Tuesday, July 21, 2015   No comments

Turkish government and Erdogan feel the heat from ISIL and opposition, prompting AKP leaders to lash out at HDP

A Turkish online magazine that supports the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has slammed Turkey and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan for the first time.

“Konstantiniyye” (the Ottoman word for Istanbul) published its second issue on July 17. The magazine, which did not criticize or threaten Turkey in its first issue earlier this year, changed its tone dramatically as Ankara toughened its stance against ISIL.

“[In this issue] we tried to explain that the state of Turkey, which is trying to confront the Islamic State by displaying erratic behavior, is moving toward disintegration with its support and concessions to the [outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party] PKK,” the issue’s
prologue said.

The magazine referred to the PKK as “the atheist gang” and Turkey as “the regime of tağut.”


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At least 28 dead in suspected ISIL suicide bombing in Turkey's border with Syria

At least 28 dead in suspected ISIL suicide bombing in Turkey's border with Syria

    Monday, July 20, 2015   No comments

Comment: ISIL's attack add pressure on Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his ruling party who supported armed groups like ISIL and Nusra in Syria and allowed fighters and weapons to flow into that country despite warnings that such policy will destabilize Turkey. Turkey must rethink its foreign policy in the region to stop further attacks.

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An explosion on Monday outside a cultural center in the Turkish town of Suruç, which is near the country's border with Syria, killed at least 28 people and wounded more than 100, in what may have been a suicide bomb attack by Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) militants.

The explosion occurred at around 11:50 a.m. in front of the Amara Culture Center while a large number of Socialist Youth Association (SGDF) members, who came from İstanbul, Ankara, İzmir and Diyarbakır, were making a press statement regarding the reconstruction of the Syrian border town of Kobani. Turkish media reports said 300 people from the SGDF were preparing to travel to Kobani to help with the rebuilding.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the midday blast. Initial reports had said the explosion was a suicide attack and the bomber was reportedly a member of ISIL, and Turkish officials speaking to Reuters also said preliminary evidence suggested an ISIL suicide attack caused the blast. The Turkish newspaper Hürriyet's website, citing official sources, said the attack is suspected to have been perpetrated by a 18-year-old female ISIL supporter.

In a written statement following the attack, Turkey's Interior Ministry said the “terrorist attack” led to the death of 27 people and injured more than 100, according to initial findings, and added that there is a fear that the death toll may rise. The ministry said a technical team was sent to the area to conduct an investigation.

"We call on everyone to stand together and remain calm in the face of this terrorist attack which targets the unity of our country," the ministry said in the statement.

Şanlıurfa Governor İzzettin Küçük later said the explosion was a suicide attack, giving the death toll as 28.


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Al Qaeda Fights on Same Side as Saudi Arabia and UAE in Yemen in support of Hadi

Al Qaeda Fights on Same Side as Saudi Arabia and UAE in Yemen in support of Hadi

    Saturday, July 18, 2015   No comments

Saudi Connections to al-Qaeda?

Special forces from United Arab Emirates said to have joined battle

Local militias backed by Saudi Arabia, special forces from the United Arab Emirates and al Qaeda militants all fought on the same side this week to wrest back control over most of Yemen’s second city, Aden, from pro-Iranian Houthi rebels, according to local residents and Houthi forces.

As Yemen’s conflict degenerates into a precarious tangle of alliances, it poses a new quandary for the U.S. Yemen was a cornerstone of the American global counterterrorism strategy until earlier this year when the Houthis drove out a government that was working with Washington. The U.S. then backed a Saudi-led coalition that launched airstrikes against the Houthis in March.

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WikiLeaks Cables Show a Saudi Obsession With Iran and interference in business of academic institutions around the world

WikiLeaks Cables Show a Saudi Obsession With Iran and interference in business of academic institutions around the world

    Thursday, July 16, 2015   No comments

Saudis wanted to fire university president

For decades, Saudi Arabia has poured billions of its oil dollars into sympathetic Islamic organizations around the world, quietly practicing checkbook diplomacy to advance its agenda.

But a trove of thousands of Saudi documents recently released by WikiLeaks reveals in surprising detail how the government’s goal in recent years was not just to spread its strict version of Sunni Islam — though that was a priority — but also to undermine its primary adversary: Shiite Iran.

The documents from Saudi Arabia’s Foreign Ministry illustrate a near obsession with Iran, with diplomats in Africa, Asia and Europe monitoring Iranian activities in minute detail and top government agencies plotting moves to limit the spread of Shiite Islam.



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Israel Assassinated Senior Syrian Official

Israel Assassinated Senior Syrian Official

    Thursday, July 16, 2015   No comments

On Aug. 1, 2008, a small team of Israeli commandos entered the waters near Tartus, Syria, and shot and killed a Syrian general as he was holding a dinner party at his seaside weekend home. Muhammad Suleiman, a top aide to the Syrian president, was shot in the head and neck, and the Israeli military team escaped by sea.

While Israel has never spoken about its involvement, secret U.S. intelligence files confirm that Israeli special operations forces assassinated the general while he vacationed at his luxury villa on the Syrian coast.

The internal National Security Agency document, provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, is the first official confirmation that the assassination of Suleiman was an Israeli military operation, and ends speculation that an internal dispute within the Syrian government led to his death.

A top-secret entry in the NSA’s internal version of Wikipedia, called Intellipedia, described the assassination by “Israeli naval commandos” near the port town of Tartus as the “first known instance of Israel targeting a legitimate government official.” The details of the assassination were included in a “Manhunting Timeline” within the NSA’s intelligence repository.

According to three former U.S. intelligence officers with extensive experience in the Middle East, the document’s classification markings indicate that the NSA learned of the assassination through surveillance. The officials asked that they not be identified, because they were discussing classified information.

The information in the document is labeled “SI,” which means that the intelligence was collected by monitoring communications signals. “We’ve had access to Israeli military communications for some time,” said one of the former U.S. intelligence officers.

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Presidential News Conference on Iran Nuclear Deal -- JCPOA

Presidential News Conference on Iran Nuclear Deal -- JCPOA

    Wednesday, July 15, 2015   No comments

President Obama held a news conference on the Iran nuclear agreement (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action -- JCPOA). The deal limits the country’s nuclear ability for more than a decade in return for the lifting of international sanctions and an eventual lifting of the arms embargo. The president talked about why the deal is in the national security interest of the United States and addressed some of the criticisms of the agreement. He also answered

several questions on topics not related to Iran, including criminal justice reform, his upcoming trip to Africa, and whether he should revoke the Medal of Freedom from Bill Cosby.

Obama Makes His Case on Iran Nuclear Deal

Obama Makes His Case on Iran Nuclear Deal

    Tuesday, July 14, 2015   No comments

Only hours after the conclusion of an agreement with Iran to lift oil and financial sanctions in return for curbs on Iran’s nuclear capabilities, President Obama is a man who evinces no second thoughts whatsoever about the deal he struck. In a 45-minute interview in the Cabinet Room, the president kept stressing one argument: Don’t judge me on whether this deal transforms Iran, ends Iran’s aggressive behavior toward some of its Arab neighbors or leads to détente between Shiites and Sunnis. Judge me on one thing: Does this deal prevent Iran from breaking out with a nuclear weapon for the next 10 years and is that a better outcome for

America, Israel and our Arab allies than any other alternative on the table?

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The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

The history of British slave ownership has been buried: now its scale can be revealed

    Monday, July 13, 2015   No comments

"The road to imperial glory is always paved by the blood, sweat, and skulls of the vulnerable and oppressed"

The past has a disconcerting habit of bursting, uninvited and unwelcome, into the present. This year history gate-crashed modern America in the form of a 150-year-old document: a few sheets of paper that compelled Hollywood actor Ben Affleck to issue a public apology and forced the highly regarded US public service broadcaster PBS to launch an internal investigation.

The document, which emerged during the production of Finding Your Roots, a celebrity genealogy show, is neither unique nor unusual. It is one of thousands that record the primal wound of the American republic – slavery. It lists the names of 24 slaves, men and women, who in 1858 were owned by Benjamin L Cole, Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather. When this uncomfortable fact came to light, Affleck asked the show’s producers to conceal his family’s links to slavery. Internal emails discussing the programme were later published by WikiLeaks, forcing Affleck to admit in a Facebook post: “I didn’t want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed.”

It was precisely because slaves were reduced to property that they appear so regularly in historic documents, both in the US and in Britain. As property, slaves were listed in plantation accounts and itemised in inventories. They were recorded for tax reasons and detailed alongside other transferable goods on the pages of thousands of wills. Few historical documents cut to the reality of slavery more than lists of names written alongside monetary values. It is now almost two decades since I had my first encounter with British plantation records, and I still feel a surge of emotion when I come across entries for slave children who, at only a few months old, have been ascribed a value in sterling; the sale of children and the separation of families was among the most bitterly resented aspects of an inhuman system.

Slavery resurfaces in America regularly. The disadvantage and discrimination that disfigures the lives and limits the life chances of so many African-Americans is the bitter legacy of the slave system and the racism that underwrote and outlasted it. Britain, by contrast, has been far more successful at covering up its slave-owning and slave-trading past. Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

That geographic distance made it possible for slavery to be largely airbrushed out of British history, following the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833. Many of us today have a more vivid image of American slavery than we have of life as it was for British-owned slaves on the plantations of the Caribbean. The word slavery is more likely to conjure up images of Alabama cotton fields and whitewashed plantation houses, of Roots, Gone With The Wind and 12 Years A Slave, than images of Jamaica or Barbados in the 18th century. This is not an accident.

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Saudi Arabia rejects UN declared cease-fire and continues bombing cities in Yemen, more civilians are killed

Saudi Arabia rejects UN declared cease-fire and continues bombing cities in Yemen, more civilians are killed

    Saturday, July 11, 2015   No comments

Saudi Arabia rejects UN declared cease-fire and continues bombing cities in Yemen, more civilians are killed

Saudi-led air strikes hit Yemen’s capital and another main city causing explosions, residents reported, two hours after a United Nations humanitarian truce took effect.

Bombing pounded Yemeni military positions east of the capital Sanaa and also Yemen’s third largest city Taiz.

The U.N.-brokered pause in the fighting was meant to last a week to allow aid deliveries to the country’s 21 million people who have endured over three months of bombing and civil war.

A coalition of Arab states has been bombing the Iranian-allied Houthi rebel movement since late March in a bid to restore to power Yemen’s President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who has fled to Riyadh.

The group controls much of Yemen, including Sanaa and Taiz. Air raids and fighting have killed more than 3,000 people since then. Residents in areas of heavy combat between Houthi forces and local militiamen reported that ground fighting and Saudi-led air strikes on the Houthis had increased across the country in the hours before the truce was to take effect.

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Relentless Terror: The Everyday Horrors of the Islamic State... and ... The Allure of the Islamic State: Money and Status Attract Fighters

Relentless Terror: The Everyday Horrors of the Islamic State... and ... The Allure of the Islamic State: Money and Status Attract Fighters

    Monday, July 06, 2015   No comments

 Relentless Terror: The Everyday Horrors of the Islamic State
In late June, images made their way around the world of four men as they were locked in a car and killed with a rocket-propelled grenade. They showed seven men, chained together with explosive necklaces, as they were blown up. And they provided evidence that five men had been locked in a metal cage and lowered into the water to drown. As we learned last week, 16 men in total were murdered in these brutal ways. We know this because the executioners with the group calling itself "Islamic State" wanted to film their victims as they were dying.

The films, carefully staged and distributed using all modern channels, seem to be coming directly from hell. The men who see themselves as the new caliphs are performing an unparalleled dance of death, complete with the kinds of horrors once depicted by painter Hieronymus Bosch -- only these killers and executioners are anything but fiction. In Syria and along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Iraq today, where human civilization once began, it is not some nightmarish fictional characters at work, but real players in contemporary history with a megalomaniacal agenda. And instead of covering up their murders, they are doing the opposite -- inviting the rest of the world to look on, proud of a brutality that knows no bounds and is both part of their military strategy and an instrument of oppression.

The Islamic State is both fact and fiction at the same time. It has clearly created a propaganda bubble, but it also represents a new social order in places where it has come into power. The "caliphate" was proclaimed about a year ago, and the older group ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) has become IS, often referred to as Da'ish in the Arab world. But all of these names refer to the same thing: a militant movement with its origins partly in the Iraqi prison camps run by the Americans, which grew into al-Qaida in Iraq and now, as IS, is claiming territory for a new state, territory captured by former top figures in the regime of dictator Saddam Hussein.

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 The Allure of the Islamic State: Money and Status Attract Fighters

The prisoner enters the room with his eyes blind-folded, with stiff and uncertain steps. He's shaking and doesn't seem to know where he is, why he is here or what is happening to him. The guard leading him directs the man to one of eight stools. A second uniformed man stands in the room. He's the head of security at this high-security prison in Erbil, with simultaneous responsibility for the anti-terror unit. He doesn't want to reveal his name for security reasons.

"In this prison, we observe the rules of the United Nations Human Rights Conventions," he says, unsolicited. "There's no torture. We treat our prisoners well."

The prisoner on the other side of the table is said to be an emir, an officer in the army of the "Islamic State" captured during fighting near the city of Tal Afar. His name: Mohammed Ibrahim, born in 1985, a professional mason, a football fan and, since July of last year, a soldier serving the Islamic State. He disputes being an emir. He claims to have been a simple soldier, one who had been on watch duty and hid himself in a trench during the Allied air strikes. He had been captured there by Peshmerga fighters.

Ibrahim has a wife and three kids. He says he took up the call to arms because two of his brothers were killed in 2004 and 2006, after going to war to fight for al-Qaida. He had been feeling the pain of that loss for years. Although the deaths of his brothers may have been a motive for Ibrahim, a second, also plausible one, was opportunism. Why else would it have taken him years after the deaths of his brothers to team up with the Islamic State's forces? Why had he only just now entered into battle?

One possible answer is that, following IS' capture of Mosul one month before, when the Iraqi army led with the arrival of a few thousand fighters in pickup trucks, he wanted to endear himself to the future leaders in Iraq.

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