujahid grabbed the closest stone to throw at me. His father stopped him just in time, telling him there was nothing to fear.
Twenty years, $850 million in military aid and nearly 400 drone strikes later, when I think of the legacy of the war on terror in Yemen, I am still haunted by the look of terror that swept across Mujahid’s face.
This essay was edited by Anjali Kamat and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.
Follow Safa Al Ahmad on Twitter: @ghariba33.
How Yemen Used the ‘War on Terror’ to Suit Its Needs is a story from Reveal. Reveal is a registered trademark of The Center for Investigative Reporting and is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.
This post was originally published on Reveal.
Host Selwyn Manning with security analyst Dr Paul Buchanan on this week’s A View From Afar podcast. Video: EveningReport.nz on YouTube
A VIEW FROM AFAR: Podcast with Selwyn Manning and Paul Buchanan
In this week’s security podcast, Dr Paul G. Buchanan and host Selwyn Manning discuss:
The background to this episode is the tragic, terrifying, attack that were committed against unarmed innocent people at West Auckland’s LynnMall Countdown supermarket, by Ahamed Aathill Mohamed Samsudeen.
The attack occurred last Friday, 3 September 2021. It ended with the hospitalisation of seven people, and, the death of Samsudeen, who was fatally shot by special tactics police officers during his attempt to kill and injure as many people as he could.
Immediately after, the Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told the nation that the dead man was a terrorist and that she herself, the police, and the courts were all aware of how dangerous he was and had been seeking to protect New Zealand from this man.
Within days of the attacks, we learned, that Samsudeen was a troubled man with psychologists describing him as angry, capable of carrying out his threats, and displaying varying degrees of mental illness and disorder.
Refugee who sought asylum
Samsudeen was a refugee who sought asylum in New Zealand after experiencing, through his formative years civil war and ethnic cleansing in Sri Lanka, who, at around 20 years of age, arrived in New Zealand on a student visa and then sought political asylum.
He was eventually granted refugee status, and since then spent years in prison on various charges and convictions – largely involving the possession of terrorist propaganda seeded on the internet by Islamic State (ISIS), and, threats showing intent to commit terrorist acts against New Zealanders.
In this week’s episode, Dr Buchanan and Manning examine questions about whether this tragedy could have been prevented and considered New Zealand’s:
Dr Buchanan and Manning also analyse whether it is necessary for the New Zealand government to move to tighten New Zealand’s terrorism security laws. And, if it does, how the intended new laws compare to other Five Eyes member countries.
Republished in partnership with EveningReport.nz
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says an attack at Auckland’s New Lynn Countdown supermarket today was a terrorist attack carried out by a violent extremist.
The prime minister and Police Commissioner Andrew Coster addressed media after the man was shot dead at a west Auckland mall this afternoon.
It is understood six people – all shoppers at the mall – have been wounded in the incident at LynnMall in New Lynn.
A St John Ambulance spokesperson said three patients in a critical condition and one patient in a serious condition had been taken to Auckland City Hospital; one patient in a moderate condition had been taken to Waitakere hospital; and one patient in a moderate condition had been taken to Middlemore Hospital.
Ardern revealed the terrorist was a Sri Lankan national who had arrived in New Zealand in October 2011 and he became a person of national security interest from 2016.
The reasons he was known to agencies was subject to suppression orders, but Ardern said it was her view that it was in the public interest to share as much information as possible.
The prime minister did say the terrorist held a violent ideology inspired by the Islamic State, but it would be wrong to direct any frustration at anyone other than this individual.
Personally aware
She said she was personally aware of the terrorist before today’s attack.
Ardern said it was a senseless attack and she was sorry it had happened.
“What happened today was despicable. It was carried out by an individual.”
Ardern said the individual was under constant monitoring, and he was shot and killed within 60 seconds of the attack starting.
The police team who was monitoring shot and killed him.
Commissioner Coster said the man had been under heavy surveillance because of concerns about his ideology.
He had entered the store and obtained a knife from within the store before starting the attack.
When the man approached police with the knife he was shot and killed.
Surveillance teams ‘close’
Coster said the surveillance teams were “as close as they possibly could be without compromising the surveillance”.
“I acknowledge that this situation raises questions about whether police could have done more, whether police could have intervened more quickly. I’m satisfied based on the information available to me that the staff involved did not only what we expect they would do in this situation, but did it with great courage,” he said.
“The reality is, that when you are surveilling someone on a 24/7 basis, it is not possible to be immediately next to them at all times. The staff intervened as quickly as they could and they prevented further injury in what was a terrifying situation,” Coster said.
Ardern said all legal and surveillance power had been used to try to keep people safe from this individual.
“What I can say is that we have utilised every legal and surveillance power available to us to try and keep people safe from this individual. Many agencies and people were involved and all were motivated by the same thing – trying to keep people safe.”
Coster said there had been nothing that would tell police the extent of his intentions, or that he intended to do this today.
He said the individual was very surveillance-conscious, and surveillance teams needed to maintain a distance to be effective.
intervened ‘in 60 seconds’
“There was nothing to prevent him being in the community and we were doing absolutely everything possible to monitor him and indeed the fact that we were able to intervene so quickly — in roughly 60 seconds — shows just how closely we were watching him.”
Ardern said the local Muslim community had been “nothing but helpful and supportive. It would be wrong to direct any frustration to anyone beyond this individual. That is who is culpable, that is who is responsible — no one else”.
She said his past behaviour and action did not reach the threshold to have him in in prison, which was why he was being constantly monitored.
An eyewitness told RNZ she had seen a man running around armed with a knife and heard many people screaming.
Another shopper who was in the supermarket at the time heard someone scream before shoppers started running towards the door.
Heavily armed police and ambulances remain at the scene.
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.
Listen to a reading of this article:
❖
A new BBC report shows eyewitnesses at the scene of the deadly Kabul airport explosion on Thursday saying that a significant number of the 170 Afghans killed in the attack actually died from gunfire by the US-led alliance in the chaos following the blast.
“Many we spoke to, including eyewitnesses, said significant numbers of those killed were shot dead by US forces in the panic after the blast,” the BBC’s Secunder Kermani said on Twitter.
New on MoA:
The Never Ending Lies About The War On Afghanistanhttps://t.co/pKoQyem6FT https://t.co/o1vzwc2zTf— Moon of Alabama (@MoonofA) August 28, 2021
Here are some transcript excerpts courtesy of Moon of Alabama’s write-up on this new report:
The correspondent talks to the brother a London taxi driver who was in Kabul to fetch his family:
A: “Somehow I saw American soldiers, Turkish soldiers and the fire was coming from the bridges, from the towers.”
Q: “From the soldiers?”
A: “Yeah, from the soldiers.”
(Side note: Some of the towers around the airport were reportedly manned by members of the CIA’s Afghan death squads.)
Another witness:
Narrator: “Noor Mohamed had had been deployed alongside American forces.”
A man holding up an identity card of a friend talks about his death in English.
A: “The guy has served U.S. army for years. And the reason he lost his life – he wasn’t killed by Taliban, he wasn’t killed by ISIS, he was (unintelligible).”
Q: “How can you be sure?”
A: “Because of the bullet. The bullet went inside of his head. Right here.” (Points to the back of his head.) “He doesn’t have any (other) injury.”The Pentagon did not respond to the BBC‘s request for comments.
"Most victims of #KabulAirportBlast were not killed by the blast but by bullets fired at them by the Americans."
Faisal of Kabul Lovers channel interviewed aid workers at Emergency Hospital in #Kabul and this is what they have to say: pic.twitter.com/vvQETq6uEe
— Sangar | سنګر پیکار (@paykhar) August 28, 2021
There’s another video going around from a popular channel called Kabul Lovers which as of this writing has over 122,000 views. According to a translation posted by Sangar Paykhar of the podcast Afghan Eye, workers at an emergency hospital in Kabul are saying that most of the fatalities from the blast actually died by bullets fired from above, which would track with what the BBC witness said about gunfire coming from the towers where American and Turkish soldiers were.
“Some people have said that victims were shot from behind by Daesh [ISIS],” a man who says he’s a military officer tells Kabul Lovers in the translated subtitles. “However, none of them were shot from behind. All bullet holes came from above. Bullets came from this angle [gesturing to indicate a downward trajectory], striking skulls, necks and chests. No bullet holes from this area below. Which means all these people were pressed against each other. There was no uncovered place for bullets to land, from the chest above. They were all shot by Americans from that area [again gesturing to show a downward trajectory].”
“All victims were killed by American bullets except maybe 20 people out of 100,” the man said.
A Pentagon official says 2 suicide bombers "assessed to have been ISIS fighters" and "ISIS gunmen" killed 12 US service members and injured 15 US service members, and caused many Afghan casualties as well pic.twitter.com/bl6BHHgdqm
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 26, 2021
The Pentagon, which is refusing to answer BBC reporters’ questions about these latest claims, had reported that there was fire from “ISIS gunmen” following detonations by two suicide bombers. Yet as of this writing there don’t appear to be any reports of any bodies of ISIS gunmen having been recovered since the attack.
“The attack on the Abbey Gate was followed by a number of ISIS gunmen who opened fire on civilian and military forces,” CENTCOM’s General Kenneth McKenzie told the press after the incident.
It seems unlikely that ISIS could lead such a gunfire attack on such a heavily defended area and then get away without any of their members getting killed by return fire, which means if there are no bodies of ISIS fighters then the “ISIS gunmen” the Pentagon reported probably never existed. It was probably just military personnel from the US and/or its allies spraying people with bullets in panic and confusion, after which someone made up a convenient story.
Which is just ghastly to think about. We may or may not know more in the coming days as the notoriously secretive US military narrative manages the situation, but the idea that this deadly incident could have been a lot less deadly if people with powerful firearms in their hands had been better trained and thought more clearly is painful.
As violent as western police can get, it’s hard to imagine even them freaking out after an explosion and opening fire into a crowd of people. The armed goon squads we unleash upon people in war zones are on a whole other level than the ones we have to deal with at home, and the fewer of them we have deployed around the world the better.
___________________________
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
ISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. So the US war machine will continue to rain down highly profitable explosives upon Afghanistan for as long as it likes, using this attack as justification for more military operations instead of taking it as yet another sign that what it has been doing is not working and keeps making things worse.
The post The ‘War On Terror’ Scam Continues appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.
This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.
Soldiers helping kids and a former British marine trying to get rescue animals out of Kabul. These have become some of the dominant images of the western evacuation from Afghanistan. They’ve started to conceal brutal truths – decades in the making – some of which I witnessed there as a soldier and journalist. That cannot be allowed to happen.
We continue to support vulnerable civilians in Afghanistan as they prepare to fly out to safety. As well as helping to secure the airport and evacuating civilians, we've provided blankets, food and water, sanitary packs and baby milk for vulnerable families. pic.twitter.com/2yUqNb5Vy5
— Ministry of Defence
(@DefenceHQ) August 23, 2021
The images are heart-warming and sickly sweet. This is precisely the point of them: to humanise and soften a pointless, 20-year war that wreaked untold havoc on one of the poorest nations on earth.
The life of every animal is precious and quite rightly the public is completely behind the hero that is @PenFarthing. Please support @Nowzad and the mission to get his team and animals back to the UK from Afghanistan. pic.twitter.com/bexHgzqnWv
— Keep The Ban (@Keeptheban_) August 26, 2021
As an Afghanistan veteran who has worked as a journalist in the country, I think it’s worth reviewing what that record is before this sickly sweet PR comes to dominate. To do that we can take a look at just a few aspects of the war.
Brown University’s Costs of War project, as reported by the US magazine Task and Purpose, registers an astonishing death toll in Afghanistan up to October 2018. Especially for a war which was meant to ‘liberate’ people.
This toll includes 2,401 US military deaths, 3,937 contractor deaths, 58,596 Afghan military and police deaths, 1,141 allied military dead, and (a conservative estimate) 38,480 civilians killed. The number of wounded across all sides – both mentally and physically – is difficult to pin down.
These figures don’t include the scores of Afghans killed and wounded at Kabul airport yesterday on 26 August. Nor the reported 13 US troops who died in the attack claimed by the local branch of ISIS.
BREAKING: A British defence source said it is “highly likely” Islamic State Khorasan (ISIS-K) was responsible for the attacks outside Kabul airport.
— Deborah Haynes (@haynesdeborah) August 26, 2021
Drones became a signature weapon of the War on Terror and were widely used in Afghanistan. Due to the secretive nature of their use, figures are hard to pin down. But The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) maintains a database to map and count deaths and strikes fairly accurately.
TBIJ projects that between 2015 and today over 13,000 strikes have been carried out in Afghanistan. These resulted in between 4,126 and 10,076 deaths over that period. Drones, however, have been in use for much longer. I can recall as a young soldier posted to Kandahar Airfield in 2006, missile-laden Predator drones taking off and landing were a daily sight.
Reports on the reality of the drone war, and its innocent victims, are widely available.
The air war was another big part of the Afghan war – distinct from the drone war. As foreign troops drew down in recent years, bombing intensified in support of Afghan military operations. For instance, as reporter Azmat Khan told Democracy Now:
the United States was bombing heavily parts of that country where there were fights against the Taliban raging. So, just to give some context, in 2019, the United States dropped more bombs in Afghanistan than in any previous year of the war. So, I think it was something close to — more than 6,200 bombs that year, as they were trying to negotiate.
The use of air power, she pointed out, boosted recruitment for the Taliban:
You know, many of its more recent recruits were people who did lose loved ones and really wanted revenge for those casualties.
Night raids on Afghan homes were another key feature of the war. These involved special forces descending on Afghan’s houses at night, supposedly in search of terrorists. These became highly controversial. In fact, former Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s own cousin was killed in a raid.
Later this role was handed to CIA-controlled Afghan death squads known as Zero Units. In 2020, I went back to Afghanistan to report on them. We met families whose relatives had been murdered in their homes. Another community was attacked in a night raid resulting in several deaths. This included a young boy whose father dug his body from the rubble of a mosque days later.
There is no doubt that the working class soldiers in Kabul airport want to help the kids there. And clearly puppies and kitten have enormous appeal for the British public. But there’s a danger that these images skew our idea of what the Afghan war was actually about. The real story of the conflict is not one of rescuing kids and dogs. It’s one of twenty years of imperial violence and failure in a war that never needed to be fought.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons/U.S. Central Command Public Affairs
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
Listen to a reading of this article:
ISIS has reportedly claimed credit for an explosion near Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. As of this writing there are around 90 dead including 13 US military personnel, though to read western mainstream media reports you’d think only US troops died and not scores of Afghans as well.
This was the deadliest attack in a decade on US troops in Afghanistan, which is odd to think about considering how many people the US military has killed during that time; just between January and July of this year the war killed 1,659 civilians. The way the US war machine has shifted to relying more on highly profitable missiles and bombs and unmanned aircraft to avoid the bad PR of flag-draped bodies flying home on jets is making the murder of foreigners a safer profession than working at a convenience store.
Because US military casualties of this size have become more rare despite their being spread throughout the world in nations whose people don’t want them there, news of those 13 deaths is being met with shock and astonishment instead of being regarded as a very normal part of foreign military occupations. People are acting like these were mall cops in Ohio and not military forces overseeing the tail end of a 20-year war overseas, and pundits and politicians are demanding more bombs and more military interventionism in response to people on the other side of the world attacking them in their own country.
It is sickening and enraging to hear that at least 12 U.S. servicemembers have been killed at the hands of terrorists in Kabul. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland. My full statement: pic.twitter.com/ydke3F6sZ7
— Leader McConnell (@LeaderMcConnell) August 26, 2021
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement calling on the US to “redouble our global efforts” in the war on terror in response to the attack, seizing the opportunity to promote more “we fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here” nonsense.
“Terrible things happen when terrorists are allowed to operate freely. This murderous attack offers the clearest possible reminder that terrorists will not stop fighting the United States just because our politicians grow tired of fighting them,” McConnell said. “I remain concerned that terrorists worldwide will be emboldened by our retreat, by this attack, and by the establishment of a radical Islamic terror state in Afghanistan. We need to redouble our global efforts to confront these barbarian enemies who want to kill Americans and attack our homeland.”
Yep, yeah, that makes sense Mitch. My neighbor attacked me when she caught me in her house at night going through her valuables. This proves she’s always wanted to attack me in my home. I need to go fight her over there so I don’t have to fight her here.
What the US actually needs to do is get the absolute fuck out of the entire region and stop creating more and more violent extremists with insane acts of mass military violence for power and profit. The very last institution on earth who should be trying to do something about ISIS is the institution whose actions created ISIS in the first place.
But of course acting in accordance with that self-evident fact is too much to ask of the US government, and Biden has announced that he has ordered his commanders “to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities.”
BREAKING: Pres. Biden says he's ordered his commanders "to develop operational plans to strike ISIS-K assets, leadership and facilities."
"We will respond with force and precision at our time, at the place we choose and the moment of our choosing." https://t.co/aVzjnzGos5 pic.twitter.com/kTw6VbCCSA
— ABC News (@ABC) August 26, 2021
So the US war machine will continue to rain down highly profitable explosives upon Afghanistan for as long as it likes, using this attack as justification for more military operations instead of taking it as yet another sign that what it has been doing is not working and keeps making things worse.
Step 1: Destroy nations, kill millions and displace tens of millions in military interventions for power and profit.
Step 2: Wait for some of those people to hate you and want to fight back.
Step 3: Use their desire to fight back as justification to repeat Step 1.
The “war on terror” is the greatest scam ever invented.
________________
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This post was originally published on Caitlin Johnstone.
UPDATE: Dozens of individuals who were wounded in the bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan, at the city’s airport (around 60 in total, it’s been reported) have been transported to a nearby surgical center in the city.
An explosion at a hotel near the airport may have been two separate blasts, sources from the United Kingdom said to The Guardian reporter Dan Sabbagh.
It is believed that the explosions were the work of an Islamic State affiliate group in the country, known as Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISIS-K).
Original article appears below…
An explosion outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Thursday has resulted in a yet-unknown number of casualties, hitting a highly populated area of the airport where thousands have gathered seeking to flee the country after the Taliban took political control of the country earlier this month.
Several media agencies have also reported of a second explosion taking place at a nearby hotel. Both explosions were confirmed by Pentagon Press Secretary John Kirby.
Kirby confirmed the initial explosion in a statement on Twitter. Some news agencies had reported that witnesses had seen a substantial casualty count, while others reported that at least 13 individuals had been killed due to the blast.
The U.S. State Department also announced that “four or more U.S. service personnel” are believed to have been among those who were harmed by the blast. It was left unclear what their current status was.
The blast took place at the Abbey Gate, the main entry point to the airport, just after 5 p.m. local time. Early reports of the explosion suggested that it was carried out by at least one suicide bomber who was wearing a vest laden with explosives.
Shortly after his first tweet confirming the explosion at the airport, Kirby confirmed that a second explosion had occurred.
“We can confirm that the explosion at the Abbey Gate was the result of a complex attack that resulted in a number of US & civilian casualties. We can also confirm at least one other explosion at or near the Baron Hotel, a short distance from Abbey Gate,” Kirby wrote.
The hotel is an area of the city where many Americans have gathered in order to coordinate their exit from the country with U.S. officials.
According to reporting from Politico, which cited a U.S. official who was familiar with the attack, the airport bombing was perpetrated by an individual affiliated with ISIS (also known as Daesh).
Hours prior to the first explosion, the U.S. Embassy in Afghanistan had warned Americans who were outside the airport waiting to be transported out of the country to leave the area immediately. They cited unspecified security threats, and discouraged travel to the airport.
“This is a dynamic and volatile security situation on the ground…. We take seriously the priority we attach to the safety and security of American citizens,” a State Department spokesperson said in a statement regarding the threat.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
It is getting exponentially more difficult to maintain a positive attitude these days. As if COVID’s rampaging Delta variant and the climate screaming, “Told you so!” by way of fire and flood were not sufficiently disheartening, there is the last act of our 20-year calamity in Afghanistan to contend with. The corporate “news” networks are reveling in footage of Afghan civilians running for their lives while pundits gravely opine about nothing of depth or substance beyond the six opportunistic inches in front of their faces.
This, though, is verging deeply into last-straw territory: On Tuesday night, Fox News wretch Sean Hannity took a moment during his nightly show to offer a few words for the families of those Americans still trying to find a way out of the chaos in that country, just in case they were in a mood to do some shopping.
“How would you like to be in Kabul today, as an American, and you can’t get to the airport?” asked Hannity. “Where are you thinking your life is headed? If you’re one of those family members, I bet you’re not sleeping. I don’t even think My Pillow can do it. MyPillow.com. That’s where I go. I fall asleep faster, I stay asleep longer. These are going to be a lot of sleepless nights for so many of our fellow Americans. We’ve got to get them home.”
That happened, and on live television. With the deft touch of a lowered bulldozer blade, Hannity perfected the ruthless art of disaster capitalism. That he used the plight of those families to pitch a product, made by a guy running around the country barfing up dangerous 2020 election fictions, took another bad year and turned it positively surreal. It was as filthy as anything I have ever seen, which makes it about par for the current course.
Hannity’s execrable pillow peddling was reinforced one short night later by Fox’s vile potato monster Tucker Carlson, who stomped right through the gruesome aftermath of the U.S.’s 21st century wars to offer yet another reason to target immigrants and love the GOP. There is concern within European governmental circles, you see, that the far right could capitalize politically on another refugee crisis arising from the Middle East, as they did in 2015. Carlson cottoned to this, and made for daylight like a rattlesnake in the corn.
“[W]e are now living through the biggest influx of American refugees in American history,” Carlson said on Wednesday night. “We are on pace for at least 2 million illegal immigrants arriving in America this year alone. That’s far more than the number of asylum applicants who arrived in Europe in 2015. That was over 1 million, just over 1 million, that totally changed Europe forever.”
Quick quiz: What do the 2015 refugee crisis and the current Afghanistan refugee crisis have in common? If you guessed “failed American wars,” go pick yourself out a prize. The calamity of Iraq — which spawned the war in Syria and the violent rise of ISIS just across the border — was the catalyst for the 2015 tide of humanity seeking to flee the carnage. The cause of the crisis unfolding today is, again, another U.S. warmaking debacle. Can’t talk about that on Fox News, though, or any other major media outlet for that matter. Makes it harder to sell those pillows.
Two years ago to the day, Donald Trump told the press his administration was having “having very good discussions” with the Taliban about establishing a peace deal and ending the war. He was, as usual, half-assing his way toward a cheap talking point and a few minutes of positive TV coverage, as current events most vividly demonstrate. This was also the day Trump announced that the U.S. was interested in buying Greenland. “It’s something we talked about,” he said. “Denmark essentially owns it, we’re very good allies with Denmark.”
So it goes, I suppose, in the land of the free, or something. Hannity tries to sell fascist pillows to the families of Americans caught in a post-war zone of fear and uncertainty, while Carlson once again tried to spook the Fox-watching horses about refugees (the ones we caused to flee their homeland with 20 years of bombs and shooting) and immigrants, and all two years after the world heavyweight champion of shabby presidents told us all was so well that he was in the market for a large partially melting land mass.
You could write all this off as standard-issue Fox/Trump material, but that would be a dangerous mistake. Racism, war and shamelessly voracious capitalism are the nucleotide bases within the DNA of the business deal we call “The American Dream.” This is not new; it is, in fact, as old as the first European invasion of this land. The fact that it has its own dedicated TV network is only slightly more malevolent than the reality that the other networks are almost — but not quite — as bad.
Anyone want to buy a pillow? They’re great at soaking up tears.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
A Labour MP’s ISIS claim during the Commons Afghanistan debate has led to questions about her knowledge of the region. Stella Creasy, who is on the right of the party, was roundly attacked on social media. She’d played up the risk of the Taliban providing a “safe haven” for the militant group ISIS.
The debate followed the rapid collapse of the Afghan government in the face of a rapid Taliban advance. This collapse followed the withdrawal of the US military occupation which had held the regime together.
In her speech, Creasy said:
President Biden may not have spoken to other world leaders since the fall of Kabul, so I am pleased to hear that the Prime Minister is, because we need to get agreement, via the UN and NATO, that if the Taliban provide a safe haven for al-Qaeda or ISIS, we will not stand for it.
Twitter users were quick to pull her up about her words.
They pointed out that the Taliban and ISIS were, in fact, deadly enemies who have been at war for years. The rift was first reported in 2015 when a pro-ISIS splinter group in Zabul province got into a gun battle with conventional Taliban forces. Both sides took heavy casualties. The groups have been in conflict ever since. A fact which even a basic internet search will bring up.
A Twitter user quickly pointed out Creasy’s mistake:
Stella Creasy MP wading in, raising the prospect of the Taliban "harbouring ISIS" which seems unlikely, given they're actively fighting each other in Afghanistan and have been for over 5 years
— jon (@AScribbledEagle) August 18, 2021
Another described her take as “woeful”:
Truly woeful by @stellacreasy here. https://t.co/kvaEpIhv5k
— Fahad Ansari (Activist Lawyer) (@fahadansari) August 18, 2021
Northern Independence Party founder and Middle East anthropologist Philip Proudfoot added his criticism:
Here is Labour MP @stellacreasy suggesting that the Taliban must not provide a safe haven for "Al-Qaeda or ISIS." The Taliban have been at war with ISIS for 6 years. pic.twitter.com/mxwu44RT69
— Philip Proudfoot
(@PhilipProudfoot) August 18, 2021
In the same speech, Creasy also used a version of a famous Afghan expression: “you may have the watches, but we have the time”.
She said the saying “reflects the speed with which the Taliban have acted”.
The phrase itself speaks to the slowness and patience of insurgents, and the vast technological differences between guerrilla and occupier – not the idea of a rapid advance as we have seen in Afghanistan in the last week.
One critic said as much:
Also found this gem from a little earlier in her speech where she seems to have completely misunderstood the meaning of "You have the watches, we have the time" pic.twitter.com/3mlZj94MMD
— jon (@AScribbledEagle) August 18, 2021
Creasy fired back at her critics by claiming she had not said what was recorded on Hansard and in the video of her speech on Twitter.
Perhaps if you consider yourself an activist lawyer you would bother to check the record as that’s not what I said at all @fahadansari …. https://t.co/iZkv5EBcUG
— stellacreasy (@stellacreasy) August 18, 2021
Creasy claimed she was being trolled. Apparently angered, she suggested that those who were questioning her couldn’t read. But Twitter users had zero time for that argument:
You're not being spammed. You sneered at a lawyer who commented on your lack of understanding of Afghan politics. You could have ignored, blocked or moved on. You chose not to.
— CrémantCommunarde#TimeToBreakthrough
(@0Calamity) August 18, 2021
Establishment politicians still don’t understand the region despite being there for the last 20 years. Something which remains true despite the decades-long military occupation which has come crashing down in a few short weeks.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
By Joe Glenton
This post was originally published on The Canary.
The House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Middle East, North Africa and Global Counterterrorism held a hearing on April 15, 2021, on “10 Years of War: Examining the Ongoing Conflict in Syria.” As is customary of American exceptionalism, the feasibility of regime change in Damascus was not left undiscussed.
Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, who is the top Republican on the subcommittee, explicitly called for President Bashar al-Assad’s ouster. “The Assad regime is illegitimate and should be replaced,” said Wilson. Omar Alshogre, Director for Detainee Affairs at the Syrian Emergency Task Force, also remained uncompromising in his insistence on the overthrow of the government, saying the 2011 uprising in Syria was inspired by USA’s “democratic” tradition.
Fantasies of Regime Change
Continued talk about regime change in Syria is unmoored from reality. Those begging the US to overthrow the Assad regime with guns and bombs fail to see how the involvement of external powers has led to sheer devastation. Far from being “democratic”, USA has been fuelling a viciously sectarian war in Syria.
While initial periods of the 2011 uprising expressed the discontent of the Syrian people against Assad’s neoliberal authoritarianism, Euro-American interventionism soon gave a sectarian character to the rebellion. The Syrian Muslim Brotherhood — a Sunni Islamist organization — played a lead role in the revolt from the very first moment, dominating the Syrian National Council (SNC), formed in early October 2011, which the US and its Western allies immediately apotheosized as “the leading interlocutor of the opposition with the international community.” The SNC, proclaimed the West, would be “a legitimate representative of all Syrians” — a potential government-in-exile.
The Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the SNC’s military wing. “What we are aiming for is a revolution with a political wing, represented by the SNC, and a military wing, represented by the FSA,” Col. Aref Hammoud, a Turkey-based commander with the FSA, told the Wall Street Journal. Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood was funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar — this money being used, as then SNC President Burhan Ghalioun said, “to help equip the Free Syrian Army.”
Molham al-Drobi, a senior council member and a representative of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood on the council, stated that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) were funding the council to the tune of $40 million per month. Weren’t all of these states presided over by princes, emirs, and kings, who preferred to govern by decree, eschewing any form of democratic participation? While the Gulf Arab monarchies funded the rebels of Syria to overthrow Assad’s dictatorship, Washington muttered not a word of criticism against them.
Then President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said they want a democracy in Syria. But Qatar, Kuwait and UAE are autocracies and Saudi Arabia is among the most pernicious of caliphate-kingly-dictatorships in the Arab world. Rulers of these states inherit power from their families — just as Bashar has done — and Saudi Arabia is an ally of the Salafist-Wahhabi rebels in Syria, just as it was the most fervent supporter of the medieval Taliban during Afghanistan’s dark ages. The Saudis are repressing their own Shia minority just as they now wish to destroy the Alawite-Shia minority of Syria. And we were made to believe Saudi Arabia wants to set up a democracy in Syria?
The FSA — touted as “moderate rebels” by the West — was inevitably going to be sectarian insofar it was dominated by Muslim Brotherhood and funded by Sunni monarchies. It had virtually no representation among the roughly 30% of Syria’s population that wasn’t Sunni. Most FSA brigades used religious rhetoric and were named after heroic figures or events in Sunni Islamic history. Many of the participating groups had strong Islamist agendas, and some groups had similar ideologies as other jihadi groups, following the strict Salafist interpretation of Islam.
Among the FSA’s Islamist members was the Muslim Brotherhood itself, which existed “on the ground” working “under the FSA umbrella.” One of the Brotherhood-affiliated guerilla groups was the Tawheed Division, which led the fight against the Syrian government in Aleppo. One FSA commander told recruits: “Those whose intentions are not for God, they had better stay home, whereas if your intention is for God, then you go for jihad and you gain an afterlife and heaven.” This was hardly the exhortation of a secularist.
As western powers provided arms to the supposedly moderate opposition, a striking development occurred. The opposition to Assad became a fragmented movement dominated by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the al-Qa’ida franchise Jabhat al-Nusra, and the Islamic Front, consisting of six or seven large rebel military formations numbering an estimated 50,000 fighters whose uniting factor was Saudi money and an extreme Sunni ideology similar to Saudi Arabia’s version of Islam. The Saudis saw the Islamic Front as capable of fighting pro-Assad forces as well as ISIS, but Riyadh’s objections to the latter appeared to be based on its independence of Saudi control rather than revulsion at its record of slaughtering Shia, Alawi, Christians, Armenians, Kurds, or any dissenting Sunni.
The “moderate” rebels were completely marginalized. Their plan since 2011 had been to force a full-scale Western military intervention as in Libya in 2011 and, when this did not happen, they lacked an alternative strategy. The US, Britain and France did not have many options left except to try to control the jihadi Frankenstein’s monster that they helped create in Syria. At other times, they repackaged some rebel warlords, thinking they would be considered “moderates” simply because they were backed by the West and its regional allies.
Reviving Jihadis
In February 2021, the US government media organization Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) conducted an interview with Abu Mohammad-al-Jolani, the head of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the latest among the name-changing jihadis the mainstream press still refers to as Syria’s “moderate opposition.” Martin Smith’s exchange with Jolani is a piece of a documentary on Jolani that PBS’ Frontline program plans to air in the future.
The HTS was formed in 2017 out of the remaining jihadi groups that had gathered in Idlib in 2015. The main pillar of the HTS is the al-Qaeda branch in Syria, the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham, and before that the Jabhat al-Nusra. The other groups that joined the Jabhat Fateh al-Sham to create the HTS include the four main omnibus jihadi groups: the Jabhat Ansar al-Din, the Jaysh al-Sunna, the Liwa al-Haq and the Haraka Nour al-Din al-Zenki. These are hardened groups of fighters, many of them coming in and out of each other’s platforms and even fighting each other viciously.
For the past several years, the HTS has tried to rebrand itself as “moderate”. In 2015, after it became the dominant force in Idlib, the outfit took on its new name and withdrew its pledge of allegiance to al-Qaeda. It claimed to be a Syrian nationalist force with an Islamic ideology. But this is merely a superficial change. It continues to propagate the view that the Syrian state must be based on Sharia law and the general orientation of the 100,000 to 200,000 “radical” fighters inside Idlib is towards al-Qaeda. This is something that is accepted even by the US government, which has otherwise used these fighters in its geopolitical games against the government in Damascus.
Jolani was once an Islamic State commander who went on to found Jabhat al-Nusra. The State Department declared Jolani a “specially designated global terrorist” in 2013. This designation still stands. Jolani now runs what he calls a “salvation government” in Idlib, the remaining retreat of Islamist extremists in northwestern Syria. He remains an Islamist theocrat determined to impose Sharia law on secular Syria, but he is committed to fighting Assad and so shares “common interests with the United States and the West,” as PBS puts it.
PBS’s attempt to legitimate Jolani was not a one-off. This was made clear on April 7, 2021, with the publication by the New York Times of an article by its Middle East correspondent Ben Hubbard based on an HTS-sponsored visit last month to Idlib. Comparing Jolani’s Islamist front favorably to the Islamic ISIS, Hubbard writes: “H.T.S. is not pushing for the immediate creation of an Islamic state and does not field morality police officers to enforce strict social codes.” He failed to mention the numerous cases of torture, violence, sexual abuse, arbitrary arrests, disappearances and the rest of the inexcusable stuff these groups get up to.
Efforts to portray the Jolani and the HTS as the new representative of “moderate rebels” in Syria are another PR ploy on the part of USA to continue its war in Syria. In an interview on March 8, 2021, James Jeffrey, who served as US ambassador under both Republican and Democrat administrations and most recently as special representative for Syria during the presidency of Donald Trump, has been quoted as saying that HTS has been an “an asset” to America’s strategy in Idlib. To quote Jeffery, “They [HTS] are the least bad option of the various options on Idlib, and Idlib is one of the most important places in Syria, which is one of the most important places right now in the Middle East.” USA will continue to revive jihadis as long as the Assad government remains in power.
The post Continuing the War in Syria first appeared on Dissident Voice.This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.
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