Syria’s Secular and Islamist Rebels: Who Are the Saudis and the Qataris Arming?

Syria’s Secular and Islamist Rebels: Who Are the Saudis and the Qataris Arming?

    Saturday, September 22, 2012   No comments

Out of Istanbul, the two Gulf states play a game of conflicting favorites that is getting in the way creating a unified rebel force to topple the Assad regime

By RANIA ABOUZEID

Vast swaths of northern Syria, especially in the province of Idlib, have slipped out of the hands of President Bashar Assad, if not quite out of his reach. The area is now a de facto liberated zone, though the daily attacks by Damascus’ air force and the shelling from the handful of checkpoints and bases regime forces have fallen back to are reminders that the rebel hold on the territory remains fluid and fragile.

What is remarkable is that this substantial strip of “free” Syria has been patched together in the past 18 months by military defectors, students, tradesmen, farmers and pharmacists who have not only withstood the Syrian army’s withering fire but in some instances repelled it using a hodgepodge of limited, light weaponry. The feat is even more amazing when one considers the disarray among the outside powers supplying arms to the loosely allied band of rebels.

As TIME reports here, disorder and distrust plague two of the rebels’ international patrons: Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The two Gulf powerhouses are no longer on the same page when it comes to determining who among the plethora of mushrooming Syrian rebel groups should be armed. The rift surfaced in August, with the alleged Saudi and Qatari representatives in charge of funneling free weaponry to the rebels clearly backing different factions among the groups — including various shades of secular and Islamist militias — under the broad umbrella that is the Free Syrian Army (FSA).

The middlemen of the two countries operate out of Turkey, the regional military power. Ankara has been quite public with its denunciation of Assad even as it denies any involvement in shuffling weapons across the border to Syrian rebels. It claims its territory is not being used to do so. And yet, as TIME reported in June, a secretive group operates something like a command center in Istanbul, directing the distribution of vital military supplies believed to be provided by Saudi Arabia and Qatar and transported with the help of Turkish intelligence to the Syrian border and then to the rebels. Further reporting has revealed more details of the operation, the politics and favoritism that undermine the task of creating a unified rebel force out of the wide array of groups trying to topple the Assad regime.

(The FSA is nominally headed by Riad al-As’aad, who is based in Turkey. Neither As’aad nor his chief FSA rival General Mustafa Sheikh are party to the Istanbul control room that supplies and arms rebels who operate under the FSA banner. The two men each have their own sources of funding and are independently distributing money and weapons to selected FSA units.)

According to sources who have dealt with him, Saudi Arabia’s man in the Istanbul control center is a Lebanese politician named Okab Sakr. He belongs to the Future Movement, the organization of former Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, which has a history of enmity with Damascus. (Syria was accused of complicity in the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father Rafiq.) The party has not made Sakr available to TIME, denies his involvement in any weapons deals and insists that Sakr is in Belgium “on leave” from his political duties.

However, he apparently was in the southern Turkish city of Antakya in late August. A TIME inquiry with an Antakya hotel confirms Sakr was in the area at the time. According to rebel sources who dealt with him, the Lebanese politician was there overseeing the distribution of batches of supplies — small consignments of 50,000 Kalashnikov bullets and several dozen rocket-propelled grenades — to at least four different FSA groups in Idlib province as well as larger consignments to other areas including Homs. The FSA sources also say he met with some commanders but not others — a selectivity that led to much chagrin.

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Study of Flame malware used in Middle East and north Africa reveals programmers probably had national backing

Study of Flame malware used in Middle East and north Africa reveals programmers probably had national backing

    Friday, September 21, 2012   No comments

The covert cyberwar being waged in the Middle East and north Africa – particularly against Iran and its allies – is even more sophisticated and widespread than had previously been understood, according to new research.

Two leading computer security laboratories – Kaspersky Lab and Symantec – have been studying a series of powerful cyberweapons used against targets including the Iranian nuclear programme and Lebanese banks accused of laundering money for Iran and its ally Hezbollah. They are now convinced that all were probably created by a national government or governments working together.

They have also identified key similarities in the weapons' computer coding suggesting some – if not all – were worked on at different times by the same or related groups of programmers.

Suspicion over the most likely culprit has centred on the US and Israel – not least after anonymous briefings to the Washington Post by an unnamed former senior US intelligence official this year.

In June the New York Times disclosed that one of the weapons identified in the last two years – Stuxnet, a sabotage program used to attack Iran's nuclear centrifuge in 2010 – was part of a joint US-Israel cyberwar plan, codenamed Olympic Games, targeting the Islamic republic, which suggests that the other cyber weapons could be part of the same wide operation.

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Frontline: the battle for Syria

Frontline: the battle for Syria

    Thursday, September 20, 2012   No comments

Frontline: the battle for Syria

Extremists Showing Up on Front Lines in Syria

Extremists Showing Up on Front Lines in Syria

    Thursday, September 20, 2012   No comments

(TEL RIFAAT, Syria) — The bearded gunmen who surrounded the car full of foreign journalists in a northern Syrian village were clearly not Syrians. A heavyset man in a brown gown stepped forward, announced he was Iraqi and fingered through the American passport he had confiscated.

“We know all American journalists are spies. Now tell us what you are doing here and who you are spying for,” he said in English before going on to accuse the U.S. of the destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.

“I really want to cut your head off right now,” he added, telling his men, many of whom appeared to have North African accents, that this American kills Muslims.

With the intervention of nearby villagers, the confrontation eventually was defused. But it underscored the unpredictable element that foreign fighters bring to the Syrian conflict.

Most of those fighting the regime of President Bashar Assad are ordinary Syrians and soldiers who have defected, having become fed up with the authoritarian government, analysts say. But increasingly, foreign fighters and those adhering to an extremist Islamist ideology are turning up on the front lines. The rebels are trying to play down their influence for fear of alienating Western support, but as the 18-month-old fight grinds on, the influence of these extremists is set to grow.

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Rage, but also self-criticism

Rage, but also self-criticism

    Thursday, September 20, 2012   No comments

Though most Muslims felt insulted by a film trailer that disparaged the Prophet Muhammad, many were embarrassed by the excesses of protesters and preachers

AFTER the noon prayer in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on September 14th, a copiously bearded speaker delivered a rousing, finger-wagging open-air sermon. Thundering against the incendiary anti-Muslim film trailer that recently appeared on the internet, he warned his brothers to prepare for battle, urging them to take up weapons against incoming “Crusader armies”. Soon after, youths resumed a rock-throwing assault on police protecting the nearby American embassy.

As with past incidents of what many Muslims see as Western attacks against their beliefs, similar scenes unfolded across the Muslim world, producing tragic results. The anger displayed at all these events was certainly real, and widely shared among Muslims. Yet the television coverage of protests obscured an obvious fact. As in many other protests across the region, the crowd at the fiery Friday sermon in Cairo numbered in the mere hundreds, in a space where throngs a thousand times bigger have become commonplace. In the midst of a city of perhaps 20m inhabitants, the rest went about their business as usual. The number of youths who actually picked up rocks barely rose to the dozens. Their anger was aimed as much at the police as against “the West”. The street-fighting looked more like a rowdy sporting event, replete with parading to the cameras, than a clash of civilisations.

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Obama Exposed as Professor with Middling Popularity

Obama Exposed as Professor with Middling Popularity

    Thursday, September 20, 2012   No comments

A longstanding conservative meme is that President Obama wasn't "vetted" during the 2008 campaign, and several conservative organizations have undertaken big projects to remedy that. The Washington Examiner posted its effort, "The Obama You Don't Know," Thursday; it follows Breitbart.com's "The Vetting." Today's major revelations include that Obama was only a moderately popular professor, and he didn't hang out that much with his colleagues at the University of Chicago in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Obama's background is an important and worthy journalistic pursuit. And anyone setting out to fill in any gaps remaining in the historical record of a sitting President should be lauded, in part because there are so few gaps remaining. Because it's not hard not to notice that the element that all these vetting projects have in common is that the results are a little boring. For instance, in contrast to Time magazine's gushing report that once Obama arrived at the University of Chicago in 1992, "Within a few years, he had become a rock-star professor with hordes of devoted students," the Examiner finds that his rock stardom faded quickly. Sure, in Obama's first two years, he was the top-ranked instructor, with a rating of 9.7 out of 10 from students. "But law student evaluations made available to The Washington Examiner by the university showed that his popularity then fell steadily." The sad stats:

1997: Obama's student rating falls to 7.75. He is ranked 23 of 40 lecturers.

1999: Just 23 percent of students said they'd retake Obama's class on racism. Obama was the third-least-liked law lecturer.

2003: Just one-third of students recommended his class.

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Iran on brink of nuclear bomb in six-seven months: Netanyahu

Iran on brink of nuclear bomb in six-seven months: Netanyahu

    Sunday, September 16, 2012   No comments

Iran

(Reuters) - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu warned on Sunday that Iran was just six to seven months away from being able to build a nuclear bomb, adding urgency to his demand that President Barack Obama set a clear "red line" for Tehran in what could deepen the worst U.S.-Israeli rift in decades.

Taking to the television airwaves to make his case directly to the American public, Netanyahu said that by mid-2013, Iran would be 90 percent of the way toward enough enriched uranium for a bomb. He urged the United States to spell out limits that Tehran must not cross if it is to avoid military action - something Obama has refused to do.

"You have to place that red line before them now, before it's too late," Netanyahu told NBC's "Meet the Press" program, saying that such a U.S. move could reduce the chances of having to attack Iran's nuclear sites.

The unusually public dispute - coupled with Obama's decision not to meet with Netanyahu later this month - has exposed a deep U.S.-Israeli divide and stepped up pressure on the U.S. leader in the final stretch of a tight presidential election campaign.

It was the clearest marker Netanyahu has laid down so far on why he has become so strident in his push for Washington to confront Tehran with a strict ultimatum. At the same time, his approach seemed certain to stoke further tensions with Obama, with whom he has had a notoriously testy relationship.

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US officials intercepted communications that linked al-Qaida to consulate attack

US officials intercepted communications that linked al-Qaida to consulate attack

    Sunday, September 16, 2012   No comments

by Chris Stepheni

The president of Libya's parliament, Mohamed al-Magariaf, has said military action is being considered against militants blamed for the killing of the US ambassador, Chris Stevens.

Magariaf also confirmed reports from Washington that US officials intercepted communications discussing the planned attack on the UN consulate in Benghazi, which he said linked al-Qaida in the Magreb to an Islamist brigade, Ansar al-Sharia. "Yes, that happened," he said.

Magariaf told the Guardian the intercepts matched other evidence indicating members of the brigade took part in Tuesday's all-night assault on the compound and an accommodation site.

"It seems there is a division within Ansar al-Sharia about this attack, some for participation, some against," he said. "We are in the process of investigation."

Such transmissions would be powerful evidence linking al-Sharia to the attack, and Magariaf said Libya had been passed the information by the US government. He confirmed that the intercepted communications discussed the timing of last week's assault.

But he urged the US not to act unilaterally, fearing it would antagonise public opinion.

"We will not hesitate to act, to do what is our duty," Magariaf said. "Let us start first by ourselves and if we are not capable then, whoever can help us. My experience with the Americans, they know what they have to do."

His comments came as Libya's interior ministry said weekend raids had led to the arrest of 50 suspects, but it gave no details or said whether they were Islamist militants.

Tension is building in Benghazi amid speculation that military action is imminent against the al-Sharia brigade, whose commanders deny responsibility for the consulate attack.

Two US warships equipped with Tomahawk cruise missiles are stationed off the coast and a propeller-driven aircraft with no lights, thought to be a drone, has spent several hours in the skies above the city for the past two nights.

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The Muslim Protests: Two Myths Down, Three to Go

The Muslim Protests: Two Myths Down, Three to Go

    Saturday, September 15, 2012   No comments

Protesting a movie or a policy

Here is the narrative that pretty much everyone was buying into 36 hours ago: Crude anti-Islam film made by Israeli-American and funded by Jews leads to Muslim protests that boil over, causing four American deaths in Libya.

Here is what now seems to be the case: the anti-Islam film wasn't made by an Israeli-American, wasn't funded by Jews, and probably had nothing to do with the American deaths, which seem to have resulted from a long-planned attack by a specific terrorist group, not spontaneous mob violence.

In retrospect, the original narrative should have aroused immediate suspicion. If, for example, this lethal attack on an American consulate in a Muslim country was really spontaneous, isn't it quite a coincidence that it happened on 9/11?

And as for the funding of the film: The filmmaker was said to be describing himself as Israeli-American and volunteering the fact that "100 Jewish donors" financed his project. Well, 1) 100 is a suspiciously round number; and 2) If you were this "Israeli-American," would you be advertising that this incendiary film was a wholly Jewish enterprise? (Kudos to two excellent reporters: Sarah Posner, who seems to have been the first to raise substantive doubts about the filmmaker's identity, and Laura Rozen, who seems to have been the first to suggest that he was "linked to [the] Coptic [Christian] diaspora"--a suggestion that so far is holding up.)

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Dave Matthews On His Band's 'Unique Sort Of Love Affair'

Dave Matthews On His Band's 'Unique Sort Of Love Affair'

    Sunday, September 09, 2012   No comments

For many people, the definitive soundtrack of the mid-1990s was a band out of Virginia with unusual instrumentation and an unmistakable sound. Born and partially raised in South Africa, Dave Matthews was a bartender in the college town of Charlottesville when he founded the Dave Matthews Band in 1991. Two decades on, the group has sold 40 million records and become one of the biggest live acts in the world.

The Dave Matthews Band has a new studio album, its seventh, called Away From the World. Things have changed for the group since 1991: Matthews is a father now, and this album is the group's second since the 2008 death of founding member LeRoi Moore. Here, Matthews speaks with NPR's Guy Raz about what has kept the other members together — and performs two songs from the new album on ukulele and guitar.

Interview Highlights

On the title Away From the World

"It kind of is suggesting that all of us are sort of removed from the world, in a way, in our minds. That we're all in the same boat, even though we're sort of locked in our own heads."

On growing up in apartheid-era South Africa

"Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population. But [I had] a mother that was so devoted to making sure that we knew that to be credited or discredited for something about yourself that you were born with, that you had the inability to change — whether it's the color of your skin or anything about you — was just the worst kind of crime. ... The guys who worked at my uncle's dairy, I'd sneak over there and — I was in Africa so we didn't have to worry about it — and smoke pot with them when I was a teenager, and drink with them and play music. And more than play, I'd listen to these guys play music. That felt almost like a revolutionary act, and then, at the same time, I got all the gift from it."

On the song "Gaucho" and the new album's themes of change

"I don't think that 'good can win.' I don't think everything is going to get peachy ever. But I think we have to fight for what we believe in. I also get very disheartened by the shallowness of the debates we have. Nothing is black or white, nothing's us or them. But then there are magical, beautiful things in the world. There's incredible acts of kindness and bravery, and in the most unlikely places, and it gives you hope."

On the future of the Dave Matthews Band

"I can remember saying 'I can't imagine that I'm going to be doing this when I'm 45' — and I'm 45. And so I don't know if there's a place that we need to go to. But it's also a sort of interesting challenge to try and work with the same group of people because there's a uniqueness to it — of trying to get past all the things that relationships have when we're working together. ... There's four of us that have been in the band for more than 20 years. It's interesting that our love for each other really revolves around the music we make together. We're not in the same age group, we didn't come up in the same places, but we really do have a unique sort of love affair when we're playing music together. And it gets stranger and stranger, but it's good."

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