Two U.S. F-35 Lightning II aircraft and about 20 supporting airmen arrived in Bulgaria this week from Royal Air Force Lakenheath, England, as part of a deployment that enhances the region’s ability to host the aircraft for future deployments and operations.
“This deployment clearly demonstrates our nation’s contribution to the security and collective defense here in Europe,” said Army Gen. Curtis M. Scaparrotti, the commander of U.S. European Command and NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe. “It shows we are serious about territorial integrity and will defend our interests with the most advanced capabilities our nation has to offer.”
These movements were planned in advance and in close coordination with the Bulgarian government, Eucom officials said. The deployment allows the F-35A pilots and supporting airmen the opportunity to engage in familiarization training within the European theater while reassuring allies and partners of U.S. dedication to the enduring peace and stability of the region, according to U.S. Air Forces in Europe officials.
The aircraft and airmen are from the Air Force’s 34th Fighter Squadron and the Air Force Reserve’s 466th Fighter Squadron. Both units are based at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.
The F-35A’s were joined by an Air Force KC-135 Stratotanker, which departed from Royal Air Force Mildenhall, England. The air refueler is an Air Force Reserve aircraft forward-deployed from the 459th Air Reserve Wing at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, and showcases the command’s ability to employ active and reserve airmen across the globe, Eucom officials said.
As the first European flying training deployment for the F-35A, these movements signify an important milestone and natural progression of the joint strike fighter program throughout Europe, the officials said.
This long-planned deployment continues to galvanize the U.S. commitment to security and stability throughout Europe, Eucom officials said. The aircraft and airmen began arriving in Europe April 15 and will remain for several weeks.
The F-35A forward deployments throughout Europe maximize opportunities for training while also strengthening the NATO alliance, the officials said. The introduction of the premier fifth-generation fighter to Europe brings state-of-the-art sensors, interoperability and a vast array of advanced air-to-air and air-to-surface munitions that will help maintain the fundamental territorial and air sovereignty rights of all nations, Eucom officials said. The fighter provides unprecedented precision-attack capability against current and emerging threats with unmatched lethality, survivability and interoperability, they said.
(Editor’s Note: Additional reporting by Air Force Tech. Sgt. Jessica Hines, U.S. Air Forces in Europe and Africa)
When the Soviet Union was there, a field called Kremlinology was prevalent in the West. It was the study of the secretive Kremlin to understand and fathom what was happening behind the iron curtain. Things such as chair placement, who sits next to whom, etc was supposed to give an idea on how Soviet economy is supposed to perform. It was pseudoscientic, and most of it was of course threat inflated guesswork. Obviously sitting arrangements might give a hint of who within the Kremlin walls are falling out of fashion or not, but in no way can it give any hint about the overall direction of the country. Naturally the Kremlinologists couldn’t for the love of God, predict anything about Soviet economy, and couldn’t foresee the primary reason behind Soviet collapse.
In recent days, something similar is back in vogue. There is a steady stream of prediction about Chinese economy. As recently as in Davos forum last year it was predicted that Chinese economy was in for a hard landing. It wasn’t. China’s economy actually grew 6.9 percent in the first quarter from a year, which was slightly better than expected, as well as predicted.
Last month Premier Ki Keqiang suggested that 6.5 percent would considered an optimum growth, although higher if possible could be achieved. Even Reuters predicted 6.8 percent, which was what Chinese growth has been hovering for around two years.
BBC reports that China’s National Bureau of Statistics said the economy maintained momentum from the second half of last year. Apparently the supply side reforms result is coming along. The growth is fueled by the rise in domestic consumption, as China focuses on domestic market strength. Retail rates jumped 10.9% in February. Booming property market is another cause of growth. As well as one of the primary drivers of economy, which never fails, domestic infrastructure projects.
Also, a weak yuan helped in growth boost. In August, People’s Bank decided to change the fixed trading ban. After the resulting market panic, the currency weakened, and trade was boosted. As Forbes reported, by major sector, the industrial sector picked up to 6.4% in year-ago terms from 6.1% a quarter earlier, even when service sector fell from 8 something percent to 7.7 which wasn’t negligible, but not big enough.
But stability is a fleeting concept, and no one should be complacent. There are two factors which will be stable in Chinese economy, and it will take time to manage those two. First of all, maintaining the pace of service sector reform is tough. Yes, China needs more houses and roads, and infrastructure will continue to provide growth potential. But growth based on infrastructure fluctuates. Second, China is in the zone of middle income trap and that’s fine, considering Chinese domestic market is still not purely and uniformly consumerist as the West.
But those are economic considerations. Another important consideration, often overlooked is geopolitics. China also needs to continue to make sure that Yuan remains weak, compared to Dollar. Geopolitical stability is a key factor in this. With the Korean peninsula extremely volatile, all efforts must be concentrated to avoidance of a war in Chinese backyard. Any geopolitical uncertainty would affect trade and export, and weaken the dollar, not to mention the increased cost coming from actual crisis situations.
The Chinese economy grew for the last 26 years, not just for economic measures, which are indeed extraordinary. But what’s often forgotten is that China avoided geopolitical entanglements. That needs to continue. As long as China can lay of geopolitical trouble, those hard landing people would have to revise their predictions every year. As Sun Tzu said, throughout history, there is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. China should avoid conflict at all cost as well.
It is often thought that the regime has a grand strategy for suppressing the rebellion in the western half of the country that constitutes the main conflict within the Syrian civil war. In reality though, there is no one-size-fits-all approach, and the question of how the regime deals with restive areas very much depends on area and circumstances. In some places, a Sunni-Alawite sectarian faultline has influenced the regime’s approach: thus we see a clear demographic shift in the city of Homs in favour of the Alawites, with the rebellious and predominantly Sunni neighbourhoods largely depopulated. Indeed it seems unlikely that the majority of the original inhabitants of those neighbourhoods will return for the foreseeable future. Some areas that are not tied to this sectarian faultline but proved to be a thorn in the regime’s side for years- such as Darayya, a suburb to the south of Damascus- will also likely remain depopulated for the time being. Indeed, as of the time of writing, Darayya remains a military zone that can only be visited with a special permit, even for Shi’i pilgrims who may want to see the largely ruined Sakina shrine in the area.
However, it would not be feasible for the regime to depopulate every restive area. It is in this context that the mechanism of ‘reconciliation’ (musalaha) exists, whereby an agreement is struck in order to bring an area officially back under regime authority. The exact terms of the reconciliation agreements have varied from place to place, perhaps reflecting some experimentation. This article will focus on the case of al-Sanamayn, a town in north Deraa province where a reconciliation agreement was struck at the end of December 2016. It is of course also important to give the context of the agreement, thus this article will first provide a general description of the town and its history during the Syrian civil war.
Unlike some other Deraa localities, al-Sanamayn has no Shi’i population. Rather it is entirely Sunni. The populations of Deraa localities can also normally be divided into the most important extended families/clans. In al-Sanamayn, these families are:
al-Atmeh
al-Nasar
al-Falah
al-Labad
al-Dhiyab
al-Haimid
al-Shatar
In addition to the original population, the town also hosts a number of people internally displaced from nearby villages over the course of the Syrian civil war.
On account of its location, the town of al-Sanamayn has been regarded as an important strategic point. From the rebel perspective, capturing the town could have served as a ‘gateway’ to connect with the rebel-held areas in the Damascus countryside and suburbs and thus launch a serious fight to take Damascus from the regime. However, in light of the regime’s consolidation of control of much of the Damascus area since 2013-2014, and the constraints faced by the Southern Front (primarily consisting of local Free Syrian Army-banner units working with an operations room in Amman), any notions of taking Damascus from the regime can only be seen as fanciful at this stage. For the regime, the al-Sanamayn area is home to an important base for the Syrian army’s 9th division serving as a logistics point and a position to fire on rebel positions in the wider north Deraa area. The al-Sanamayn area also has a base for the 15th brigade affiliated with the 5th division. In addition, al-Sanamayn bears some industrial importance for the regime’s development plans in Deraa, as al-Sanamayn is supposed to feature an industrial area that was partly the subject of a recent conference attended by the artisans union and the Deraa provincial governor Muhammad Khalid al-Hanus. There are also some personal loyalist connections to al-Sanamayn: most importantly, the head of the Deraa province branch of the Ba’ath Party- Kamal al-Atmeh– is from al-Sanamayn.
Though there was never a major battle waged by rebels from outside the town to advance into al-Sanamayn and take control of it, the town saw the rise of a number of local rebel factions within its neighbourhoods. This development is hardly surprising considering that the town saw protests against the regime on multiple occasions in 2011, indicating the existence of considerable popular discontent. In late March 2011, a violent crackdown on protests in al-Sanamayn occurred, dubbed a massacre in pro-opposition media.
A protest on 6 November 2011 in al-Sanamayn. The banner in the name of “Revolutionaries of al-Sanamayn” reads: “We don’t love you.” The Syrian Arabic- Ma Manhibbak– is a play on the common slogan in support of Assad: Manhibbak (“We love you”). Photo Credit: Syria Comment.
The town of al-Sanamayn has never featured some of the more familiar names of the Syrian insurgency like Jabhat al-Nusra or Ahrar al-Sham, even as many rebels of al-Sanamayn origin have participated in fighting outside the area. Instead, the factions that emerged within al-Sanamayn derived from a strictly local basis. The first faction to arise in al-Sanamayn was Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn (“The al-Sanamayn Martyrs Battalion”) in late 2012, under the leadership of Abu Fadi al-Saydali (real name: Muhammad Jaber al-Atmeh), who worked as a service taxi driver between Damascus and al-Sanamayn before the uprising. Other local groups were then formed through the course of 2013 as rebel forces inside al-Sanamayn gained strength. Most notably, in May 2013 came the announcement of the group Katibat Nusrat al-Haq (“Supporting the Truth Battalion”), under the leadership of one Abd al-Latif al-Haimid, who studied at the Shari’i college in Damascus university and taught Islamic education, thus the use of the honorific title of sheikh in reference to him.
Soon after it was formed, Katibat Nusrat al-Haq came into conflict with Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn, which accused the group of engaging in criminal behaviour through taking money from civilians in the al-Sanamayn area under threat of arms, while falsely using Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn’s name and the pretext of buying weapons for the battalion. Notice the deriding of Abd al-Latif al-Haimid’s title of sheikh by Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn. The other side of the story is the claim that this dispute was rooted in al-Saydali’s perception that Katibat Nusrat al-Haq posed a threat to his influence over the rebel milieu in al-Sanamayn, as Abd al-Latif al-Haimid was supposedly not the sort of character who could have sanctioned criminal behaviour in light of his Islamic background. Abd al-Latif al-Haimid was found dead at the end of 2013 in rather murky circumstances while outside of al-Sanamayn, though accusations of kidnapping and assassination were directed at the Mujahideen of Hawran Battalion affiliated with the group Liwa Hamza Assad Allah, with which Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn also had links in 2013.
Like many other rebel environments, the al-Sanamayn area saw its share of faction merger initiatives. In February 2014 came the announcement of the formation of Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra (“Fire of the Revolution Brigade”), likely a homage to the title of Sha’alat al-Thawra that has become associated with al-Sanamayn. With a purview beyond the town of al-Sanamayn, the brigade was declared to be “operating in the northwest region of Deraa province.” The formation statement declared the leader to be Yahya al-Rifa’i, with one Maher al-Labad as his deputy, while al-Saydali would serve as the head of civil affairs for the group. Probably owing to tensions with al-Saydali, Katibat Nusrat al-Haq did not join the initiative. Later in July 2014, Maher al-Labad would also found his own contingent: Liwa Fajr al-Tahrir (“Dawn of Liberation Brigade”), though that did not necessarily amount to a defection from Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra. The names of both Liwa Fajr al-Tahrir and Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra are mentioned in conducting operations against regime forces in the months following the former’s formation. The links between the two are also illustrated by the fact that they have adopted the same subsequent affiliations, mostly recently being affiliated to the Southern Front’s 46th infantry division. The main difference now is that Liwa Fajr al-Tahrir maintains a presence inside al-Sanamayn city, whereas Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra does not. As for Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn, it had apparently gone its own way by 2015, as al-Saydali had allegedly sought to marginalise others like Maher al-Labad in Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra and claim the leadership for himself. There were also claims of criminal behaviour and imposition of extortion fees on civilians.
Even so, it should be noted that despite the apparent comprehensiveness of the offices announced for the local councils, most of the public services in al-Sanamayn have been provided throughout by the regime. The local council bodies have instead been limited to distribution of gifts and aid on particular occasions (cf. here and here). According to Yassin al-Atmeh, his local council, which on the ground in al-Sanamayn is presently headed by one al-Tayyib Abu al-Nur, continues some of these activities today, telling me: “The council still provides what it can to aid the orphans and the sons of those detained, along with aid from organizations and the people of benevolence, who have taken it upon themselves to pay sums for the orphans.” All that said, there are allegations that Yassin al-Atmeh has enriched himself, along with Muhammad Jaber al-Atmeh, through corruption and theft of local council money.
So how did the reconciliation come about? As mentioned above, rebel forces inside al-Sanamayn gained strength through 2013. While service provision by the regime remained, large parts of al-Sanamayn effectively fell outside of regime control. The main exceptions were the market road and the general road in al-Sanamayn. The rebels would target regime positions and bases with projectiles or engage in relatively small-scale clashes. Instances of kidnappings by one side would lead to tit-for-tat escalation. The worst such incident appears to have been a massacre conducted by regime forces in April 2013, reportedly killing more than 60 people in an assault that was focused on al-Sanamayn’s southern neighbourhoods. Civilians would sometimes be caught in the crossfire more generally. For instance, in November 2015, at least one civilian was killed and a number of others wounded as rebel mortar fire landed at the site of the bakery.
The regime’s main leverage over the rebel factions in al-Sanamayn was to impose a siege on the neighbourhoods in which the rebels had effective control, blocking access to commodities and goods. Thus in December 2015, the regime’s forces imposed a blockade on those neighbourhoods, reportedly in retaliation for the rebel factions targeting a car carrying an army officer and a number of personnel. The rebel factions in turn had reportedly carried out the attack in response to the arrest of a youth from al-Sanamayn at one of the regime checkpoints around the town. The blockade was lifted after negotiations between the rebel factions and the regime forces, on condition that the rebels do not attack regime positions or personnel. Another condition of this virtual ceasefire was that people in al-Sanamayn should be able to participate in the subsequent parliamentary elections, which took place in April 2016.
The regime would go on to impose a new siege on the rebel-held areas of al-Sanamayn in response to a perceived violation of the de facto truce, as a man called Imad al-Labad and his group- well known for criminality among the people of al-Sanamayn- had stolen a number of cars, including one belonging to one of the regime’s security apparatuses. The regime then used this opportunity to try to resolve the problems it faced in al-Sanamayn by pressing for a reconciliation agreement. Rebel opinion was divided at the time regarding how to respond to the new siege. Liwa Ummat al-Tawheed, based only inside of al-Sanamayn, rejected the idea put forward mostly by al-Sanamayn rebels based outside the town to target the regime’s military points inside the town, fearing the consequences for those already besieged inside the town. There does appear to have been some outside rebel firing on the town to target the regime, which killed at least one civilian.
The pressure created by the siege was a contributing factor to negotiations in December 2016 and the formal reconciliation agreement towards the end of that month. Key to the negotiation of this agreement on the regime side was Wafiq Nasir, head of the military intelligence in southern Syria. Wafiq Nasir is widely disliked among more third-way Druze in Deraa’s neighbouring province of Suwayda’ where his authority also applies. The other key figure on the regime side was the head of the Syrian army’s 9th division. Intermediaries in the reconciliation agreement were Jamal al-Asha, head of the reconciliation committee in al-Sanamayn, and one Antar al-Labad, who is accused of dealing in stolen cars, wider theft and of being close to Wafiq Nasir. He had set up his own very small armed group that was initially on the side of the rebels, but well before the reconciliation, he had established relations with the regime. During the siege of al-Sanamayn prior to the reconciliation, he was able to use his influence to bring about a lifting of the siege at the end of November 2016. Jamal al-Asha is apparently of the al-Labad family, with his son allegedly on the side of the rebels and based in Nawa. Both a Jamal al-Labad and an Antar al-Labad are named along with a number of other locals by pro-opposition outlet Zaman al-Wasl as those who had been pushing for a reconciliation agreement in al-Sanamayn to avoid a Darayya-style scenario. Observe that the family names of those named by Zaman al-Wasl indicate that they are mostly from al-Sanamayn’s biggest families.
The reconciliation agreement did not require a formal undertaking of the reconciliation process by every inhabitant of al-Sanamayn. Rather, the idea was that a certain number of people would undertake the process to represent the entire town. The pro-opposition outlet al-Modon says that the reconciliation was imposed on a clan basis: that is, that each clan/extended family should have a representation in the reconciliation agreement. For its part, the regime’s state media outlet SANA claimed on 25 December 2016 that 510 people in al-Sanamayn- among them 150 “armed men”- carried out taswiyat al-wad’ (“sorting out of affairs”) as part of the reconciliation, while handing over weapons to the security apparatuses. No one inside al-Sanamayn was compelled to leave for Idlib or other rebel-held areas.
Among those who formally reconciled, one important motive to undergo reconciliation would be to deal with the problem of being wanted for military service. In this case, taswiyat al-wad’ would grant a temporary formal respite. As for the rebel factions inside al-Sanamayn, it is clear that not every member or even leader of every faction formally reconciled and handed over weapons. Indeed, there was no requirement for them all to do so, and any formal reconciliation on the part of the rebels can be seen as symbolic. The most notable rebel faction leader who formally reconciled was Tha’ir al-Falah, leader of Liwa Ummat al-Tawheed. In contrast, Abu Fadi al-Saydali, leader of Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn, did not formally reconcile, though he did meet with Wafiq Nasir.
It must be emphasised that while not every rebel or rebel leader inside al-Sanamayn formally reconciled, all the rebel factions operating inside the town have agreed to abide by the state of affairs imposed by the reconciliation. This situation is not all that different from the agreement struck after the lifting of the siege in December 2015. Thus, as of now, the factions still exist inside of al-Sanamayn and have kept hold of many of their weapons, but they do not attack any regime positions or personnel. Meanwhile, the regime provides services as usual, maintains state institutions in the town, and allows regular flow of commodities and goods to all areas of the town. Also as will be recalled from above, the local council of Yassin al-Atmeh still exists at a very modest level as before. Furthermore, the regime’s army and security forces do not generally intervene in security and criminal incidents in the town, allowing the factions to deal with these matters, while legal affairs such as marriage are dealt with by the regime’s court system. Thus, the regime avoids arresting anyone inside al-Sanamayn. That said, the regime has helped to set up a new faction inside al-Sanamayn to try to help maintain security in the town, about which more below.
At present, the main factions inside al-Sanamayn are:
Katibat Shuhada’ al-Sanamayn of Abu Fadi al-Saydali.
Liwa Ummat al-Tawheed of Tha’ir al-Falah (aka Tha’ir al-Abbas).
Liwa Fajr al-Tahrir of Maher al-Labad, though Maher al-Labad is not inside al-Sanamayn. By virtue of links to Liwa Sha’alat al-Thawra and the 46th infantry division, there is a presence for this group outside al-Sanamayn as well.
Katibat Maghawir al-Haq, led by one Abu Zaher al-Labad (real name: Barhum Mahmoud al-Labad): a new group created after the release of Abu Zaher al-Labad from prison as per the reconciliation agreement requiring the release of sets of detainees. The group mostly contains people from the al-Labad family and was set up with help from the military intelligence.
In addition to these factions, there are some smaller armed groups, each of which does not have more than 10-15 people. These groups may constitute criminal gangs and/or partly reflect remnants of al-Sanamayn’s minor factions from earlier years. Muhammad Khalif, the leader of Katibat Dir’ al-Sanamayn (aka Liwa Dir’ al-Sanamayn), and a representative on his behalf, for instance, insisted to me that his group is still a real actor on the ground in al-Sanamayn (recall the group’s name among the signatories that backed the local council that lost out to Yassin al-Atmeh’s outfit). Yet a media activist in al-Sanamayn- Abu al-Awras al-Shami- insisted that the group does not have a presence on the ground and was dissolved some time ago. The reality is perhaps somewhere in between. It may be the case that Katibat Dir’ al-Sanamayn no longer exists as a meaningful name on the ground in the town, but perhaps Khalif can call on some armed supporters in times of trouble for him or his family.
Al-Sanamayn, April 2017. Photo Credit: Syria Comment.
So on the whole, how is life in al-Sanamayn after the reconciliation? Commenting in general on the reconciliation, the media representative for Muhammad Khalif did not necessarily object to it, clarifying: “If these reconciliations prevent bloodshed, we all welcome them…The reconciliation happened through pressure from the people of al-Sanamayn town on the revolutionaries present inside, because all the revolutionaries of al-Sanamayn are from the people of the town.”
For many opposition/rebel supporters and activists, the reconciliation amounts to little more than cynical regime propaganda. “This reconciliation arose for media purposes for the regime’s interest only in order to promote reconciliations to the rest of the localities in Deraa province,” said Aboud al-Hawrani, an activist for the pro-opposition “Revolutionaries of al-Sanamayn” media office. He elaborated: “Even before the reconciliation, al-Sanamayn was in a state of ceasefire with the regime [referring to the agreement in December 2015] and the problems that arose with the regime arose on an individual basis only: i.e. if the regime arrested one of someone’s relatives, that person would cause problems with the regime like kidnapping military personnel and firing on a military zone…This state of affairs remains the case even after the reconciliation. This reconciliation is a media movement only for the regime on the basis that al-Sanamayn has come under complete control.”
Other people in al-Sanamayn with whom I spoke agreed with the basic point that the current situation is little different from the previous status quo (i.e. the one prior to the siege imposed just before the reconciliation). In this state of affairs, the existence of multiple armed factions and gangs without a real central intervening authority poses an important problem for those who just want greater stability, order and rule-of-law. Indeed, Ala’ al-Din al-Labad, one of the individuals named by Zaman al-Wasl as being behind the efforts to push for a reconciliation, seemed gloomy about the current situation. He was never a supporter of the opposition but not necessarily an ideological loyalist of the regime. Rather, his primary desires are stability and security. “The situation is like the silence before the storm,” he said. He went on to explain: “When arms spread in the hands of the ignorant, there is much killing, as well as treachery, extortion and theft. This is our state of affairs now.” He also pointed out the poor state of services provision, affirming that “there is one hour of very weak and intermittent electricity for every four hours it is cut off. Water is available for 4 hours a week. Insufficient.” The provision of national grid electricity (Arabic: kahraba’ wataniya) by a ratio of around 1-1.5 hours for every 4-5 hours it is cut off was corroborated by others residing in al-Sanamayn.
At this stage, the main factions inside al-Sanamayn primarily amount to clan-interest groups. As Tha’ir al-Falah explained, “We no longer have [political] factions in al-Sanamayn, they have become clan factions: every armed person affiliated with his family.” Thus, his group- Liwa Ummat al-Tawheed- mostly consists of members of the al-Falah clan that primarily inhabits the northeastern part of the town. Abu al-Awras al-Shami, himself from the al-Haimid family, offered a similar assessment: “In the recent time, the armed factions in al-Sanamayn have become clan factions: that is, every family has armed men from its sons, whose aim is to protect the family from any attack.”
When this point is taken into account along with the existence of criminal gangs, Ala’ al-Din al-Labad’s concerns about lack of security are hardly surprising. As Abu al-Awras al-Shami also explained, “There are many security problems in the town from theft, kidnapping and assault on the people by force of arms, and no one can put a stop to these criminals.” One example of these problems is an incident that received some opposition media attention around a month ago, as it involved the new Katibat Maghawir al-Haq. The event- a clash that killed at least one person and wounded a number of people- was portrayed in the pro-opposition media outlet All4Syria as a clash along loyalist-rebel lines (Katibat Maghawir al-Haq vs. “the battalions of the revolutionaries”). In fact, this portrayal is quite off-base. Fundamentally, the incident involved clashes between members of the al-Dhiyab family and members of the al-Labad family. The roots of the issue lie in an attempt by at least two people from the al-Dhiyab family- apparently members of a notorious criminal gang led by one Nadim al-Dhiyab- to impose an extortion fee on a shop, allegedly demanding 500,000 Syrian pounds and threatening to burn the shop if the owner did not pay the extortion fee. This threat was rejected by the shop owner, who then contacted Barhum al-Labad to intervene. Barhum al-Labad then came with one Abu Abdo al-Shatar and someone else from the al-Labad family, and tried to get the gang members to leave. When they refused, one of them was shot in the leg. Barhum then sent men to members of the al-Dhiyab family to try to prevent a wider clash. Despite an apparent initial agreement from the wider al-Dhiyab family, there was then an assault by members of the al-Dhiyab family on the Harat al-Labad (the part of the town where the al-Labad family is found in large numbers).
Also of note with regards to All4Syria’s coverage of the incident is the claim that Katibat Maghawir al-Haq is affiliated with the Fifth Legion. An interesting follow-up item was posted on All4Syria, in which Katibat Maghawir al-Haq ostensibly denied this affiliation in a statement, which is reproduced below.
The statement at first sight has all the trappings of a typical Deraa rebel faction, using the monikers of “the Free Syrian Army” and “the Southern Front.” The statement includes revolutionary affirmations like the following: “Our complete readiness…to defend our land against the Assadist criminal gangs.” It concludes with the declaration: “Victory to our blessed revolution.” The interesting thing about this statement though is that it may not have been written by Abu Zaher al-Labad at all, but rather Maher al-Labad, who was angered by All4Syria’s claim about Katibat Maghawir al-Haq and told Abu al-Awras al-Shami that he intended for an apology statement from All4Syria, as he considered that All4Syria’s article would be harmful to the al-Labad family.
In any case, the conflict involving Katibat Maghawir al-Haq required intervention from Wafiq Nasir. According to Tha’ir al-Falah, Wafiq Nasir has formally distanced himself and the military intelligence from the faction in statements to the people of al-Sanamayn. Tha’ir al-Falah attributes this distancing to the problem of this clash, adding that “Maghawir al-Haq is a faction that does not have popular support in al-Sanamayn. The town has agreed on this point.” A more sympathetic view of the faction was offered by Ala’ al-Din al-Labad, portraying it as a group dedicated to cracking down on criminal behaviour. Family affiliation biases are likely at play here.
Tha’ir al-Falah’s own faction was involved in a minor clash this month, after a member of an armed gang demanded that a doctor provide him with free treatment, threatening him with his weapons. When the doctor refused, the member of the armed gang attacked him and opened fire on his clinic, prompting an intervention from Tha’ir al-Falah, resulting in a clash that lasted no more than a matter of minutes. Afterwards the armed gang came to Liwa Ummat al-Tawheed’s base and apologised to the doctor, resolving the case.
It would be a mistake to presume that all conflicts inside al-Sanamayn are between members of different families, just as not all conflicts within Iraq and Syria more generally take place along ethno-religious sectarian lines. A recent case that culminated in a trial and execution of the accused by qisas ruling involved people from the same clan: al-Atmeh. In particular, a young man called Ismail Yahya al-Atmeh, a member of Abu Fadi al-Saydali’s faction, killed a father and son (also of the al-Atmeh clan) in a quarrel. After much pressure from people in al-Sanamayn on Abu Fadi al-Saydali, Ismail al-Atmeh was arrested, and he then acknowledged his crime. Interestingly, in keeping with the regime’s general non-interference in security and criminal matters in al-Sanamayn, the case was referred to the Dar al-‘Adl (“Abode of Justice”), the main rebel judicial authority in southern Syria. To be sure, the Dar al-‘Adl does not have a base in al-Sanamayn: rather the connection was done remotely. Ismail al-Atmeh fled from his imprisonment but was recaptured. He was then executed in accordance with the qisas ruling at dawn on 18 April.
The security problems in al-Sanamayn are recognised to a degree by the leadership of the main factions, thus on the night of 14-15 April there was a meeting involving the faction leaders and town notables. The principal outcome of this meeting was that the majority agreed on the need to form a security force that has joint participation from all the factions and families. The meeting also pointed to the wider lack of popular support for Katibat Maghawir al-Haq, with the consensus view being that its members do not adhere to good conduct or values, and town notables opined that it should not be entrusted to deal with security problems alone. That said, it remains to be seen how exactly the joint security force will be constituted, and whether it will lead to something that endures practically on the ground.
The situation in al-Sanamayn bears a number of analytical implications for wider analysis of how the regime will deal with restive areas. It is clear that al-Sanamayn is considered by the regime to be a model for how it should eventually deal with the wider rebel-held south. Facing wider manpower shortages, it would not be feasible for the regime to retake every Deraa province town by sheer force and depopulation, which would also risk further large-scale displacements towards Jordan and likely upset the Jordanian government’s less hostile stance (in comparison with some other regional players) towards the regime. Instead, some kind of accommodation with what are largely local, more malleable factions- granting them autonomy in security affairs within ‘reconciled’ localities- is the most realistic option for the regime, even as al-Sanamayn is not a wholly identical situation because it never fell entirely out of regime control and arguably has more strategic importance than an entirely rebel-held town like Nawa. For the rebel factions, a possible additional motive to ‘reconcile’ is the risk of feeling trapped in a pincer between the regime’s forces and its allies on one side and the Islamic State-linked Jaysh Khalid bin al-Waleed on the other, which exploited rebel weaknesses to secure some advances earlier this year. Civilian pressure on account of war weariness may also be a motive to settle with reconciliation agreements.
At the same time, it is clear that this model does not come without its problems: namely, an atmosphere of lawlessness created by the large number of armed factions and gangs. This phenomenon exists elsewhere in regime-held territory on account of reliance on auxiliary militias, even as the regime continues to provide services and government jobs in those areas. The difference in al-Sanamayn from those other regime-held areas is that the factions occupy a curious limbo position, whereby they do not attack any regime positions or personnel and the Syrian state institutions function in their place, but they are appealing to a rebel/opposition judicial authority (Dar al-‘Adl) to resolve at least some criminal cases. Within areas controlled by Jaysh Khalid bin al-Waleed, it is clear from some civilian residents that one perceived advantage of the group’s rule is that it is rule by one faction, and thus brings a sense of order. This issue might make the group’s rule more attractive than continued formal rebel control or a reconciliation agreement on the model of al-Sanamayn.
Could the al-Sanamayn reconciliation framework be applied elsewhere in Syria, especially in Idlib province that is the last epicentre for the insurgency’s conflict with the regime? It seems more doubtful on account of the dominance of far more irreconcilable and ideologically hardline elements, such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham and Ahrar al-Sham. To be sure, both of these factions were important inside the Damascus countryside towns of Madaya and Zabadani on the border with Lebanon that were the subject of recent mutual evacuation agreements, but the negotiations took place and were exceptional in nature most notably because there was leverage over Iran in besieging the two Idlib Shi’i towns of al-Fu’a and Kafariya. For Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in Idlib more generally, there is no further leverage in trying to resist a forthcoming push by the regime and its allies into Idlib. It is more likely in the endgame to go with al-Qa’ida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri’s advice to move away from the idea of controlling territory and instead focus on guerrilla tactics.
North Korea has promised to sink a US submarine currently deployed in South Korean waters if the Americans take provocative action. The statement comes shortly after Donald Trump said he won’t be “happy” if Pyongyang conducts another nuclear test.
North Korea’s state-controlled Uriminzokkiri news website warned on Sunday that “the USS Michigan won’t even be able to rise to the surface when it will meet a miserable end and turn into an underwater ghost.”
North Korea’s nuclear deterrent will assure that American aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines, and other military hardware will be “shattered into pieces of molten metal” if they threaten Pyongyang, the article read.
The deployment of the USS Michigan submarine and the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier group near the Korean peninsula “is aimed at further intensifying threats against our republic,” it added.
According to the article, recent statements coming from the Trump administration indicate that Washington is close to implementing a strategic scenario in which an actual military confrontation is a real possibility.
Earlier on Sunday, Donald Trump told CBS that he “will not be happy” if North Korea conducts another nuclear test.
When asked to clarify, the US president said: “I would not be happy. If he (North Korean supreme leader, Kim Jong-un) does a nuclear test, I will not be happy.”
“And I can tell you also, I don’t believe that the president of China, who is a very respected man, will be happy either,” Trump said, adding that he believes Xi Jinping was also “putting pressure” on North Korea to bring a halt to its nuclear tests.
CBS host John Dickerson then directly asked Trump whether US military action was possible, the US president replied: “I don’t know. I mean, we’ll see.”
On Saturday, the North Korean military unsuccessfully fired a mid-range ballistic missile, which reportedly crashed shortly after launch, making it the country’s third failure in April.
Pyongyang’s ballistic missile tests have been banned by the UN, as they are considered to be part a North Korean program aimed at building a nuclear-capable missile.
Trump told CBS that the failed test wasn’t significant enough to warrant action against North Korea.
“This was a small missile. This was not a big missile. This was not a nuclear test, which he was expected to do three days ago. We’ll see what happens,” the president said.
Joint US-South Korean naval wargames, Foal Eagle, involving 20,000 Korean and nearly 10,000 American troops kicked off in the region on Sunday.
Washington said that the USS Carl Vinson aircraft carrier group and USS Michigan submarine, which docked in the port of Busan earlier this week, will remain in the area due to the spike in tensions between Washington and Pyongyang.
Also on Sunday, Seoul said that the US had reaffirmed that it would foot the bill for deploying the THAAD anti-missile system in South Korea to counter the perceived threat from the North.
South Korea was stunned in the middle of last week when Trump told Reuters that South Korea would have to fork out $1 billion for the hardware, contrary to prior agreements.
In a phone call requested by the US, Trump’s national security adviser, H. R. McMaster, “explained that the recent statements by President Trump were made in a general context, in line with the US public expectations on defense cost burden-sharing with allies,” the South Korean president’s office said.
What do the hashtags #IWontCompromise, #EffYourBeautyStandards, #DareToWear, #AndIGetDressed have in common? They are all ultra-intersectional feminist, “body positive” and accumulated over 700,000+ tags and counting on Instagram. Oh, and they are also killing women. Allow me to explain.
No matter how many ludicrous comments saturate pictures of these body positive heroines, obesity is still a massive (no pun) issue within the health system. £25,000 is being spent a minute within the NHS on diabetes alone. In total, an estimated £14 billion pounds is spent a year on treating diabetes and its complications, with the cost of treating complications representing the much higher cost. That number is just scratching the surface, with heart disease, high blood pressure and a copious amount of other obesity related chronic illnesses that is crushing health systems across the western world.
When the inevitable happens, and the obese patient is told that it is now a matter of life and death, the NHS seems to be freely handing out bypass surgeries at the cost of a tidy estimation of £32 million. Yikes. How many nurses would that pay for? How many beds would cater for generally ill people? Imagine how well equipped cancer wards could be with that nice little bonus?
I know what you’re thinking, and it’s a theory that many people leap to when trying to fight against such a precipitous argument. What if the obese person we are currently critiquing has a health problem that causes weight gain? True, there are things that go wrong in the body that will cause unwanted or unprovoked weight gain. I myself suffer from hypothyroidism, with, which means lacking the function to create thyroxine and triiodothyronine, so my metabolic rate is constantly slow, which causes weight gain. I also have to take tablets that cause on average a 20lb weight gain, I also suffer from many joint and pain afflictions, that I will not bore you with the unpronounceable names of. Essentially, my point is I have every excuse in the world to have a weight problem, and be all “body posiztivy”. A couple of years ago I did, being a former obese twenty something, who was ashamed of her folds and rolls. Now, I am 25kg down and still going, I get frantically asked how I did it. No, not body positive, feeling but a fact of healthy eating and exercise. Yeah, that old chestnut. Disappointing for those who were expecting some magical feel good story. Unfortunately, real life is much more prosaic. It’s a fight. Fighting is hard, and I think therein lies the problem. You don’t get fat by running, you get fat by over eating and not moving enough. Laze and greed to be mercilessly honest. Two genuinely appalling attributes that should not be revered, and is not positive by any means.
Not convinced? Still cheerleading behind the big gals who parade in bikinis in train stations to convince people (and probably themselves) that it’s fine to be fat? Ok, how about another angle?
As I previously ran my own fashion label which was published in multiple international issues of Vogue, I noticed how these ultra-feminists attack the fashion industry. Models being too thin, companies not making a big enough selection of plus sized clothes, and designer labels not making plus size clothes at all.
The way these ladies will twist the truth to make it sound like they’re being victimized by the fashion industry is incredible. Of course reality is not as conspiratorial as these feminists would like you to believe. The majority of the time when a fashion brand uses bigger models for clothes that aren’t exclusively for bigger customers, the campaign loses money. The clothes don’t sell as well as ones that were used on smaller models. And whose fault is that? The consumer.
Chanel, Gucci, Givenchy etc. don’t have plus size collections because generally plus size women don’t spend hundreds of pounds on clothing. If these growing numbers of avid hashtag users were so happy with their shape, why isn’t the fashion industry changing? They’re excluding 24.9% of Britain who are obese from buying their products. Because that 24.9% aren’t buying them. Of course, I’m pleased we’re slowly crawling out of the heroin chic of the 90s, which was the other extreme of the spectrum, but it shouldn’t be replaced with the opposite end.
The most popular hashtag #EffYourBeautyStandards is headed by plus size model Tess Holliday, a 31-year-old American woman, and someone who is deemed by the health system as super morbidly obese. And absurdly believes that she can be healthy at the shocking weight of 280lbs, a comment that she preachers to her 1.7 million followers on Instagram. In my opinion, that is not only dangerous, but outrageously irresponsible. Many of her followers are teenagers, being told their unhealthy lifestyle is fine, to carry on, not being given the warnings of the inevitable, of illness, pain, disability and eventually death. Even on her website’s front page, she describes herself as a body positive ambassador. What positivity is she speaking of?
#EffYourBeautyStandards is a misleading line, again, blaming the standards in which society and the fashion/beauty industries are making everybody envision what real beauty is like. I’m pretty sure we all have brains, and understand Photoshop/airbrushing etc. right? I don’t look at Kim Kardashian and wonder why I have a Buddha belly to match my big bum and she somehow embodies the most “perfect” curves without a sight of a stretch mark or a quiver of cellulite. This isn’t a question of beauty. It isn’t a question of standards. It’s an important debate that questions the seriousness of the damage this movement is causing.
The fact one needs to state something so obvious is itself ridiculous. It’s time to wake up. Obesity is not positive. It’s a dangerous plague that is being fuelled by disillusioned women convincing themselves that they are happy, while leading a generation into early graves.
About the author:
*Holly Ashe is a London based fashion and culture writer. She was previously published in Vogue International as a fashion designer and a start-up business entrepreneur. Her previous publications can be found here. You can follow her on twitter @hollyroseashe.
Ten patients at Penn Medicine have been cured of the Hepatitis C virus (HCV) following lifesaving kidney transplants from deceased donors who were infected with the disease. The findings point to new strategies for increasing the supply of organs for the nation’s more than 97,000 patients who are awaiting kidney transplants – often for as many as five or more years.
In 2016, Penn Medicine launched an innovative clinical trial to test the effect of transplanting kidneys from donors with HCV into patients currently on the kidney transplant waitlist who do not have the virus, and who opt in to receive these otherwise unused organs. Recipients were then treated with an antiviral therapy in an effort to cure the virus. Early data from the study were presented today by David S. Goldberg, MD, MSCE, an assistant professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, at the 2017 American Transplant Congress in Chicago, and were simultaneously published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“We started this trial in the hopes that, if successful, we could open up an entirely new pool of donor organs, and effectively transplant hundreds, if not thousands, more patients who are awaiting a lifesaving organ,” Goldberg said. “Historically, Hepatitis C-infected kidneys were often discarded, and were thought to be damaged or too ‘high-risk.’ Our pilot data demonstrate the ability to cure the contracted virus following transplantation in this patient population. If future studies are successful, this may be a viable option for patients who may otherwise never see a transplant.”
Goldberg, who co-led the study with Peter Reese, MD, MSCE, an assistant professor of Medicine and Epidemiology at Penn and chair of the Ethics Committee for the United Network of Organ Sharing (UNOS), approached and enrolled participants who relied on dialysis treatments to stand in for their damaged kidneys. Participants were between 40 and 65 years of age and had been waiting for a transplant for at least a year and a half. A three-step process of education and consent was used during pre-enrollment to ensure patients, and their loved ones were provided with a comprehensive understanding of the risks. Once enrolled, and as organs became available, the team performed HCV donor genotyping during the allocation process, selecting only kidneys that were considered “high quality.”
In the first phase of the study, to date, 10 patients have received transplants using the protocol. On average, patients received a transplant 58 days after enrolling in the trial–some in as quickly as 11 days, while others waited for over 100 days. At three days after surgery, patients were tested for HCV, and all 10 tested positive for the disease. Next, the participants were treated with the standard 12-week course of elbasvir/grazoprevir, commonly known as Zepatier, a recently-approved and highly effective oral medication prescribed to eradicate HCV. All 10 patients have been cured of their contracted HCV.
“For so long, HCV was a virus with a very negative stigma associated with it, especially among physicians. So it was interesting to see that patients were quick to jump at the chance to get this transplant, despite the possibility that they could get Hepatitis C permanently,” Reese said. “Going into the study, we knew it was a possibility that some or all of the patients would contract HCV, and that they could have the disease for the rest of their lives if we were unsuccessful. But for these patients, getting off of dialysis and getting back to their normal lives was very much worth the risk.”
Following the early positive results, the research team was granted an extension of their study, which will allow them to transplant and treat an additional 10 patients–20 patients in total.
The research team is designing a new clinical trial that will study this same approach in patients who are heart transplant recipients, and in the future they hope to examine the efficacy of this approach in liver and lung transplants. Researchers note there is a need for longer and larger trials to continue evaluating the effectiveness of HCV-positive to HCV-negative transplantation followed by antiviral therapy in a broader population.
A Detroit doctor Jumana Nagarwala, a U.S. citizen born in Washington who speaks Gujarati, a language of western India., was charged with the female genital mutilation (FGM) of 2 young girls age 6-8 in what is believed to be the first case involving a doctor since FGM was made illegal in the US in 1996.
Dr Nagarwala denied being involved in any such procedure. But on April 21, Dr. Fakhruddin Attar and his wife Faida were arrested in the Detroit suburb of Livonia, and accused of involvement in the same FGM crime as Dr. Nagarwala.
The 16-page criminal complaint issued against Dr. Attar and his wife refers to “a particular religious and cultural community”; now identified as the Dawoodi Bohra, a sect within the Ismā’īlī branch of Shia Islam, who mainly reside in west India, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, and whose world leader, Syedna Mufaddal Saifuddin, has condemned FGM.
FGM, although wide spread in limited geographic areas, is opposed by the overwhelming majority of Muslim scholars (ulema). Of the four schools of Sha’aria only the Shafii school of law, declares FGM wajib, or obligatory. In contrast, the other three Sunni schools, plus the Shia schools, consider FGM sunnah- recommended but not required.
World Health Organization says female genital cutting, unlike male circumcision, has no health benefits for girls or women. The procedure can cause severe bleeding, problems urinating and infections, while increasing the risk of complications in childbirth and newborn deaths.
Thus, FGM is not circumcision: it is female genital mutilation, and calling it circumcision is a slander of both Islam and Judaism. It is important that Muslims and Jews make this distinction clear to the general public.
Christianity, Islam and Judaism all teach that circumcision was practiced by Prophet Abraham, who is revered by Christians, Jews and Muslims to this day. Christians do not believe circumcision is still a required observance.
But, even during Medieval times, Christian governments never prohibited ritual circumcision for Jews and Muslims living under their rule. Equally, Jews and Muslims never tried to force Christians to circumcise their children.
Only pagan governments like the Greeks and the Romans, or anti-religious secular governments like Communist Russia, have forbidden ritual circumcision of males. These governments are led by people who believe that their own humanistic, rational philosophy is on a much higher level than what has been taught by traditional religions, which they do not believe in.
Many European secularists regard circumcision of minors by Muslims and Jews, as a cruel violation of children’s rights. A similar debate is occurring across northern Europe about the issue of ritual slaughter of animals, which devout Jews and Muslims require be performed on conscious animals.
This is part of a larger dilemma facing left-wing parties in Europe, which often struggle to balance their stated commitment to minority rights, with a pushy, self-righteous, secularist agenda that is perceived as intolerant by most members of religious groups.
It is totally false to compare the custom of female genital mutilation to the religious practice of male circumcision.
First, while there are great medical benefits from removal of the foreskin of a male, especially in reducing the spread of HIV; there is no medical benefit to a female from the removal of her clitoris and labia.
In Africa, Jewish and Muslim men have much lower rates of AIDS than uncircumcised Christian men.
Second, there is no evidence that female genital mutilation promotes chastity and preserves a woman’s virtue. Having a considerate, loving and faithful husband does much more to promote a woman’s virtue than female genital mutilation.
Third, male circumcision is a religious requirement; female genital mutilation is only a tribal custom, originating in sub Sahara Africa; which is now being spread by Muslim religious extremists to Asia and the West as part of a reaction against the rising rate of girls going to high school and woman going to work outside the home.
Evidence that female genital mutilation is a only a custom comes from the fact that in rural Egypt even Coptic Christians mutilate their daughters genitals. Also female genital mutilation had been denounced by most of the major Islamic scholars in the Muslim world.
Finally, and most important, male circumcision is derived from the God inspired practice of Abraham and Muhammad.
God said to Abraham (Genesis 17:7): “I will establish my covenant between me and you, and your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you…
(8-12) “And I will give to you, and to your offspring after you, the land where you are now an alien, all the land of Canaan, for a perpetual holding; and I will be their God. And God said to Abraham, “As for you, you shall keep my covenant, you and your offspring after you throughout their generations. This is my covenant, which you shall keep, between me and you and your offspring after you: Every male among you shall be circumcised.
“You shall circumcise the flesh of your foreskins, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and you. Throughout your generations every male among you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old,” (Genesis 17: 7-12a)
And Allah ordered Prophet Muhammad to follow the religion of Abraham/Ibrahim. When Allah said (Qur’an 16:123) “Then We inspired you: ‘Follow the religion of Ibrahim, the upright in Faith’.” And part of the religion of Ibrahim is, as is evident from the verses cited above, to practice circumcision.
Abraham was an old man when he circumcised himself, thus becoming a good example that one is never to old to do God’s will. As a Hadith says: Prophet Muhammad said: “Prophet Ibrahim circumcised himself when he was eighty years old and he circumcised himself with an axe.” (Related by Bukhari, Muslim & Ahmad.)
Abraham’s first born son Ishmael, was a young boy when he was circumcised, so Muslims do not have to circumcise their son’s on an exact date. A Hadith states: When Ibn Abbas was asked “How old were you when the Prophet Muhammad died?” He replied, “At that time I had been circumcised. At that time people did not circumcise boys till they attained the age of puberty (Baligh).” (Bukhari)
Prophet Muhammad himself selected the 7th day after birth to circumcise his own grandsons: Abdullah Ibn Jabir and Aisha both said: “The Prophet performed the Aqiqah of al-Hasan and al-Hussein (the prophets grandsons) circumcising them on the 7th. Day.” (Related in al-Bayhaq & Tabarani)
Thus, for Jews circumcision is a sign of the covenant that God made with Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac and their descendants for all future generations.
For Muslims it is a sign of their close connection to Abraham which is also celebrated each year at the annual Hajj ceremonies.
For both Muslims and Jews circumcision is a sign that one who submits to God’s commandments and covenant cannot expect a life without some pain and suffering. But when endured for the right reasons pain and suffering always lead eventually to great spiritual benefits.
Female genital mutilation is the exact opposite of circumcision both medically and religiously.
A high-profile media forum to be held in Dubai next week will feature an Arab News panel discussion examining the region’s image abroad.
The Arab Media Forum (AMF), to be held on May 1-2 at the Madinat Jumeirah, is expected to attract prominent international media figures from the Middle East and beyond.
A report titled “The Arab Image in the US” will be unveiled at the event. It is based on an exclusive survey of how the American public views the Arab world, conducted in partnership between Arab News, the Dubai Press Club and research and polling specialist YouGov.
The topic will be discussed during an Arab News panel session featuring: Nathan Tek, US State Department spokesman in the Middle East; Mark Donfried, director of the Institute for Cultural Diplomacy in Berlin; and Hadley Gamble, a reporter and anchor for CNBC covering the Middle East, Africa and US politics.
Faisal Abbas, editor in chief of Arab News, will be moderating the session, which will be held on the second day of the forum.
Promoting civil dialogue
The Dubai Press Club this week revealed the wider agenda for the 16th edition of AMF, which is to be held around the theme “civil dialogue.”
Prominent media leaders, scholars, writers and media experts are set to gather and discuss the importance of dialogue in highlighting peaceful coexistence, tolerance and mutual respect — as well as in condemning racism, hatred and prejudice.
Mona Ghanim Al-Marri, president of Dubai Press Club (DPC) and chair of the AMF Organizing Committee, said that the Arab Media Forum since its inception has had a focus on promoting constructive dialogue.
She noted that this become more important given the regional complexities, for which some people blame the media.
The forum attempts to correct misconceptions about the media and explore ways in which the industry can effectively face the growing challenges in the Arab world and promote a civil dialogue based on respecting pluralism and different ideologies.
Keynote speaker
This year’s AMF is expected to attract over 3,000 participants and experts in the media industry. The UAE’s Minister of State for Tolerance Sheikha Lubna bint Khalid Al-Qasimi will be presenting the keynote address at the opening plenary session on the second day.
Noura Al-Kaabi, minister of state for Federal National Council affairs and chairperson of the Abu Dhabi Media Zone Authority, will present a panel session on “Constructive Dialogue,” while Minister of State for Youth Affairs Shamma Al-Mazrui will be launching a media initiative for Arab youth.
Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, chairman of DP World, will speak at a panel discussion titled “The Silk Road”. The session — moderated by Nadine Hani, business news presenter at the Al Arabiya News Channel — will address the role of business in enriching civil dialogue between nations.
International media figures will also be partaking at the annual event, including Richard Buangan, managing director for international media at the US Department of State, who will be talking during a session titled “Successful Political Dialogue.”
Alex Aiken, the UK executive director of government communications, will speak at AMF about the “Dialogue of Tolerance.”
In the years after 2011, I grew accustomed to receiving a condescending grimace from Western officials when I asked about Iranian terrorism in Bahrain. Often this would earn me a lecture about “prisoners of conscience” and “rights to peaceful protest.”
Despite Bahraini authorities’ efforts to reach a consensus with opposition entities via dialogue, reforms and permitting licensed protests, there was a stiff refusal to countenance Iranian meddling in the Gulf, and to recognize the militant and sectarian ideology of these Tehran-backed groups.
Today, not only has the mountain of evidence become incontrovertible, but the Trump administration has loudly denounced terrorist entities pursuing Iran’s agenda in Bahrain. British leaders have been quick to parrot these denunciations. Suddenly everybody wants to talk about Iranian interference.
The spotlight has fallen on a previously unknown figure, Murtaza Al-Sanadi, who fled to Iran in 2012. Al-Sanadi is the effective leader of the terrorist group Al-Ashtar Brigades, responsible for a string of killings of policemen in Bahrain. Al-Sanadi recruited hundreds of impressionable young men, many radicalized while on pilgrimage or religious study.
Along with training by the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, numerous militants traveled to Iraq for training with the Hezbollah Brigades, an Iranian proxy fighting as part of Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi that is complicit in war crimes, including sectarian cleansing and mass summary executions.
As dangerous as learning to build bombs is the poisoning of minds against Arab heritage and nationalism. Differences in religious belief between Shiites and Sunnis are tiny, yet these radicals are brainwashed into a culture of anti-Arab sectarian hatred.
Western misconceptions on this issue are rooted in the post-9/11 belief that terrorism is a Sunni phenomenon. But while Daesh tends to flaunt its violent acts, Iranian proxies in Iraq, Syria and elsewhere have been more discreet about the trail of blood they leave behind.
It has been relatively easy for Bahraini militants to join bus-loads of pilgrims visiting Iraq and obtain training from the Hezbollah Brigades. Some even temporarily signed up to Al-Hashd Al-Shaabi. An Ahrar Manama division of Bahraini fighters was reported earlier this year.
Pakistan’s leaders recently protested Iran’s policy of recruiting and radicalizing Pakistani and Afghan nationals for cannon-fodder in the Syria conflict. During the 1980s Iran-Iraq war, Iran used a similar tactic of battle-hardening Gulf militants on the frontlines, before sending them home to wage war.
A number of prominent Bahraini militants even lost their lives in this fighting. This militarization of Bahraini radicals culminated in a 1981 coup attempt by an Iranian proxy, the Islamic Front for the Liberation of Bahrain.
More than 35 years later, Iran’s strategy toward Bahrain and other Arab states has become more malign and expansive. As Quds Force Commander Qassim Soleimani reiterated and boasted in 2015: “We are witnessing the export of the Islamic Revolution throughout the region, from Bahrain and Iraq to Syria, Yemen and North Africa.”
The Hezbollah Brigades was also recently in the news as it sought to take receipt of half a billion dollars in ransom for 24 Qatari hostages it kidnapped in 2015 — the largest ransom in history. Although this money (for now) has been impounded on the orders of Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi, the dangers of handing over such a huge sum to terrorists and war criminals are only too obvious.
Given the Hezbollah Brigades’ support for Bahraini militants, this ransom money is in effect enabling terrorists to commit mass murder in a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) nation, not to mention encouraging hostage-takers to strike again against high-value regional targets.
Among the other catastrophic consequences of this hostage deal are Syrian population swaps. In 2016, it became widely known that Iranian proxies were lobbying hard for a deal that removed Sunnis from the towns of Madaya and Zabadani, between Damascus and the Lebanese border.
Demographic engineering and sectarian cleansing are war crimes. Parties enabling such measures should be conscious of their obligations and the consequences under international law.
Tehran’s motivations are clear: Controlling weapons convoys to Hezbollah and a contiguous territory reaching the Mediterranean. I speak to Syrians who exclaim that Iran is creating “a hundred Palestines.” Does anyone believe that Syrians will simply walk away from land that has been theirs for hundreds of years?
Al-Sanadi, using Iranian media outlets to incite “holy war,” is one of many Arabs who have sold out their nations. The US designation of him as a “global terrorist” is belated recognition that when Iranian leaders threaten that the US Fifth Fleet could be “raised to the ground,” they are not joking.
A Washington Post report cites the seizure in Bahrain of “armor-piercing projectiles capable of slicing through a tank,” C4 explosive “in quantities that could sink a battleship… that almost certainly originated in Iran.” Militants were building sophisticated explosively formed projectiles (EFPs), devices last seen being used by the Hezbollah Brigades against US troops in Iraq.
In American politics, we are accustomed to policy U-turns every four to eight years, or in Donald Trump’s case from one day to the next. This makes the West ill-equipped to grapple with an Iranian strategy for regional dominance with the patience and tenacity to remain consistent over many decades.
The West may no longer be in denial about Iran’s meddling, but we seem little closer to a coherent strategy for halting its regional stranglehold by dismantling proxy militias and terrorist cells wreaking havoc across the Arab world.
*Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate, a foreign editor at Al-Hayat, and has interviewed numerous heads of state.
The Supreme Court of Pakistan has once again delayed the case of a Catholic mother sentenced to death for blasphemy that church and human rights activists hold hard-line Islamic lobbyists responsible for.
On April 26, Chief Justice of Pakistan Mian Saqib Nisar declined a request for an early hearing for Asia Bibi. The application was made two weeks earlier requesting that Bibi’s case be fixed for the first week of June, Saiful Malook, her Muslim lawyer, told local media.
In 2016, a hearing of the final appeal against her execution was adjourned after one of a three-judge bench exited the case. The judge cited his involvement in the case of former Governor of Punjab Salmaan Taseer who was assassinated in 2011 while lobbying for a presidential pardon for Bibi.
“This is very unfortunate. Her husband became quiet when he heard the latest developments. We shall again apply for the hearing and keep struggling for justice,” Joseph Nadeem, executive director of the Renaissance Education Foundation told ucanews.com.
“There are many factors at work behind the slow pace of judiciary. Her case has been in the doldrums due to huge pressure. There will be a strong reaction if Bibi is freed, opposing groups have made it matter of honor and ego.”
The Renaissance Education Foundation has been supporting Bibi’s family in Lahore since she was imprisoned for allegedly defaming Prophet Mohammed in 2009. The first woman in Pakistan who might be put to death for blasphemy became famous after Catholic minister Shahbaz Bhatti was killed.
In 2011, Judge Pervez Ali Shah fled to Saudi Arabia along with his family after getting death threats for convicting Malik Mumtaz Hussein Qadri who confessed to murdering Taseer. Analysts consider Qadri’s 2016 execution a litmus test for processing blasphemy-related killings.
Now, in the view of Bibi’s former attorney, the current environment in the country is not conducive for the dispensation of justice in her case.
“Our plight is that the socio-political atmosphere of the country has no space for discussion on blasphemy laws. The judges know what is happening outside as non-state actors show their strength on the roads demanding death for Bibi,” said Naeem Shakir, a Christian lawyer.
The sensitivity surrounding blasphemy laws has made it a political tool to threaten and put down others. The state has a weak narrative regarding this law and its functionaries usually try to evade questions regarding its misuse,” he said.
Meanwhile, several Islamic clerics have renewed calls for the execution of Bibi after the recent lynching of a university student in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, also for blasphemy.
The National Assembly adopted a resolution condemning the student’s murder and resolved to insert safeguards into the blasphemy law but religious parties opposed the idea.
Since the passage of blasphemy laws in the early 1980s, religious minorities including Shia, Ahmadi, Hindu and Christians have often been attacked and persecuted for their faith.
“Such atrocities have become routine. The plight of Bibi has had a dampening effect on minorities. Their grief cannot be addressed because of religious retrogressive and extremist groups. Islamists consider her freedom a defeat for their movement,” added Shakir.
(RFE/RL) — A Baku district court has sentenced former Azerbaijani Health Minister Ali Insanov to seven years’ imprisonment on charges of possessing psychotropic drugs and assaulting and seriously injuring a prison officer that his lawyers say are both implausible and unsubstantiated by hard evidence.
Insanov, who is 71, rejected the charges as fabricated and politically motivated. He has vowed to appeal his new sentence, which he believes was intended to preclude his release from prison after serving an 11-year jail term and his anticipated participation in the presidential election due in October 2018.
Insanov is a former close associate of Heidar Aliyev, the father and predecessor of Azerbaijan’s current President Ilham Aliyev, and a co-founder in the 1990s of the ruling Yeni Azerbaycan Party. He first fell into disfavor in the run-up to the parliamentary elections of October 2005, when he and several other senior officials were arrested on charges of plotting a coup against Ilham Aliyev, who had succeeded his father two years earlier.
The coup charge was subsequently dropped; instead, Insanov was found guilty and sentenced in April 2007 on charges, to which he pleaded not guilty, of bribery, forgery, and the illegal privatization of state-owned medical facilities.
‘Military-Political Regime’
Six years later, in March 2013, the Strasbourg-based European Court of Human Rights ruled that Insanov had been denied the right to a fair trial and that he had been held in inhuman and demeaning conditions in various penitentiaries. The court ruled that the Azerbaijani authorities should pay Insanov 10,000 euros ($10,896) in compensation.
The Azerbaijani government ignored that ruling, however, whereupon Insanov appealed to the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe. Two months later, Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court annulled its own rejection of Insanov’s appeal against his prison term and ordered a repeat hearing by the Baku Appeals Court.
The five-week retrial, which Insanov’s lawyers and human rights activists said was marred by egregious procedural violations, ended in February 2014 with the judge upholding the original 11-year sentence. Insanov claimed that verdict was dictated by President Aliyev, whom he had earlier publicly accused of appropriating money from the sale of Azerbaijan’s Caspian oil and of establishing a “military-political regime.”
New Charges
The new charges against Insanov were brought in August 2016, two months after Azerbaijan’s Supreme Court upheld the sentence handed down during the retrial and just weeks before his original 11-year prison term was due to end.
The new trial, during which Insanov was constrained to sit in a steel cage in the courtroom, opened on April 8. Insanov’s lawyers argued that the prosecution had failed to furnish any evidence to substantiate the charge that Insanov had inflicted a potentially fatal head injury on a much younger prison officer during an altercation.
They further objected that the tablets allegedly found during a search of his cell could not have contained a psychotropic substance because they were colored, not white, the news portal Caucasian Knot reported on April 20.
The lawyers also implied that the new charges were retaliation for Insanov’s public backing of opposition candidate Djamil Hasanly in the 2013 presidential election.
In that context, they noted that former Economic Development Minister Farhad Aliyev (no relation to Ilham), who was arrested together with Insanov in October 2005 in connection with the purported planned coup, was pardoned and released from prison after expressing support for Ilham Aliyev’s candidacy.
The Saudi Arabian delegation to the International Seminar on ‘Islamic Reality and Timely Challenges’ praised Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena’s views on religious harmony and peace. They said that the people in the Islamic world, where the President’s speech at the seminar was relayed, expressed deep appreciation for its contents.
A high level delegation which attended the seminar called Friday on President Sirisena to express their gratitude to him for the speech and the participation at the seminar.
Sirisena emphasized the need for religious leaders to play a dynamic role to end conflicts and usher in lasting peace in the world. “While people have a mistrust over politicians, they respect the religious leaders and they have a tremendous influence to guide the people to the right path, the President said.
The Advisor to Islamic Minister of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Al Ammara said that under the leadership of President Sirisena, Sri Lanka is a worthy example to follow for religious amity and peace.
Secretary General of the World Assembly for Muslim Youths, Salih Nasseer Mohamed Al Saleh said that President Sirisena’s policies would result in further strengthening of relations between the Islamic world and Sri Lanka.
The Saudi delegates said that Saudi Arabia would extend fullest support to Sri Lanka’s development efforts.
Saudi Arabia’s King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Sunday held talks to review bilateral relations and aspects of cooperation between the two countries.
Additionally, the two leaders witnessed the signing of various memorandums of understanding aimed at strengthening economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries.
A memorandum of understanding on the development of sustainable industries was co-signed by Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources Eng Khalid bin Abdulaziz Al-Faleh and Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser.
A draft common declaration of intent between the Ministry of Interior of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the German Federal Police was co-signed by Undersecretary of the Ministry of Interior Dr. Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Salem and German Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Dieter Walter Haller.
A draft common declaration of intent in the field of development cooperation between the Saudi Fund for Development and the German Federal Ministry of Cooperation, Economy and Development was co-signed Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Saudi Fund for Development Eng. Yousuf bin Ibrahim Al-Bassam and German Ambassador to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Dieter Walter Haller.
An executive cooperation program in the field of technical and vocational training was co-signed by Governor of Technical and Vocational Training Corporation Dr. Ahmed bin Fahd Al-Fuhaid and Siemens CEO Joe Kaeser.
On January 31, 2017, four Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist) cadres were arrested by the Security Forces (SFs) from the Hanamkonda area in Warangal District.
On January 13, 2017, the District Police arrested a suspected Maoist from his house in Karimnagar town, Karimnagar District. Police recovered 50 rounds of ammunition of different weapons, five rifles, one Carbine 9 mm, and one .32 pistol from the hideout.
According to partial data collated by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), at least 24 Maoists were arrested in 2016 in Telengana, in addition to 33 arrested in 2015 and seven in 2014. Five Maoists have been arrested in the current year (data till February 19, 2017).
Mounting SF pressure also led to the surrender of 11 Maoists in 2016, in addition to 13 in 2015, according to SATP data. Importantly, on December 7, 2016, Uyka Dulaiah aka Joga (24), a senior leader of the rank of ‘deputy commander’ of the CPI-Maoist’s Savithri Dalam (armed squad) operating in the restive Sukma District of Chhattisgarh, and carrying a reward of INR 300,000, surrendered before the Police in the Bhadradri Kothagudem District; on November 19, 2016, Sunnam Sridevi aka Nirmala (35), an ‘area committee member’ of the Charla Local Operating Squad (LOS) of the CPI-Maoist, carrying a reward of INR 100,000, surrendered before the Police in Bhadradri Kothagudem District; and on July 8, 2016, Goli Srinivas aka Praveen (39), carrying a cash reward of INR 400,000, surrendered before the Police in Warangal District.
Significantly, Maoist-related violence in the State recorded a decline through 2016 even in comparison to the low levels in the preceding year. According to the SATP database, Telangana registered just one fatality, a Maoist cadre, through 2016, as against four fatalities, including two civilians and two Maoists, in 2015. Since the State’s formation on June 2, 2014, Telangana has recorded eight fatalities, including four civilians and four Maoists. There has, so far, been no casualty in 2017 in Telangana in Left Wing Extremism (LWE)-related violence.
The lone fatality was reported from Mehboobnagar District of Telangana on August 8, 2016. In 2015, fatalities were reported from three Districts of the State – one civilian each from Adilabad and Khammam; and two Maoists in Warangal.
Further, according to data provided by the Union Ministry of Home Affairs (UMHA), LWE-linked incidents in Telangana decreased from 11 in 2015 to seven in 2016. The State registered 14 such incidents in 2014. Similarly, attacks on economic targets by the Maoists also decreased from two in 2015 to one in 2016. There were no abduction incidents reported in 2016, as against two in 2015.
Nonetheless, the inherent danger from the Maoists persists in Telangana. According to SATP data, the Maoists were engaged in three reported exchange of fire incidents in 2016, the same as in 2015; five bandh (general shutdown) calls were issued in 2016, as against two such calls in 2015; and two incidents of arson were recorded in 2016, as against one such incident in 2015.
Moreover, according to SATP data, LWE-related violent incidents were reported from nine Districts (Khammam, Mehboobnagar, Warangal, Adilabad, Bhadradri Kothagudem, Jayashankar Bhoopalpally, Nalgonda, Nirmal and Rajanna Sircilla) in 2016. In 2015, violent incidents were reported from eight Districts (Khammam, Adilabad, Karimnagar, Medak, Mehboobnagar, Nalgonda, Warangal, and Nizamabad). Eight of the nine Districts which witnessed violence in 2016 were also listed by UMHA among the 106 Maoist-affected Districts across 10 Indian States.
Further, dubbing the ruling TRS (Telangana Rashtra Samithi) as a “feudal and capitalist” political formations, similar to all other parties which protected properties of landlords and capitalists belonging to undivided Andhra Pradesh, the CPI-Maoist Telangana State committee ‘official spokesman’ Jagan, in a release (media report published on May 22, 2016), appealed, “We are calling upon people and democratic forces to wage a struggle till the problems of drought, drinking and irrigation water and fodder are resolved.” It is significant that TRS was seen to be close to the Maoists during the agitation for a separate State, prior to the division of Andhra Pradesh in 2014.
Worryingly, at least 17,061 Police posts are vacant in the State, against a sanctioned strength of 64,489, a 26.46 per cent deficit, according to the latest data provided by the Bureau of Police Research and Development [BPR&D], as on January 1, 2016. Moreover, the sanctioned strength of the apex Indian Police Service (IPS) Officers in the State is 112, but just 94 officers were in position, considerably weakening decision-making in the Force. The police-population ratio (Policemen per hundred thousand population) in the State was 130.71 per 100,000, as compared to an appallingly low national average of 137.11 [over 220 Policemen per 100,000 population are considered necessary for ‘peacetime policing’].
Despite the fact that the influence of the Maoists has reduced over the last few years across the country, their residual capacities and capabilities, cannot be ignored. The Maoists’ revival plan in Telangana demonstrates clearly that the rebels have not given up. It is imperative that the lacunae in the enforcement apparatus be addressed, before the Maoists are able to gather sufficient force to make a serious attempt to resurrect their fortunes.
The Sanhgiya Gathabandhan that includes the Sanghiya Samajwadi Forum, the newly formed Rashtriya Janata Party as well as a few other parties of Janajathis, finally agreed to withdraw the proposed agitation and participate in the local body elections scheduled for 14th May this year.
This decision was taken after over five hours of discussions with the Prime Minister Dahal at his residence on 20th April. Briefly the decisions taken (later approved by the Cabinet) were:
Increase in the number of electoral constituencies and the local federal units on the basis of population
A high powered Federal Commission will be formed to settle the provincial boundaries.
Recommendations of the language Commission would be listed in the schedule to the Constitution.
Citizenship provisions in the present Constitution will be replaced with a fresh proposal
While the first one on the electoral constituencies had already been agreed upon, the formation of a federal commission and listing of the recommendations of the language commission in the schedule of the constitution are new ones, now agreed to by the government. There is also an undertaking that the citizenship provisions in the constitution that would affect mainly the Madhesis will be replaced with a fresh one and hopefully a non-discriminatory one!
The PM is said to have agreed to have the constitutional amendments on a fast track and for this the support of the UML will be necessary. Though it is still not clear, it looks that the UML will also be on board as their main demand for going ahead with the local elections has been conceded.
The Madhesi groups have agreed to participate in the local body elections besides calling off the proposed agitation for constitutional amendments. The local body elections are scheduled to take place in two phases- the first to be held on May 14 and the second on June 14. It is also learnt that while provinces 3,4 and 6 will have the local elections in the first phase, others- provinces 1,2,5 and 7 will have the elections on June 14.
There appears to be an understanding that the second phase of the local elections will be overseen by a government led by the Nepali Congress.
While the Madhesi groups should be congratulated for withdrawing the proposed senseless agitation, Prime Minister Dahal should be given all the credit for finally making the local elections an all-inclusive one and to be held on the desired date. He had displayed extreme patience and hopefully in getting the UML also to agree to meet some of the major demands of the Madhesi groups.
Two days prior to the meeting at the PM’s place another important event that will have far reaching consequences took place. Six constituents of the UDMF (Terai Groups) formed a new political party called Rashtriya Janata Party with a new symbol (umbrella).
The six constituents were:
The Terai Madhes Democratic Party led by veteran leader Mahant Thakur
The Sadhbhavana Party led by Rajendra Mahatao
The Terai Madhes Sadhbhavana Party led by Mahendra Ray Yadav
The National Madhes Socialist Party led by Sharat Singh Bhandari
The Madhesi Janaadhikar Forum of Raj Kishor Yadav
The Sadbhavana Party of another faction led by Anil Kumar Jha.
The parties have agreed to participate in the elections as one entity. Mahant Thakur of the TMDP declared the unity meeting as a “historic” moment. It was truly a historic decision even if it is carried through only to the elections at the national level.
The odd party out of this group is the Federal Socialist Forum of Upendra Yadav who perhaps has ambitions to have a pan Nepal Group in alliance with the Naya Sakthi of Dr. Baburam Bhattarai.
These developments are good not only for the Madhesi groups but are in the long term interests of Nepal. We had in this forum time and again urged the Terai groups to give up the agitation, accept representation in electoral constituencies according to population and leave it to a high-powered commission to look into the provincial boundaries. Cancellation of the agitation should be welcomed by all. It is also good to see the Terai leaders who have suffered more by their disunity have realised the need to get together and go for the three tiered elections as one entity.
The charge that the Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election is presented as fact in the corporate media and by the Democratic Party. Their collusion accomplishes two goals at once. The imperial project which has long sought to weaken Russia is given legitimacy. The Democrats divert attention from years of electoral failure which culminated in Donald Trump’s victory. Democratic Party rank and file members seethe about Vladimir Putin’s alleged misdeeds when they ought to ask their leadership hard questions.
Something is seriously amiss when Congressional Black Caucus talking points enshrine the FBI and CIA as beneficial and reliable sources of information. Democrats irresponsibly speak of an “act of war” and in so doing may bring about the real thing. The corruption and overreach are obvious but there is another important issue that has gone unaddressed.
Why is it worse for Americans to suffer a fate their government has meted out to others all over the world? The list of coups, invasions, and electoral fraud committed against other countries by the United States is a long one and encompasses every continent on the planet. American expressions of outrage should not be taken seriously.
The United States directly subverted the will of the Russian people in 1996 when Bill Clinton’s operatives assisted Boris Yeltsin’s reelection campaign The current animosity between Russia and the United States results in large part from interference in Ukraine which ousted president Victor Yanukovych in 2014. The coup would not have taken place absent Obama administration support. If anyone should be crying about interference it is the Russians.
But the list of skullduggery is ignored in favor of argument about what is provable and what is not. There should also be discussion about why Americans refuse to acknowledge the wrongdoing they support either tacitly or actively. There is an opportunity being missed, an opportunity to express contrition and to change the temptation for Americans to support their government’s worst acts.
Many of the liberals so quick to cast aspersions at Russia are also quick to support American state sponsored violence. Some of those who said Trump is “not my president” applauded his bombing of a Syrian air base.
It is time for Americans to grow up but that is easier said than done in a country for which historical amnesia is a founding principle. Most liberals want to be flag waving patriots and they are loath to concede the wrongdoing which goes on in one presidency after another. They refuse to admit their own complicity in excusing war crimes with vapid talk of lesser evils.
If Americans are so upset about the prospect of being treated the way their government treats millions of people they should always condemn these violations. They ought to foreswear support for the wars of aggression committed in their name. Democrats go on foolishly speaking of an “act of war” committed by Vladimir Putin. This latest propaganda term is not just stupid, it is extremely dangerous and posits that Americans have rights that they do not accord to others.
So far this year there have or will be marchers wearing pink hats, supporting science or fighting climate change. There ought to be a march of apology from Americans to people in Grenada, Haiti, Honduras, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and yes in Russia too. Millions of people have lost their homes, health and lives whenever an American president decides that another leader “must go” or claims that national interest demands intervention or endless war.
It is time for people in this country to stop acting like aggrieved children. The temper tantrums about their sovereignty and their democracy are not just hypocritical but also tell lies about how this political system really works. There isn’t any democracy left for the Russian government to damage. And even if there were America’s guilty behavior abroad makes a mockery of it.
If Vladimir Putin hatched a plot to get Trump into office he didn’t do anything worse than American presidents have done. People in this country ought to reflect on their history instead of behaving as if they are entitled to rights they routinely disregard elsewhere. The Russia haters must stop whining about their supposed grievance. But first they should apologize to people around the world and fight to stop America’s attacks on them.
Ahead of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sk. Hasina’s visit (April 7-9), Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said “Your dream of golden Bangla is our dream too”.
Contrast this with the chorus of criticism from the main Bangladesh opposition party, the BNP, both before and after the visit. This significant visit was roundly trashed as a sell out to India, especially the defence agreement, which was to institutionalise the various ongoing defence cooperation under one portal. The five hundred million military tranche advanced by India does by no means put any condition on Dhaka. There is nothing secretive about this accord, and no offensive agenda.
The bitterness and frustration in the BNP was so evident, yet without a credible reason. There was no appreciation of the rest of the four and a half billion credit tranche at a very low interest (of one percent). The first tranche was for one billion dollars, of which 200 million was converted into aid. The second was for two billion dollars. Each step was initiated by India. Bangladesh aims to use this to create jobs, infrastructure and education. Under Sk. Hasina’s prime ministership, Bangladesh has raced ahead with a seven percent rate of growth and other positive social indicators that puts the country at the top. Why does this irritate the BNP, the Jamaat-e-Islami and the like? Would they like to keep Bangladesh in the state that Henry Kissinger described, as a “basket case”? This is curious and more than surprising.
Bangladesh is a critical player in South Asia’s development and in SAARC’s unity, stability and progress. It has been in the forefront against terrorism and separatism, promoting women’s development, child welfare, information technology, job creation and fighting other challenges. This, despite the vitriolic attacks from those who still pursue an anti-liberation agenda.
Unfortunately, BNP chairperson and former Prime Minister Khaleda Zia tried to inject political toxicity when she told the media, “people once again noticed that India’s defence, political and geo-political dominance over Bangladesh would grow due to signing of treaties and MOUs in different areas, including security assistance and cyber-crime, arms purchase, line of credit, assistance in nuclear project, import of diesel and power and increasing connectivity” (April 12). She went on to charge all the deals signed as giving priority to Indian interests. Not unsurprisingly, she took another swipe at India, accusing New Delhi of “grossly interfering” in the country’s 2014 elections.
Begum Zia would do well to remember that during her prime ministership, India had bent over backwards to accommodate Bangladesh. She and her government responded with dangerous anti-India acts, including giving sanctuary to Indian insurgents and terrorists, clandestinely importing ten truckloads of arms and ammunition from China for these insurgents to create mayhem in North East India, and trying to project the Jamaatul Mujahidin Bangladesh (JMB) terrorists as a creation of India. This visceral anti-Indianism is a virus that she and her political comrades like the Jamaat carry from the days of the liberation war.
There is a not-so-hidden agenda in the BNP plan to put China against India in Bangladesh. This powerful tilt is extremely dangerous, not only for Bangladesh but also for the region. During Khaleda Zia’s regime, a tripartite intelligence operation was created between Bangladesh, Pakistan and China to sabotage India and collect information. China, however, was not actively involved but was a recipient of the fruits.
Does the BNP cherish liberation or do they want to turn the clock back as far as possible? During the war of liberation China openly supported Pakistan and its rapacious soldiers and local cohorts like the Jamaat, while India fought for liberation. China would have opened a front against India had not a warning been given by the Soviet Union.
China vetoed Bangladesh’s membership of the United Nations till 1974, and accorded recognition to Bangladesh only in January, 1976, after the assassination of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in August 1975 in a pro-Pakistan conspiracy.
Of course, relations between nations are not static and respond to the changing geopolitical realities. The Soviet Union and China were bitter opponents, but have entered into close strategic cooperative relations, Sk. Hasina is aware of these realities and responded accordingly. Recently Bangladesh acquired two submarines from China, and when the Chinese President Xi Jinping paid a visit to Bangladesh he carried a 20 billion dollar package.
Why does this small defence agreement with India irk Khaleda Zia so much? As prime minister she contracted the country’s biggest defence agreement with China, during her visit in 2002. Today, more than 70 percent of Bangladesh’s military arms and equipment are from China. Bangladesh is emerging as a major buyer of Chinese weapons. So, what is Khaleda Zia’s problem? After all, like Myanmar, Seychelles, Vietnam, and to an extent Sri Lanka, have military relations with New Delhi and have procured arms from it. They have not been subsumed by India, as Khaleda Zia would like us to believe.
Strangely, the BNP opposed rest of India’s connectivity with its north east through Bangladesh on the specious grounds that in the event of an India-China war, India would move its military through Bangladeshi territory and China would not like it! BNP forgot that in such a case India would have to seek explicit permission from Dhaka.
The Bangladesh general elections are scheduled for 2019. If the situation in the country so demands, in the interest of the nation’s on-going development process the elections can be brought forward. For the opposition, there is a twin threat. On the one hand the common people are beginning to enjoy a better daily life. Bangladesh is now accepted internationally very positively for its policy aimed at putting the country into a comfortable position economically by 2022 as Sk. Hasina promised.
On the other hand, the machinations of the BNP and Jamaat are unravelling. The criticism against International Crimes Tribunal trying the 1971 genocide criminals have subsided to a great extent. Efforts to declare “March 25”, 1971 as Genocide Day is beginning to find tractions internationally. Of course, much more documentation work will have to be done to present a solid case.
The trial and execution of HUJI commander Mufti Hannan and two of his associates in the Shajalal Shrine attack case targeting the British High Commissioner Anwar Choudhry which killed three people (Choudhary was injured) has brought to light some BNP leaders’ assurance of protection to Hannan. These are documented. Hannan made two serious attacks on Sk. Hasina’s life, one of which on August 21, 2004 seriously injured her. It is reported that there have been twenty attacks on Sk. Hasina’s life, the latest being tampering with her aircraft which an alert pilot managed to detect.
BNP must recall that at one point of time during their rule, in alliance with the Jamaat, there were talks, among the international community, to declare Bangladesh a state sponsor of terrorism. It was only after a warning from US President George W. Bush that the government acted against the JMB (in 2005). A review of the country’s GDP growth and social indicators will show where Bangladesh was going.
In today’s globalised world interdependence and cooperation between nations is the new normal for development and progress. India and Bangladesh share a 4,100 km border which has been ratified by both the countries, and the problem of adversely possessed enclaves was also resolved. The sea boundary issue was also resolved amicably.
Khaleda described the power purchase agreement with India as against national interest. Would she rather keep her nation power starved and industries struggling to survive? Where will jobs come from? New agreement, like the Bangladesh-Bhutan-India-Nepal (BBIN) connectivity paves the way for trade, power import and water augmentation which can further energise Bangladesh. The Bay of Bengal initiative for Science, Technical and Economic Cooperation (BIMSTEC) is another bright light. Cooperation in the fight against terrorism has been outstanding.
The Teesta river water sharing agreement has been ready for signing from 2010, but has been held up by West Bengal Chief Minister, Mamata Banerjee’s obdurate stand. This, too, will be resolved as promised by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Ms. Banerjee’s proposal to examine three to four other rivers flowing into Bangladesh is a non-starter. Bangladesh and India are joined at the hip, especially by the Bengali people on both sides. There are aberrations, but they are surmountable. The future, however, remains bright.
(The writer is a New Delhi based strategic analyst. He can be reached at email grouchohart@yahoo.com)
The United States original sins on Afghanistan and the after effects of which haunt the United States in 2017 is that in both its military interventions in Afghanistan and more so the recent one in 2001 still ongoing, it overly depended on an unreliable and double-timing Pakistan to deliver US strategic objectives.
To oust the Soviet Union from Afghanistan in the decade of the 1980s the United States unwisely strategized more out of political expediency to exploit Pakistan’s ill-reputed ‘rentier state’ proclivities and coupled it with US permissiveness to let Pakistan use the dubious instrument of Islamic Jihadi terrorism under directions of Pakistan Army’s intelligence agency the ISI to force the Soviets to exit Afghanistan.
United States and Pakistan may have succeeded in prompting the exit of the Soviet Union from Afghanistan, but with what results? In the deleterious debris of the United States first military intervention in Afghanistan one can find three major spill- over effects which impacted the United States and regional security and stability.
Pakistan emboldened by the Soviet Forces exiting Afghanistan was led to the arrogant belief that if Pakistan could so force a Superpower to retreat, it was not difficult for it to inflict the same on India or elsewhere by using the same weapon of Islamic Jihad. The United States did not foresee the unintended consequences of introduction of Islamic Jihad as an instrument of statecraft in hands of a volatile country like Pakistan. Soon Islamic Jihadi terrorism was to spread its wings globally as a scourge that still persists.
One would not be wrong in saying that even the terrorist attacks in earlier decades emanating from Palestinian unrest were not intensely Islamic Jihadi in nature. It was spawned by the Palestinian struggle for independence. But the terrorism that Pakistan spawned from its ISI-sponsored Taliban terrorist factories in the Pakistan Occupied Afghanistan and exported it worldwide was decidedly Islamic Jihadi in nature, intensity and content. The Holy Islam religion was grossly misused by Pakistan for its narrow political ends.
It was tragically ironic that Pakistani Islamic Jihadi instincts were used with brutal force to subjugate an Islamic country of Afghanistan to submit to Pakistan Army dictates.
Neither the United States nor the rest of the world ever thought that one day its original sin of permissiveness on Pakistan Army’s use of Islamic Jihad would visit Homeland United States. The 9/11 devastating terrorists’ attacks on the citadels of American power, namely New York and Washington were spawned from the Islamic Jihadi factories that sprung up in Afghanistan by the likes of Osama bin Laden. It was conceived, planned and facilitated by Pakistan’s agencies. The United States continued in a state of denial of Pakistan’s complicity and double-timing of the United States in both its Afghanistan military interventions till it had to liquidate Osama bin Laden, deeply ensconced in the midst of Pakistan Army’s largest garrison cantonment of Abbottabad.
That the United States had to resort to a second major military intervention in Afghanistan in December 2001 was the second major impact springing from the American original sin of the 1980s to exploit Pakistan Army’s Islamic Jihadi propensities. Pakistan used its Islamic Jihadi affiliates and its creation, the Taliban, to capture Afghanistan and place it under brutal medieval Islamic governance.
The United States went with a vengeance to oust the Pakistan Army propped proxy regime of the Taliban in Kabul. Ironically, the United States was victorious in doing so not on the shoulders of the Pakistan Army but on the shoulders of the Northern Alliance which spearheaded the US drive to capture Kabul and displace the Taliban regime. The Northern Alliance was incidentally supported by India and Iran as a counterfoil to Pakistan’s Taliban proxy regime in Kabul.
The third major impact was that the Pakistan Army coerced by the United States into joining President Bush’s ‘Global War on Terrorsism’concluded that the United States while remaining transactionally engaged with Pakistan would never let the Pakistan Army to convert Afghanistan into a subservient satellite state of Pakistan. Thereafter, there was a more major drift towards China. In 2017 while still providing transit facilities for US logistics for its military presence in Afghanistan, Pakistan jettisoned its strategic partnership with the United States and embraced China.
As I reflected in my Book and writings on China that Pakistan was no longer a ‘Front Line State of the United States’ in its Global War on Terrorism as Americans so boasted earlier but in 2017 Pakistan now appears fully as a ‘Front Line State of China’ and as a part of the Chinese strategic blueprint against the strategic diminution of the United States and force the Americans exit from Afghanistan
Let me also repeat what I have emphasised in my past writings and that is that the US Military Forces in Afghanistan in the second US military intervention performed creditably and so were the operational directives and leadership of US Generals in Afghanistan. They were hamstrung by political micro-management of the US war efforts and success inflicted by the Washington policy establishment who were more concerned with catering for Pakistan Arm’s sensitivities not only on the direction of the US war effort in Afghanistan but worse still did not allow the expansion of the Afghan National Army in the initial stages beyond 150,000 which was inadequate to secure Afghanistan. I had in those years recommended that the Afghan National Army should have strength of 500,000 to safeguard Afghanistan sovereignty against Pakistan Army depredations.
None of the above was done chiefly because Washington was fixated on pampering Pakistan Army’s sensitivities on Afghanistan and keeping Afghanistan in the Pakistani orbit, spurred more by US political expediencies rather than a realistic appraisal of ground realities.
With the above contextual failures of the United States in its two major military interventions in Pakistan or lack of success therein, we can now proceed to list briefly the major prognostications for the United States 0n Afghanistan in 2017 as the new US Trump Administration begins to grapple with the challenges so staring.
The first major recommendation is that the United States has only one viable option and that is for the United States to stay embedded militarily in Afghanistan and in strength. This is not only an imperative for US larger global security interests in South Asia and Central Asia but also to prevent the China-Pakistan-Russia ‘Mission Creep’ into Afghanistan as a prelude to a full scale military intervention in Afghanistan.
Pakistan can never be a determinant of the stability and security of Afghanistan. Pakistan is the major problem impeding the same and is not part of any solution. The Trump Administration should exorcise the Pakistan Army ghost from any future American policy formulations, if the United States wants a stable, secure and stable Afghanistan allied to the United States.
The United States should also exorcise from its policy perspectives and formulations that the Taliban holds the key to Afghan’s future. The United States should rule out completely bringing the Taliban to the negotiating table and participate in future governance of Afghanistan. It would be akin to having brought Osama bin Laden to the negotiating table and making him part of Afghanistan’s future governance.
In 2017, the United States should recognise that the Taliban now is not only being propped up by the Pakistan Army but more markedly by China and Russia in their convergent aims of making the United States exit Afghanistan. Can the United States afford this?
Also needing exorcising from US perspectives and policy formulations is the fixation in US policy circles that China is a responsible stakeholder in Afghanistan’s security and that the United States can rely on China to assist in securing Afghanistan. The converse is true.
All of the above leads to the final recommendation that the US Trump Administration should order a major surge of US Forces in Afghanistan to steady the worsening situation where Pakistan Army affiliates like the Haqqani brothers and the Taliban have once again intensified their depredations and terrorist activities. This time around Washington should allow the US Generals to get on with their main mission and not fight anti-Afghan Forces with one hand tied to cater for Pakistan Army sensitivities.
The last point that I would like to repeat is that to succeed in Afghanistan, independent of Pakistan, the United Sates needs a drastic change in its mindset on Iran. At the height of the US military lack of successes in Afghanistan, what was noticeable is that Iran did not take advantage of the US lack of military success. On the contrary Iran earlier lost nearly a dozen diplomats earlier in Mzaar-e-Sharif murdered by the Taliban. If political expediencies could prompt the United States to temporise with a disruptive Pakistan, surely, the United States could afford a transactional relationship with Iran so that any forthcoming US troops surges in Afghanistan are no longer dependant on Pakistan’s logistics connectivity, Viable alternatives exist through the Indo-Iranian joint project of Chah Bahr and the ongoing connectivity to the Indian constructed road links in Afghanistan.
Concluding, in 2017, the stark message that stares at the United States is that it is Afghanistan that needs to be saved at all costs and not Pakistan as was the obsession for the last two decades and a half. Pakistan and the Pakistan Army can be left to stew in the broth of their new colonial masters—China. Afghanistan can be saved as a credible asset of the United States global security interests by the imperatives of a sizable US military embedment in Afghanistan lying at the crossroads of Asia. The Middle East is no longer a strategic asset for United States future, but Afghanistan is surely one.
*Dr Subhash Kapila is a graduate of the Royal British Army Staff College, Camberley and combines a rich experience of Indian Army, Cabinet Secretariat, and diplomatic assignments in Bhutan, Japan, South Korea and USA. Currently, Consultant International Relations & Strategic Affairs with South Asia Analysis Group. He can be reached at drsubhashkapila.007@gmail.com
At a time of growing tensions between nuclear powers — Russia and NATO in Europe, and the U.S., North Korea, and China in Asia — Washington has quietly upgraded its nuclear weapons arsenal to create, according to three leading American scientists, “exactly what one would expect to see, if a nuclear-armed state were planning to have the capacity to fight and win a nuclear war by disarming enemies with a surprise first strike.”
Writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project of the Federation of American Scientists, Matthew McKinzie of the National Resources Defense Council, and physicist and ballistic missile expert Theodore Postol conclude that “Under the veil of an otherwise-legitimate warhead life-extension program,” the U.S. military has vastly expanded the “killing power” of its warheads such that it can “now destroy all of Russia’s ICBM silos.”
The upgrade — part of the Obama administration’s $1 trillion modernization of America’s nuclear forces — allows Washington to destroy Russia’s land-based nuclear weapons, while still retaining 80 percent of U.S. warheads in reserve. If Russia chose to retaliate, it would be reduced to ash.
A Failure of Imagination
Any discussion of nuclear war encounters several major problems.
First, it’s difficult to imagine or to grasp what it would mean in real life. We’ve only had one conflict involving nuclear weapons — the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 — and the memory of those events has faded over the years. In any case, the two bombs that flattened those Japanese cities bear little resemblance to the killing power of modern nuclear weapons.
The Hiroshima bomb exploded with a force of 15 kilotons, or kt. The Nagasaki bomb was slightly more powerful, at about 18 kt. Between them, they killed over 215,000 people. In contrast, the most common nuclear weapon in the U.S. arsenal today, the W76, has an explosive power of 100 kt. The next most common, the W88, packs a 475-kt punch.
Another problem is that most of the public thinks nuclear war is impossible because both sides would be destroyed. This is the idea behind the policy of Mutually Assured Destruction, aptly named “MAD.”
But MAD is not a U.S. military doctrine. A “first strike” attack has always been central to U.S. military planning, until recently. However, there was no guarantee that such an attack would so cripple an opponent that it would be unable — or unwilling, given the consequences of total annihilation — to retaliate.
The strategy behind a first strike — sometimes called a “counter force” attack — isn’t to destroy an opponent’s population centers, but to eliminate the other sides’ nuclear weapons, or at least most of them. Anti-missile systems would then intercept a weakened retaliatory strike.
The technical breakthrough that suddenly makes this a possibility is something called the “super-fuze”, which allows for a much more precise ignition of a warhead. If the aim is to blow up a city, such precision is superfluous. But taking out a reinforced missile silo requires a warhead to exert a force of at least 10,000 pounds per square inch on the target.
Up until the 2009 modernization program, the only way to do that was to use the much more powerful — but limited in numbers — W88 warhead. Fitted with the super-fuze, however, the smaller W76 can now do the job, freeing the W88 for other targets.
Traditionally, land-based missiles are more accurate than sea-based missiles, but the former are more vulnerable to a first-strike than the latter, because submarines are good at hiding. The new super-fuze does not increase the accuracy of Trident II submarine missiles, but it makes up for that with the precision of where the weapon detonates. “In the case of the 100-kt Trident II warhead,” write the three scientists, “the super-fuze triples the killing power of the nuclear force it is applied to.”
Before the super-fuze was deployed, only 20 percent of U.S. subs had the ability to destroy re-enforced missile silos. Today, all have that capacity.
Trident II missiles typically carry from four to five warheads, but can expand that up to eight. While the missile is capable of hosting as many as 12 warheads, that configuration would violate current nuclear treaties. U.S. submarines currently deploy about 890 warheads, of which 506 are W76s and 384 are W88s.
The land-based ICBMs are Minuteman III, each armed with three warheads — 400 in total — ranging from 300 kt to 500 kt apiece. There are also air and sea-launched nuclear tipped missiles and bombs. The Tomahawk cruise missiles that recently struck Syria can be configured to carry a nuclear warhead.
The Technology Gap
The super-fuze also increases the possibility of an accidental nuclear conflict.
So far, the world has managed to avoid a nuclear war, although during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis it came distressingly close. There have also been several scary incidents when U.S. and Soviet forces went to full alert because of faulty radar images or a test tape that someone thought was real. While the military downplays these events, former Secretary of Defense William Perry argues that it is pure luck that we have avoided a nuclear exchange — and that the possibility of nuclear war is greater today than it was at the height of the Cold War.
In part, this is because of a technology gap between the U.S. and Russia.
In January 1995, Russian early warning radar on the Kola Peninsula picked up a rocket launch from a Norwegian island that looked as if it was targeting Russia. In fact, the rocket was headed toward the North Pole, but Russian radar tagged it as a Trident II missile coming in from the North Atlantic. The scenario was plausible. While some first strike attacks envision launching a massive number of missiles, others call for detonating a large warhead over a target at about 800 miles altitude. The massive pulse of electro-magnetic radiation that such an explosion generates would blind or cripple radar systems over a broad area. That would be followed with a first strike.
At the time, calmer heads prevailed and the Russians called off their alert, but for a few minutes the doomsday clock moved very close to midnight.
According to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, the 1995 crisis suggests that Russia does not have “a reliable and working global space-based satellite early warning system.” Instead, Moscow has focused on building ground-based systems that give the Russians less warning time than satellite-based ones do. What that means is that while the U.S. would have about 30 minutes of warning time to investigate whether an attack was really taking place, the Russians would have 15 minutes or less.
That, according to the magazine, would likely mean that “Russian leadership would have little choice but to pre-delegate nuclear launch authority to lower levels of command,” hardly a situation that would be in the national security interests of either country.
Or, for that matter, the world.
A recent study found that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan using Hiroshima-sized weapons would generate a nuclear winter that would make it impossible to grow wheat in Russia and Canada and cut the Asian Monsoon’s rainfall by 10 percent. The result would be up to 100 million deaths by starvation. Imagine what the outcome would be if the weapons were the size used by Russia, China, or the U.S.
For the Russians, the upgrading of U.S. sea-based missiles with the super-fuze would be an ominous development. By “shifting the capacity to submarines that can move to missile launch positions much closer to their targets than land-based missiles,” the three scientists conclude, “the U.S. military has achieved a significantly greater capacity to conduct a surprise first strike against Russian ICBM silos.”
The U.S. Ohio class submarine is armed with 24 Trident II missiles, carrying as many as 192 warheads. The missiles can be launched in less than a minute.
The Russians and Chinese have missile-firing submarines as well, but not as many, and some are close to obsolete. The U.S. has also seeded the world’s oceans and seas with networks of sensors to keep track of those subs. In any case, would the Russians or Chinese retaliate if they knew that the U.S. still retained most of its nuclear strike force? Faced with a choice committing national suicide or holding their fire, they may well choose the former.
The other element in this modernization program that has Russia and China uneasy is the decision by the Obama administration to place anti-missile systems in Europe and Asia, and to deploy Aegis ship-based anti-missile systems off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts. From Moscow’s perspective — and Beijing’s as well — those interceptors are there to absorb the few missiles that a first strike might miss.
In reality, anti-missile systems are pretty iffy. Once they migrate off the drawing boards, their lethal efficiency drops rather sharply. Indeed, most of them can’t hit the broad side of a barn. But that’s not a chance the Chinese and the Russians can afford to take.
Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Forum in June 2016, Russian President Valdimir Putin charged that U.S. anti-missile systems in Poland and Romania were not aimed at Iran, but at Russia and China. “The Iranian threat does not exist, but missile defense systems continue to be positioned.” He added, “a missile defense system is one element of the whole system of offensive military potential.”
Unraveling Arms Accords
The danger here is that arms agreements will begin to unravel if countries decide that they are suddenly vulnerable. For the Russians and the Chinese, the easiest solution to the American breakthrough is to build a lot more missiles and warheads, and treaties be dammed.
The new Russian cruise missile may indeed strain the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, but it is also a natural response to what are, from Moscow’s view, alarming technological advances by the U.S. Had the Obama administration reversed the 2002 decision by George W. Bush’s administration to unilaterally withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the new cruise might never have been deployed.
There are a number of immediate steps that the U.S. and the Russians could take to de-escalate the current tensions. First, taking nuclear weapons off their hair-trigger status would immediately reduce the possibility of accidental nuclear war. That could be followed by a pledge of “no first use” of nuclear weapons.
If this does not happen, it will almost certainly result in an accelerated nuclear arms race. “I don’t know how this is all going to end,” Putin told the St. Petersburg delegates. “What I do know is that we will need to defend ourselves.”
Marine Le Pen, the far-right candidate in the French presidential elections, said she will ban halal slaughter of animals if she is elected, along with any other method of ritual slaughter (i.e. kosher) done without stunning.
Le Pen, made the statement Tuesday (4/25/17) during a campaign visit at a meat market near Paris. She did not openly mention the kosher slaughter of animals, but everyone understood what she meant by “any other method of ritual slaughter done without stunning”.
Both halal and kosher slaughter require animals be conscious when their throats are slit — a practice that critics say is cruel; but which advocates insist is more humane than mechanized methods used in non-kosher abattoirs.
Muslims slaughter animals in a similar method to Jews, but with many fewer restrictions, to produce halal meat. “I would say that I think that 90 percent of abattoirs are halal” in the Paris region, Le Pen said.
In Europe, the Jewish and Muslim rituals like circumcision and ritual slaughter have united opponents both from liberal circles who cite animal welfare as their main concern; and right-wing nationalists who view the custom as foreign to their countries’ Christian or secular cultures.
Both Islam and Judaism put great emphasis on animal welfare, and adhere to a one-cut method of slaughter, intended to ensure the animal’s rapid death. Under Jewish and Islamic law, animals for slaughter must be healthy and uninjured at the time of death, which rules out driving a bolt into the brain – though some Muslim authorities accept forms of stunning that can be guaranteed not to kill the animal.
Under Orthodox Jewish law the animal’s neck is cut with a surgically sharp knife, severing its major arteries, causing a massive drop in blood pressure followed by death from loss of blood. Supporters say unconsciousness comes almost instantaneously – the cut itself stunning the animal. A similar procedure is used in Islamic slaughter, or dhabiha.
Both Islam and Judaism stress that diet should not just be about calories. A religious diet is an exercise in spiritual discipline and in God consciousness. We do not eat only to ‘fuel up’ like a machine. Nor should we eat only to enjoy ourselves.
Most Christians, especially Protestants, have a hard time understanding why Jews and Muslims think what you eat is important. Why should people restrict their culinary pleasures? Don’t most people think that being happy is the most important thing? Isn’t eating one of the most accessible pleasures we have? Why should religions restrict our daily pleasures?
From the Jewish and Muslim point of view, God has given us a diet that is good for us physically and spiritually. That diet is found in the Bible, in the later Jewish legal writings, and in the Qur’an and Sharia law.
Like all diets, a Kosher or Halal Holy Diet must be followed daily, to be effective. Like all diets, you should not become a fanatic in following this diet. Moral issues are more important than any one particular part of the diet.
Nevertheless, like all diets, and all forms of spiritual exercise and meditation, the more frequently you fail to keep your Kosher or Halal Holy Diet, the less you will benefit from it.
