Qatar reiterated its cooperation with various United Nations bodies related to the fight against terrorism, including Security Council’s Committees, expert teams and the Counter-Terrorism Implementation Task Force (CTITF), stressing support of their efforts in fulfilling their mandate in order to assist Member States.

This came in a speech delivered by the Permanent Representative of the State of Qatar to the United Nations, Ambassador Sheikha Alia Ahmed bin Saif Al-Thani, before the United Nations General Assembly on “Strengthening the Capacity of the United Nations System to Assist Member States in the Implementation of UN Counter-Terrorism Strategy”.

In this context, Ambassador Al-Thani pointed to the financial contribution made by the State of Qatar in support of the CTITF, stressing the ongoing coordination to strengthen partnerships in capacity-building and launch of projects aimed at preventing violent extremism and addressing the roots of terrorism.

The State of Qatar attaches great importance to working within regional and international mechanisms to eradicate terrorism and address its causes, reaffirming in all forums its strong condemnation of terrorism regardless of its motivation, in all its forms and manifestations, wherever and by whomever is committed, she stressed.

Since the adoption of the United Nations counter-terrorism strategy, the State of Qatar has been keen to fully implement its measures to address conditions conducive to the spread of terrorism, enhance international cooperation in the field of prevention and combating of terrorism and to fully comply with the international obligations of the UN Security Council relating to the fight against terrorism and its financing, Ambassador Al-Thani added.

Qatar is keen to strengthen bilateral cooperation to combat terrorism and deprive terrorist groups of funding sources, she said, referring to the bilateral agreements for cooperation and coordination signed by Qatar, such as the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the United States against terrorism.

She stressed the State of Qatar’s keenness to continuously update its national laws and regulations related to the fight against terrorism and its financing to cope with any emerging terrorist challenges, adding that Qatar as a distinguished international partner in the joint international efforts to combat terrorism follows a comprehensive approach in dealing with the phenomenon of terrorism in various military, financial and legal levels.

She also shed light on the State of Qatar’s role focused on strengthening all these efforts by supporting technical capacity-building to prevent violent extremism leading to terrorism and supporting efforts to eliminate terrorism by addressing the causes leading to an environment conducive for terrorism for terrorist activities such as security vacuum, injustice, tyranny, repression, marginalization and discrimination, which provide an incubator environment for terrorism.

In this regard, Ambassador Al-Thani stressed the importance of preventing terrorism, noting the State of Qatar’s initiative to hold a General Assembly’s meeting on the ‘Prevention of Children and Young People from Violent Extremism’ in June 2016.

Ambassador Sheikha Alia Ahmed Bin Saif Al Thani praised the efforts of the State of Qatar to prevent the threat of terrorism, pointing to the Silatech initiative, which aims to provide employment opportunities for young people in the region ,covers more than 15 countries and has funded since its inception tens of thousands of projects run by young people at the request of international partners.

She also referred to Educate A Child (EAC) program aimed at addressing the environment exploited by terrorists to recruit young people by providing educational opportunities for children who have lost their right to education due to conflicts, wars and natural disasters.

The State of Qatar pursues a comprehensive approach that involves the consolidation of a culture of peace, tolerance and dialogue among civilizations, cultures and religions, HE Al-Thani concluded, noting that Qatar hosts a range of leading intellectual and enlightenment centers in the region and also encourages freedom of expression and freedom of the press to contribute to countering any attempt to exploit the fight against terrorism as a pretext for political ends.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned that a new wave of religious intolerance is originating in the West, where groups like the Muslim Brotherhood operate freely, proving a threat back in the Arab world.

The former Labour Party leader, who led the country for a decade from 1997, made the remarks in a wide-ranging interview with Asharq Al-Awsat and Majalla magazine, sister publications of Arab News.

“The reason why I was opposed, for example, to Western policy at the time over Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood, was because it was so obvious to me that if we ended up supporting the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, we’d end up supporting a regime that was going to be profoundly intolerant, and quite apart from taking Egypt backwards, would end up as a significant security threat to us, never mind to Egypt or the region.”

The former politician, who now runs the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said that it was important for the Western governments to see Islamist ideology as “regressive” and as a totalitarian way of looking at the world.

“It’s the same if you do it to any religion – the Christian religion, Jewish religion, Hindu religion and indeed there are people who do it within each of those religions. You end up politicizing religion in that way, you end up doing damage to the future. And you end up excluding people.”

“The 20th century had these political ideologies, and the 21st century has these religious ideologies – whether religious or political they’re both totalitarian in nature. Therefore they are essentially regressive and reactionary.”

He said there was also a sense that part of the intolerance emerging in the world emanates from some quarters of the West rather than the Arab World.

“What we have done — and the UK is a good example of this, as I know from battles I had as prime minister — is that our societies are very tolerant, and very open, but unfortunately sometimes what’s happened is we’ve allowed these groups to come in and abuse that hospitality.

“And so you actually have pockets of extremism in the West now which can play themselves back into the region. The answer is the same: be intolerant of intolerance. We will have to take steps in the West to confront this in time.”

He said that while it was important to act against people using violence, it was also important to confront the ideology of extremism.

“There is still in the US, Britain, and Europe a reluctance to do this,” Blair said.

Real stories about the military don’t come from public relations officers or official statements. The real stories come from soldiers who go to the frontline – and, the only way to get those stories is to talk to the soldiers.

In an age of instant global communication, governments have refined their public diplomacy, particularly in the way defence issues are covered in the media, to market their version of events effectively to their domestic as well as the international public. Indeed, ignorance and misinformation are far more dangerous for the military than is informed reporting, however critical in tone. But the media need help here. Because the press is fragmented, competitive, sometimes ignorant of military realities, and constantly whiplashed between the demands of the market and those of journalistic ethics, however defined, the quality of coverage of military events is inevitably uneven at best. The tendency of unprepared reporters, charging from crisis to crisis, unaware of the issues at stake or of how the military functions, is to frame complex matters in simplistic ways. For its part, the military owes access to information both to media and the Indian people. Furthermore, it needs to get its story out—for the military will be competing with other groups, and enemies, eager to put their “spin” on events. To do this, it needs the media.

What is in it?

Defence and war stories can be complex, with even the basics such as appropriate language, ranks and regiments posing challenges to accurate reporting. Just as there are specialist financial, sports and showbusiness journalists reporting on their respective fields, there are also Defence journalists.

Though the days of national newspapers each having an ‘defence correspondent’ are over – there are still opportunities for budding writers with defence and security magazines and online defence news sites. There is also some crossover from defence journalists and travel/transport journalists who also may cover defence and security matters on their beat.  Reporting conflict requires a sound knowledge of the subject and good contacts to interpret complex stories. Get the basics right, such as appropriate language, ranks and regiments.

How to become a Defence Journalist in India

The best way to become a military journalist is to earn a college degree in journalism, Defence studies, International relations, Military history, various languages or related fields as students have options to choose various subjects while doing their graduation in India. You will be required to work on military bases, sometimes in foreign countries, in order to perform the job duties required, and this may mean you are in harm’s way in a war zone or other conflict area. You will need to prepare yourself to become a military journalist by knowing and understanding the risks involved, and being open to frequent travel.

It will also be necessary to become familiar with any military rules and regulations regarding the publishing and distribution of materials to troops or outside media outlets. So it helps to have exemplary grades in high school English or other languages; participating in the publication of school newspapers is helpful as well. If you have some college experience or have already earned a degree, be sure to make this known to your superiors. You can make yourself a more valuable candidate to become a military journalist by familiarizing yourself with the common equipment used by such journalists. If you have photography or videography experience, this will certainly help your qualifications and you are likely to be considered more seriously for a position. Become proficient in the use of word processing programs as well as other software you are likely to use on the job.

What does it involve?

The day-to-day job involves interviewing, researching and writing up news and features on defence subjects. It involves being a news junkie and wanting to keep up with the latest developments in defence. These days’ digital and online media are becoming more and more important, and an defence journalist today must know how to exploit the latest in social media such as Twitter, and might, for example, have to upload HD camera footage themselves to Youtube.

The job also can include a lot of foreign travel,conducting interviews, covering major defence shows/exhibitions such as International Defence Exhibition, Defence expo, Naval expo, Aerospace expo, Weapons Expo, Military & Defence Exhibitions worldwide as well as press trips to various Indian DRDO,DPSUs, ISRO, aircraft factories, labs, nuclear installlations or airbases. Occasionally you may also get an exclusive media flight on an aircraft to report on – such as in the back seat of a MiG-29 or may be in an APC or in a Tank. The drawbacks are that the job is not at the top end of salary scales in India yet but growing as an emerging field. It also involves unsocial hours where you may be travelling away from home and family. Finally, whether you are working on a monthly, weekly or online, it involves constant deadlines.

We still had long conversations about embedded journalism and the dangers of war correspondence — such as dealing with PTSD, getting injured and even dying at the frontlines. Covering war can be a noble task. It can be exciting. It can be surprising. It can be dangerous with really grave consequences. I learnt that while it can be a rewarding job, it is a very serious job. It is not something that should be entered into lightly or uninformed.

The Good

But is it really propaganda to exercise caution, and make sure the good news gets out with the bad? Military journalists inform the public of events and ideas they might otherwise never hear and counteract the effects of enemy propaganda. Embedded civilian journalists, though vital storytellers are at a disadvantage when it comes to accessing inside information and, more importantly, understanding the troops’ perspectives. Journalists within the military in some foreign countries are better able to give voice to the daily lives of their brothers- and sisters-in-arms, delivering the difficult facts without losing sight of the good news (how often do you see that on the 11 o’clock news?).

That makes it all the more imperative for building greater harmony and understanding between journalists and armed forces. The defence forces will keep shooting themselves in the foot if they don’t realize the potentials of media as a force multiplier and a weapon of war. Failure to recognize and counter enemy usage of media could lead to avoidable military failures. We must realize that decisions are no longer based on events but on how the events are presented. So we must lay greater emphasis on the role of media/journalists in war and train them for it in peacetime. They provide a vital service to the troops themselves, keeping them informed and entertained in every clime and place. And let’s face facts: It sure wouldn’t hurt your resume to land a job right out of high school that lets you reach an audience of millions, would it?

Indian Arena

Defence stories are often complex for those with no military background. And sometimes journalists are liable to confusion over the basics – for example: ranks, regiments, military structure, funding and responsibilities. A Indian defence analysts should sheds light on several questions of national importance — how India is modernising its armed forces? Why is India not able to develop enough technology in defence sector? India imports 70 per cent and exports 30 percent of weapons / ammunitions — how can we reverse the ratio? An Indian defence journalist work included sifting through all international treaties, press releases, parliamentary reports, journals, and interviewed nuclear scientists, bureaucrats and ambassadors across the world.

Need of the hour to introduce specialize courses besides a few options available in Defence and Strategic Studies Departments

There is a strong need to introduce a specialized course in defence journalism in India. A course which includes a combination of media-military theory in a classroom setting, coupled with field visits to armed forces regular force and reserve units. The goal is to enhance the military education of Indian journalists who will report on the issues facing the Indian armed Forces and their activities domestically and abroad.

There are only few universities in India in which Department of Defence and strategic Studies offered as a specialized paper or in Practicals on Defence journalism in options at graduation and post graduation level. Pune University offered this course in choosen options in Bsc as two optional paper of Military and Media, Defence Journalism and National Security and in Msc as a optional paper of Defence Journalism in Defence and strategic Studies course. THIRUVALLUVAR UNIVERSITY offered this course in B.A. Defence and strategic Studies as a paper under the name of Basics of Defence Journalism as a Skill based Subject. Dr Bhimrao Ambedkar University Agra offered the subject in B.Sc. Defence and strategic Studies as a practical paper under the name of Journalism and rescue.

Budelkhand University Jhansi offered the subject in BA/B.Sc. Defence and strategic Studies as a practical paper under the name of Strategic Defence Journalism. Post graduate Diploma in defence journalism was available in Guru Jambheshwar University, Haryana some years ago but currently not offered as not shown in the university website. Other alternates that can be considered are choosing journalism and mass communication and defence studies in your Graduation degree as optional subjects. Many students doing their Masters in defence and strategic studies and then opted for PG diploma in Mass and communication studies for enhance their knowledge in the field of defence journalism. Defence journalism, though very much a part of modern day journalism, has practically very little literature for reference existed in India and I found only a single book under the title Defence Journalism in India written by Dr Sangeeta Saxsena  This book has a unique distinction of being the first book on defence journalism, with special reference to India. Being a book on information and opinion, it analyses the love-hate relationship between the military and the media. Here the media`s point of view in no war, no peace, low intensity conflict areas have been answered.

Defence Correspondents’ Course for Indian Journalists: A Course to Force

The Directorate of Public Relations (DPR) acts as the gatekeeper of information. It is the only authorised channel of communication for disseminating information about the programmes, policies and activities of the Ministry of Defence and all establishments of the MoD including the armed forces. Currently, the Directorate of Public Relations (Defence)—a part of the Ministry of Defence (MOD)—interacts with the media on matters related to defence forces.

Through its civilian and defence services officers spread out through-out the country, it indulges in PR exercises during peacetime.The Directorate of Public Relations (DPR) is the nodal agency for the dissemination of information to the media and the public about the pant event, events, programmes, achievements and major policy decisions of the Ministry, Armed Forces, Inter-Services Organisations and Public Sector Undertakings under the Ministry of Defence. The Directorate with its headquarters in New Delhi and 25 regional offices across the country is responsible for providing media support to ensure wide publicity in the print and the electronic media. It also facilitates media interaction with the leadership and senior officials of the Ministry of Defence and Armed Forces by conducting regular interviews, press conferences and press tours.

As in the previous years, the Directorate conducted Defence Correspondents’ Course for media persons to enhance their knowledge about Defence matters. The Defence Correspondents’ Course (DCC) is one of the most prestigious courses conducted by the Directorate of Public Relations, Ministry of Defence. Now Defence Correspondents Course DCC is also conducted annually by Directorate of Public Relations (DPR), MoD for journalists from the print and electronic media, to acquaint them with the nuances of the armed forces to help them become specialist Defence journalists. Eminent speakers and Defence experts from the three Services, DRDO and Coast Guard among others will share their expertise and views with the journalists on varied military subjects. Media publicity for the major events is officially arranged by DPR in India. Coverage was also arranged in the form of photographs and news reports for various military exercises and assignments including those abroad. Visits of the Indian Defence Minister and Armed Forces Chiefs abroad and the visits of foreign dignitaries to India were also prominently covered. Major decisions of the Union Cabinet and the Ministry of Defence (MoD) including the Armed Forces were also widely publicized. The DPR also conducts media tours to various places across the country for major events and familiarization of visits. This Directorate also arranges all media facilities related to the Republic Day Celebrations and brings out a commentary for the parade on the Rajpath. Other important calendar events such as the Independence Day celebrations at Red Fort, Combined Commanders’ Conference and NCC Rally addressed by the Prime Minister and Defence Investiture Ceremonies at Rashtrapati Bhawan were also accorded due publicity.

How do I get to be a defence journalist?

A good knowledge of English is vital along with a high standard of grammar and ability to create a readable story. Unlike some other journalism fields, defence journalism involves highly technical information – with an emphasis on accurate facts. A science or an engineering background is therefore useful but not essential. A defence journalist must also have good interview and interpersonal skills – you will be trying to get information out of people. Knowledge of defence and security is extremely helpful too. More important, perhaps, is the ability to analyse, sort and communicate the information you find and decide – which is the most newsworthy/important?

Some tips are: practise your writing. If you are at school or university get involved with the local magazine. Also you could try starting your own blog – frequenting defence forums to get feedback. While blogging may be easy getting a paying job in this field is more difficult – it is a quite small niche sector. However, try writing, emailing or phoning your favourite defence magazines and inquire about internships, jobs or submitting articles. Don’t be worried about rejection the first time. If you have the aptitude, enthusiasm and persist – eventually you will get there. Freelance writing and photography is also a option for defence journalists. A freelance writer is a writer who works on a self-employed basis. They can work for just one magazine or, more often, they write for several different publications at a time. The more diverse a writer can be, the more likely they are to be published and paid for their work.

In short, if you love writing, have a nose for security news, have a passion for defence and like to travel, then defence journalism may be just for you!

A web of formal and informal Israeli-Arab relations and common fears of renewed popular uprisings that could threaten regimes and benefit Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood facilitated Israel’s backing down in the crisis over Jerusalem’s Temple Mount or Haram al Sharif, home to Islam’s third most holy shrine, the Al Aqsa mosque.

Protests in recent weeks that forced Israel to lift restrictions on access and dismantle security arrangements installed on a site that evokes deep-seated emotions among Muslims and Jews alike had all the makings of a popular revolt and could yet prove to be a catalyst in approaches to Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation of lands captured half a century ago during the 1967 Middle East war. The security equipment was initially installed after two Palestinians with Israeli nationality shot dead two Israeli policemen in the compound.

The spontaneous protests that erupted independent of established political forces such as the Palestinian Authority (PA) headed by President Mahmoud Abbas; Hamas, the Islamist faction that controls the Gaza Strip, and other Palestinian political factions, empowered Palestinian Jerusalemites who live in a part of the city that has been annexed by Israel but feel that they are routinely discriminated against. The dismantling of the security equipment and lifting of restrictions on access constituted a rare instance in which Israel bowed to Palestinian pressure.

“We Palestinians have proved, not only to Israel, but to the whole world, that we Palestinians have promising potential that can never be broken,” said Palestinian activist Ali Jiddah.

“We are on the threshold of a big shift. What is going on today is not random or transient. It could be the beginning of a third intifada that is different from the others. What is unique about this is that it’s not individual actions, but a popular movement capable of attracting huge numbers of people. This popular momentum could recharge the Palestinian people. It may take time but we are on the way. It will override the PA. They don’t even know it exists. This will bring about a change in leadership,” added former Palestinian information minister-turned activist Mustafa Barghouti.

The sense of empowerment was evident two days after the Israeli backdown when protests erupted in the Jaffa section of Tel Aviv after police shot dead a Palestinian during a shootout with suspected criminals. ‘The policemen have no right to shoot at people. This time we will not keep quiet,’ said a Jaffa resident.

The notion of an empowered and angry public raised not only the spectre of a possible Palestinian uprising, the third in three decades, but a potential return of street protests elsewhere in the Middle East like those that in 2011 toppled the leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Yemen.

The Jerusalem protests erupted at a moment that Saudi Arabia and the UAE have gone to extremes to roll back the 2011 achievements and ensure that the Middle East and North Africa does not witness a repeat. Saudi King Salman, the custodian of Islam’s two most holy cities, Mecca and Medina, in a statement by his royal court, claimed credit for resolving the Al Aqsa crisis through his contacts with world leaders.

The Jerusalem protests came on the back of widespread anti-government demonstrations in northern Morocco that have mushroomed since May and more recently expressed an anti-monarchy sentiment. The Moroccan protests, much like the 2011 revolt in Tunisia that forced President out of office, were sparked by the death of a fish vendor in the Riffian city of al Hoceima, who was killed by a trash compactor as he attempted to recover fish confiscated by authorities.

King Mohammed VI of Morocco, in a bid to end the unrest, this weekend pardoned more than a thousand people who were under arrest for taking part in the protests.

Two incidents, the sentencing of a scion of a key Jordanian tribe to life in prison for killing three Americans at a Jordanian air base and the extradition to Israel of an Israeli security officer who killed two Jordanians to fend off an attack, threaten to take Jordan to the brink. Outrage over the government’s handling of the incidents have called into question a social contract in which Jordanians in the wake of protests in 2011 dropped demands for political reform and accepted austerity in exchange for stability.

“This has become an issue of dignity. There is a complete lack of trust and resentment toward this government by the people. We are afraid of where we go from this point,” said Jordanian member of parliament Saddah Habashneh.

Much more than the Moroccan protests and Jordanian anger, resistance to Israeli actions surrounding the Al Aqsa Mosque had the potential of forcing the hand of Arab autocrats in a post-2011 era in which Arabic public opinion has begun to count. Deep-seated divisions in the Arab world coupled with draconian anti-protest laws may explain the absence of demonstrations in the Middle East and North Africa in support of the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, if Palestinians were to capitalize on their Al Aqsa success to confront Israeli occupation and discrimination, it could spark public dissent elsewhere in the region as well as the wider Muslim world that could turn against local leaders. Continued Palestinian protests, moreover, could complicate cooperation between Israel and conservative Arab states in countering Iranian influence in the Middle East as well as an attempt to return to Palestine a UAE-backed Palestinian leader, who has good relations with key figures in the United States and Israel.

Arab rulers have so far been helped not only by the absence of solidarity protests in Arab capitals, but also by indications that Arab public opinion may be divided because of the Gulf crisis over attitudes towards the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, both of which have close ties to Qatar. In one instance, a caller told the London-based Arabic-language Al-Hiwar television network: “I’m opposed to an Al-Aqsa victory, because an Al-Aqsa victory is a victory for Hamas and Qatar!”

Ahmed Samah al-Idarusi, a spokesman for the Popular Committee for the Defense of Sinai, a group formed by the Egyptian region’s tribal leaders, complained that “we now encounter Egyptian diplomatic and cultural silence such that even the elites are not capable of releasing a single joint statement of condemnation” of Israeli actions in the Al Aqsa compound.

Prominent Israeli commentator Zvi Bar’el noted that so far, the Al Aqsa protests have not sparked a third Palestinian intifada even though they had all the makings of an uprising. Mr. Bar’el argued that Palestinians were still traumatized by the political and human cost of the second intifada in the first years of the 21stcentury that ironically was dubbed the Al Aqsa intifada.

“The tragic results of the second intifada – from both the humanitarian and strategic perspectives – have been deeply engraved in the collective Palestinian memory. It’s hard to imagine what the expiry date of such trauma is… Perhaps…the trauma is still effective – but it’s best not to put it to the test,” Mr. Bar’el said.

What a dramatic week this past one has been in the U.S. capital! After writing about the POTUS last week I had no intention of getting back to Trump politics this week, but given all the hullaballoo, excitement and even the nervousness with all the major news events unfolding, I simply could not ignore revisiting the subject.

For years the Republicans have been trying to put the death nail to the affordable healthcare act – more popularly known as the Obamacare, named after the past president. And if anyone could have resuscitated the troubled Obamacare repeal and replace bill, it was Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader with a track record of getting tough things done within the Senate.

But after years of pleading, months of negotiating, and weeks of just barely edging the contentious bill forward, it suddenly died. And it happened in a dramatic way. According to the CNN, the end was unexpected, as McConnell watched Sen. John McCain — his longtime friend and occasional political rival — walk to the center of the Senate floor and turn his thumb down to vote “no.”

McCain’s was a signature statement about what’s wrong with the Trump administration. “We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace,” McCain said in a statement.

All 48 Democrats voted no, along with three Republican senators — McCain, as well as Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.

McCain had returned to Washington for the health care vote on Tuesday, nearly a week after his office announced he had been diagnosed with brain cancer. The Arizona senator delivered a powerful speech from the Senate floor Tuesday, focusing on a need to return to a more bipartisan approach.

From the published news reports, it appeared that Republican leaders attempted to convince McCain to change his vote before the “skinny repeal.” Senator Mitch McConnell and Vice President Mike Pence were seen before the vote speaking with McCain, but the senator stuck with his “no,” effectively killing the bill.

From the TV images, one can see McConnell’s face ashen; he stood still and silent for few minutes before he could air his disappointment with a cracked voice. As Vice President Pence walked out of the senate podium, the Senate Minority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer delivered an emotional speech thanking Senator McCain for his inspirational speech and vote. He stressed the importance of bipartisanship moving forward in dealing with the plethora of problems facing the nation. Later on Friday while speaking with reporters, Schumer said, “I have not seen a senator who speaks truth to power as strongly, as well and as frequently as John McCain. The very same courage he showed as a naval aviator during Vietnam he showed last night and has shown time and time again.”

Schumer also praised Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who along with McCain voted down the GOP bill. They both have been critical “no” votes in halting the Senate GOP’s legislative efforts on health care. “They were amazing and women are in so many instances stronger than men,” he said. “They brag less about it, but they are.”

This past week also saw the nasty infighting within the White House where the newly appointed Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci trashed the White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus.

In an interview with the New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza, Scaramucci said, “Reince is a f―-ing paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.” If you had thought that you had heard enough of trash talk from the candidate Trump wait for his communications chief who seemingly is destined to take it to new lows.

“In my many years as a White House watcher, as a federal employee, as a Presidential Schedule C appointee, as a very proud public servant during 14 years as a staff member in the House and the Senate, I cannot recall a more frightening, more disturbing specter of a debauched human being than White House Chief of Communications, Anthony Scaramucci from whose mouth emerge the demonic toads of inhumanity,” Jim Moore writes in the Huffington Post.

Priebus is known as a Washington D.C. insider with lots of political connections. He was, however, suspected as the one leaking out sensitive information to the press, which he squarely denies. He submitted his resignation on Thursday and was replaced by ex-General/secretary John F. Kelly, which was announced via a tweet on Friday afternoon by who else but the President.

Kelly since January has been secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, after Trump nominated him for the position. The 67-year-old Kelly is a retired Marine Corps general who held senior command positions in Iraq and served as the combatant commander of the United States Southern Command. He was also senior military assistant to two secretaries of defense, Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.

In the meantime, President Trump has expressed his disdain for his ‘beleaguered’ Attorney General Jeff Sessions who refuses to take the hint and resign honorably before perhaps getting fired by his boss. Many lawmakers have come to the defense of Sessions for recusing himself from the Russia-gate.

“I understand [Trump’s] feelings about it, because this has been a big distraction for him,” Sessions told in an interview with Fox News.

The U.S. Senate had voted almost unanimously (98-2) on Thursday to slap new sanctions on Russia. The vote will force Trump to choose between a tough position on Moscow and effectively dashing his stated hopes for warmer ties with the country or to veto the bill amid investigations in possible collusion between his campaign and Russia.

By signing the bill into law, Trump cannot ease the sanctions against Russia unless he seeks congressional approval.

Russia took its first steps on Friday to retaliate against proposed American sanctions for Moscow’s suspected meddling in the 2016 election, seizing two American diplomatic properties in Russia and ordering the United States Embassy to reduce staff to 455 matching the number of Russian diplomats in the United States by September 1. This retaliation with echoes of the Cold War would affect hundreds of staff at the U.S. embassy and far outweigh the Obama administration’s expulsion of 35 Russians in December.

Late on Friday, the White House issued a statement saying Trump would sign the bill after reviewing the final version. The statement made no reference to Russia’s retaliatory measures.

On Friday, North Korea tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that appears to have the ability to hit Alaska and major US cities. South Korea’s joint chiefs of staff said they estimate that the intercontinental ballistic missile tested Friday is more advanced than one launched earlier in July based on the range it traveled.

A combination of US, South Korean and Japanese analyses of the launch from Mupyong-ni, near North Korea’s border with China, shows the missile flew about 45 minutes, going 3,700 kilometers (2,300 miles) high and for a distance of 1,000 kilometers (621 miles). If the missile were fired on a flatter, standard trajectory, it would have major US cities like Los Angeles, Denver and Chicago well within its range, with possibly the ability to reach as far as New York and Boston, according to David Wright, a missile expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists. However, early analysis of Friday’s test cannot determine how heavy a payload the missile was carrying in its warhead, Wright said. Obviously, the heavier the payload, the shorter the range.

Michael Elleman of the International Institute for Strategic Studies, however, estimated a range of at least 9,500 kilometers (5,900 miles) for the North Korean missile, per Reuters news agency — less than that estimated by Wright, but still potentially putting Los Angeles within reach.

The ICBM test prompted a fresh round of condemnation from the United States, China, Japan and South Korea. Read More

US President Trump condemned the missile launch and said the US would act to ensure its security. “Threatening the world, these weapons and tests further isolate North Korea, weaken its economy, and deprive its people,” Trump said in a written statement. “The United States will take all necessary steps to ensure the security of the American homeland and protect our allies in the region.”

Per KCNA (Korean Central News Agency), North Korea’s leader Kim is quoted as saying “the whole US mainland” is now within North Korea’s reach. He called Pyongyang’s weapons program “a precious asset” that cannot be reversed nor replaced. Many of his countrymen are convinced that developing the missile program as a nuclear deterrent is absolutely necessary.

They may be right. After all, with such a deterrent, American experts tell us that the USA will not have the stomach to pre-emptively attack Pyongyang.

In the wake of the test, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., and Adm. Harry Harris, commander of US Pacific Command, called the South Korean Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Gen. Lee Sun Jin, to express “ironclad commitment” to the US alliance with South Korea and discuss military response options. Hours after that call, the US and South Korean military conducted a live-fire exercise as a show of force in response to the test, according to Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis. The exercise included firing missiles into the ocean.

Less than six years in power, Kim has tested more missiles than his father and grandfather combined. He is absolutely committed to the missile program and not interested in tempering its activities.

Threats from Trump has not been able to sober him.

The latest test has spurred calls for a response from the Trump administration. Administration officials have warned that “all options are on the table” but a clear path forward has yet to materialize. Trump may find himself in a situation with no good choices.

On July 28, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif stepped down from his post after a Supreme Court ruling him and Finance Minister Ishaq Dar guilty of corruption, leaving a dangerous political vacuum before the general elections next year. While the Supreme Court’s verdict shows a new era of accountability and a strong political opposition, which is good for a country in transition like Pakistan, it also raises questions about the implications of these developments for country’s economy and security as well as potential scenarios about what will happen next.

This was a historical ruling for Pakistan, which from its emergence in 1947 experienced four military coups d’état and has been affected by multiple sources of violence and insecurity. The end of the military regime of General Pervez Musharraf in 2008 marked the beginning of a period of democratic transition, but armed conflicts, Islamic terrorism, separatist insurgence and sectarian violence have continued to destabilize Pakistan.

The recent judicial decision was taken on the basis of Article 62(1)(f) of the Constitution and other domestic legislative provisions, suggesting a revival of the rule of law in the transitional country. The verdict was met with enthusiasm by all major political parties in Pakistan (except Sharif’s PML-N), with many politicians giving credit to the contribution of Imran Khan and his Pakistan-Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI). The verdict generates some incertitude related to the developments in the next period, while also opening new windows of democratic opportunity for the unstable country, affected by multiple insecurities.

Increasing Support for Imran Khan

Against the background of next year’s general elections, the Supreme Court verdict is likely to increase support for Imran Khan, the leader of the oppositional PTI party. Imran Khan filed the corruption case against PM Nawaz Sharif at the Supreme Court after the leaks related to the Panama Papers at the beginning of 2017 and played an important role in the public debate around the case.

On numerous occasions, PTI showed that it can mobilize substantial parts of the society. The ex-cricketer and his party also gained recognition and appreciation as result of the achievements in the province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, where PTI is in government. Disregarding of Nawaz Sharif’s successor, the Supreme Court’s decision is likely to result in a redistribution of political preferences, with voters in the 2018 elections expected to migrate from PML (who was a major favorite) to PTI.

Military Takeover Currently Unlikely

Even after the period of uncertain democratic transition post 2008, the armed forces of Pakistan continue to remain very influent. The ousting of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif leaves a dangerous political vacuum and generates a window of opportunity for the military to step in. However, a military takeover is a very unlikely scenario at the moment. This is because a military coup d’état would get little acceptance, from both domestic and international communities, although the military is one of the most trusted institutions in the country, well recognized for its discipline and efficiency.

Demonstrated support of the Pakistan Army for the Taliban and domestic organizations with presumed links to terrorist organizations, such as Jamaat-ud- Dawa, have decreased the popular support for military and its affiliated agencies. An expanding (democratic) political culture in Pakistan is resulting in an increased societal opposition against the interference in politics of men in uniform.

While the Pakistan Army has been praised for numerous security achievements, most notably in stabilizing Karachi – which is the country’s economic centre – and clearing terrorist safe-heavens in Federally Administered Areas (FATA), the resurgence of terrorist attacks post 2014 has raised questions about the army’s approach. What went wrong with the implementation of the National Action Plan?

Nonetheless, the military will continue to play a strong role in both internal and external affairs of Pakistan. Regional instability, particularly spillover effects from Afghanistan and India, nuclear technology and an intensification of Islamic terrorism after 2014, demand a strong military capacity.

Opportunities

The latest political development also creates a series of important opportunities for the nuclear South Asian country. Firstly, it opens a window of opportunity for a re-negotiation and possibly recalibration of civil–military relations, which, even after the beginning of democratic transition post 2008 remained inclined in the favor of the military. A capable and ‘clean’ new Prime Minister, with strong political competences and ability to take command over and strengthen state institutions could consolidate the period of democratic transition in Pakistan. Democratic civilian control and functional civil-military relations are an essential premise of democratic consolidation.

Secondly, the Supreme Court verdict marks the beginning of a new era of accountability, transparency and rule of law, which are vital for the progress of both democracy and security in Pakistan. Inefficiency of government institutions and agencies, lack of democratic political parties and weak political leadership have been factors enabling military intervention in politics and part of Pakistan’s numerous problems in the past.

Implications for Security

In terms of domestic security, the authority vacuum and situation of political uncertainty in the aftermath of the withdrawal of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif could be used by terrorist organizations to re-organize themselves and re-define their agendas. However, an intensification of terrorist attacks as result of the verdict cannot be anticipated, because the Pakistan Army and para-military security forces have been in charge of providing security and this is likely to remain so in the next period.

While developments on the political scene might get the military’s attention, it should not prevent them from the main responsibility, i.e. providing security. As far as regional security is concerned, a change in the political leadership and domestic political constellations could result in a shift in Pakistan’s foreign policy, in particular vis-á-vis India and Afghanistan. Depending on the political preferences of the new leadership, this might open new opportunities for negotiations with the neighboring countries.

Implications for Economy

The recent developments jeopardize Pakistan’s period of relative stability after the end of military regime Pervez Musharraf in 2008 and first transfer of power from a civilian to another civilian government in 2013. The premature end of Nawaz Sharif’s mandate generates new institutional instability.

Together with the volatile security situation, the ousting of Nawaz Sharif makes Pakistan an uncertain financial environment, which is likely to further deter investors. In strong association with the Pakistan—China Economic Corridor program, foreign direct investment in Pakistan increased by 10% in 2017. However, the Supreme Court’s disqualification of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, along with the Finance Minister of his cabinet, could have significant macroeconomic implications, with possible repercussions on the Pakistan’s bond rating (which was updated to “stable” in 2015).

To conclude, while the ousting of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif opens new opportunities for democratic transition and civil-military relations, the premature change of power in Pakistan is likely to bring a moderate decline in country’s economic momentum, released by the period of relative stability post 2013.

*Cornelia-Adriana Baciu is PhD candidate in Politics and International Relations at the School of Law and Government, Dublin City University, where she focuses her research on international security, military economy and democratic security governance. Cornelia-Adriana delivered lectures and tutorials to undergraduate students enrolled in the programme Economics, Politics and Law at Dublin City University. She has presented papers at international conferences in Pakistan, Japan and New Zealand. In 2015, Cornelia-Adriana was a pre-doctoral fellow of the ZEIT-Stiftung Hamburg. Previously, she worked as a Risk Analyst at a security management company in Konstanz, Germany, where she focused her work on armed conflict, terrorism and political instability in Asia and the Middle East. Cornelia-Adriana Baciu studied Politics and European Studies in Germany, India and Romania and completed an internship at the Terrorism Prevention Branch, United Nations.
Contact: cornelia.baciu@uni-konstanz.de; cornelia.baciu2@mail.dcu.ie
Twitter: corneliaa_baciu
Website: http://www.corneliaadriana-baciu.vpweb.de/

Lurking below the surface of the Gulf crisis, are rival, yet troubled, attempts by Qatar and its detractors to use sports to boost soft power and/or launder tarnished images of their autocracies.

Ironically, the crisis threatens to have levelled the playing field in a bitter media and public diplomacy war that was covert prior to the seven-week-old Saudi-UAE-Bahraini-led diplomatic and economic boycott of Qatar. If anything, the Gulf crisis has emerged as a case study of the pitfalls of reputation management in which sports is an important tool. On balance, it so far has had different effects on the reputations of three of the key protagonists.

It has also served to highlight the pot-blames-the-kettle-character of the Gulf crisis, most recently with the disclosure that North Koreans were employed not only in Qatar on World Cup-related projects, but also on a UAE military base that hosts US forces. The disclosure of relations with North Korea is awkward at a time of increased tension between North Korea and the United States over the pariah state’s ballistic missile and nuclear program.

A Washington-based Saudi dissident group, the Institute for Gulf Affairs, recently published a memo reportedly from the State Department as well as emails from the hacked account of Yousef al-Otaiba, the high-profile UAE ambassador to the United States, that asserted that a UAE company, Al-Mutlaq Technologies, had bought $100 million worth of weapons from North Korea for use in the Saudi-led military campaign in Yemen.

Qatar, plagued by allegations that its successful bid for the 2022 World Cup hosting rights lacked integrity and that its migrant labour regime amounted to slavery, has scored reputational gains in the Gulf crisis despite the recent revelations related to North Korea. While the revelations reinforced concerns about Qatar’s policies and labour regime, they also suggested that issues at stake in the Gulf crisis constituted regional problems rather than exclusive concern about just one of the Gulf states.

The UAE, a driving force in the anti-Qatar campaign that uses the hosting of international sporting events to boost its image, has suffered because of its failure and that of its alliance partners to garner widespread international support for its tactics and demands that were perceived as unreasonable, unactionable, and designed to undermine Qatari sovereignty and independence. The UAE’s North Korea link as well as allegations by human rights groups, denied by the government in Abu Dhabi, that the UAE was backing the abuse of prisoners in Yemen has done little to enhance the Gulf state’s reputation.

Qatar and the UAE’s North Korean links could put the two Gulf states in the Trump administration’s firing line as it considers how to respond the Pyongyang’s most recent ballistic missile test that the pariah state claims would allow it to target any US city. Pressuring countries to back away from economic relations with North Korea, the Trump administration recently extended sanctioning of Sudan for among other things not being fully committed to implementing United Nations sanctions on the country.

Saudi Arabia promised Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, during a visit earlier this month to the kingdom as well as the UAE, that it would continue to see improvement of relations between Sudan and the United States despite the African country’s refusal to join the Saudi-UAE-led boycott of Qatar.

Neither the Gulf crisis nor sports has done much for Bahrain, its image tarnished by its brutal suppression in 2011 of a popular revolt with the help of Saudi and UAE forces, and its subsequent repression of opposition forces and continuous violations of basic human rights. Worse even, the Gulf crisis has focussed attention on Bahrain’s failed effort to use sports to polish its tarnished image and put it in the spotlight as an example of the degree to which smaller Gulf states risk losing their ability to chart an independent course.

As the quarrelling Gulf states pour millions of dollars into hiring public relations and lobbying firms in Washington and elsewhere with the UAE as the largest spender, Qatar can shrug off in both reputational and financial terms a $51,000 fine by world soccer body FIFA. Qatar was fined because its national team wore jerseys in a World Cup qualifier against South Korea that featured a drawing of Qatari emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani. The drawing has come to symbolize a wave of Qatari nationalism sparked by the Gulf crisis.

The public diplomacy war has expanded beyond a constant diet of allegations against one another in state-controlled media of the Gulf protagonists into Saudi-sponsored tv spots on US television and rival advertisements on London’s famous black cabs, alternatively featuring a pro-Qatari message, a Saudi soccer match, and the UAE’s Emirates and Ettihad airlines.

Qatar, in the latest move in the public diplomacy war, hired a Washington lobby firm originally established by former Trump election campaign manager Corey Lewandowski. Mr. Lewandowski has since left the firm over a dispute with his partners, who include Barry Bennett, a Trump campaign adviser and others with ties to the president as well as George Birnbaum, an American-born former chief of staff to Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu who has close relations with the Republican Party establishment.

Qatar separately contracted the services of a company, Information Management Services, that specializes in digging up dirt on U.S. politicians.

For its part, the UAE in the years running up to the Gulf crisis hired a US firm established by former Treasury Department officials to influence US media reporting on Qatar.

The media war potentially could enter a new phase with the acquisition by a relatively unknown Saudi businessman, Sultan Muhammad Abuljadayel, of an up to 50 percent stake in Independent Digital News and Media, the holding company that publishes Britain’s left-wing The Independent daily. The Independent has consistently been critical of the kingdom. Evgeny Lebedev, the Russian owner of the Independent’s parent company, ESI Media, recently saw his shareholding fall below 50 percent.

At the bottom line, the escalating media and public diplomacy war between Qatar and its Gulf detractors is as likely, as is evident with the revelations about North Korea, to put on public display the protagonists’ hidden skeletons, as it is likely to contribute to attempts to polish tarnished reputations and influence attitudes and policies in Western capitals.

A key tool in the protagonists’ quivers, sports is proving to be a double-edged sword as it too has the potential of shining the light on practices and policies Gulf states would prefer to keep out of the public domain.

President Donald Trump should be careful that his careless words do not roll back the enormous strides in human rights and civil liberties awareness and progress put into place by the previous President Barack Obama administration over 8 years, which sought to redress the deeply entrenched human rights violations and law enforcement misconduct within the American psyche of the past 500 years, both domestically and overseas.

In December 2010, the Arabs, sick to death with the corrupt patriarchal and tribal regimes that ruled them since independence, took to the streets to express their discontent and to ask for democracy. Initially, nobody believed that such a movement would topple well-rooted dictatorships. But the anger quickly grew in size and scope and became a true tsunami that swept away the ruling dictators and with them the proverbial lethargy of Arab society.

The media quickly dubbed the successive uprisings “Arab Spring” but, alas, soon this became a mere wishful thinking as counter-revolution, civil war and chaos started to take the place of the much-desired democracy and freedom. Many countries of the Middle East have gone awry instead of initiating a fresh start in national democratic empowerment.

Chaos, Mon Amour

The Middle Easti is bent on its own timed destruction; this is taking place slowly but surely. The next two or three decades, or even may be more, will see the irreversible deconstruction of the Middle East prior to the emergence of a new region, totally different and totally metamorphosed into a numerous small states created either along sectarian or ethnic identity lines.

The military dictatorships, the traditional monarchies and the petro-dollar entities have since independence kept the region’s volcano under control through various artifices: brutal oppression, material persuasion or religious legitimacy. But, then two things happened: the digital revolution that empowered the powerless and the oppressed, this led to the Arab uprisings that started at the end of 2010 and set the stage for the chaos that will increase with time. As such, the Arab volcano has blown its top and entered into activity spewing dense fumes and tons of molten rock and will certainly go doing that for some time to come. The magma is not about to solidify soon.ii

The Middle East today is undoubtedly ridden by a multitude of conflicts, those that are currently in progress and many awaiting the propitious time to declare themselves officially in existence. The ultimate question of identity has never been raised, never considered, let alone solved in total fairness. In the Arab world everyone was Arab even if he were Berber/Amazigh, Kurd, Copt, Druze or else. The pan-Arab ideology negated all identities that existed in this region either by persuasion, dictatorship or religion and still do.

If you were from the Arab region, by definition, you could be nothing else but Arab. Arabism is an ideology, a language, but, also, a cultural religion on itself. The pan-Arabism exponents like to repeat on and on that the Arab language is the idiom spoken in paradise, in other words it means that if you reject their ethnic ideology you will end up in hell. This concept is, today, highlighted and defended by The Islamists, for whom it is a must for every pious Muslim to learn and speak Arabic, the language of the Koran and ahl al-jennah, paradise inhabitants.

This is obviously a very simplistic and racist argument, bearing in mind that the majority of Muslims do not speak Arabic. The number of Muslims worldwide is estimated at 1.5 billion, of which there are only 250 million Arabs, a simple calculation will send 1.25 billion Muslims to hell because they don’t speak Arabic, but, instead, Persian, Urdu, Malay, Swahili, Pulaar, Mandinke, Berber/Tamazight, etc. Even with the fires of the uprisings ravaging the whole region, many Arab ideologues still believe blindly in the Arab supremacy, come what may.

Ethnic cultures

Berber/Amazigh

The Berbers occupy a huge area of North Africa from Morocco to western Egypt and as far south as Timbuktu and the Niger River. Historically, their influence extended to Sicily, southern Italy, and Spain and now enriches emigrant culture in contemporary France.

They are not a single “people” but can be defined by their prehistoric Mediterranean origins, by a common language (or language-group) and by their historical tendency to seek refuge from a long succession of conquerors (Punic, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Ottoman, French) in remote mountain or desert communities, where they could preserve their independence, tongue and way of life.iii

The Berbers/Amazighs are very proud of their culture and are presently undergoing some kind of renaissance, especially after the official recognition of their civilization (The Royal Declaration of Ajdir in 2001) in Morocco, and the subsequent setting up of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture (Institut Royal de la Culture Amazighe -IRCAM-,) whose mission is to safeguard Berber culture from extinction and make provisions for teaching the language in schools. One of the first acts of this institute was the adoption of Tifinagh, an ancient Berber script, as the official alphabet of the Tamazight language in 2003. Since then the Berber militants have been struggling for the recognition of their language as an official idiom besides Arabic. In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Moroccan constitution was overhauled in 2011 and Tamazight was inscribed in it as an official language besides Arabic. The same official recognition is happening slowly but surely in Algeria, a bastion of pan-Arabism.iv

Casper White, a researcher based in Cairo and working for the Democracy Program of the Carter Center in Egypt, supporting its election observation missions, highlights identity politics in Algeria:v

“We are Algerians and Muslims but we are not Arabs”, begins Ait Bachir. He refers to the idea of an exclusive Algerian identity that began to take shape in the 1930s when the Arabic language and Islam were proclaimed as integral to the Algerian identity by the emerging national movement in opposition to French colonial rule. “Colonization brought the genocide of our identity, of our history, of our language [and] of our traditions,” President Abdelaziz Bouteflika said on Algerian television in 2006. Under the leadership of the National Liberation Front (FLN), this concept of an indivisible Algerian identity – nationalist, Muslim, and Arab – was further consolidated. The Berber minority in Algeria, estimated at between 6 and 10 million, have always maintained a strong determination to preserve their distinctive cultural identity and language. “Efforts to force us to use Arabic are a form of Arab imperialism”, explains Ait Bachir. Although Berber became an official — but not a national — language in Algeria in 2002, the Tamazight language is still not to be taught in public schools or in university. “Our community is traumatised – we feel like our body parts have been amputated.”

The Kurds

The Kurdish people comprise a large ethnic group of about 25 million that have always lived in the same place, and trace their roots back to the Medes of ancient Persia more than 2,500 years ago.
For nearly 3,000 years the Kurds have lived along the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the cradle of civilization. This places their beginnings at the very source of the nations and in the immediate vicinity of history’s most important events.

Most Kurds are Muslims, and about 75% today are at least nominally members of the majority Sunni branch. As many as four million Kurds are Shiites, living mostly in Iran where the Shiite faith predominates. However, the Kurds generally strive to express their Islam in a distinct fashion. For example, the Sunni Muslim Kurds of Turkey have adopted the Shafi’i legal code, ignoring the general rule among the surrounding Arabs and Turks, who adhere to the Hanafi School.

Mystical practices and participation in Sufi orders are also widespread among Kurds. Many of these orders are considered heretical by rigid orthodox Muslims. Drawing heavily on shamanism, Zoroastrianism and elements of Christianity, Kurdish mysticism places emphasis on the direct experience of God through meditation, ecstatic experiences and the intercession of holy men or sheiks.

Most Kurds possess a tangible sense of the supernatural, readily acknowledging demonic activity in the form of evil spirits and curses; they often worship at shrines or other holy places.

The Kurds, very much like Berbers/Amazighs in that respect, have always dreamt of an independent country of their own, but geopolitics has not being favorable to them. So apart from the small state within a state, they have in Iraq. They are scattered in the area: Syria, Iran, Turkey, etc.

Islamic sectarian strife

If you believe that the Arab world is safe of religious wars, you are totally wrong. Prior to the Iranian revolution, the Arab world enjoyed period of Nahda, renaissance, during which religion coexisted peacefully with secularism. Most political regimes, then, were military dictatorships with socialist tendencies that strived to keep citizens away from politics by the means a generous welfare system, like in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Algeria and Yemen. Then, the Iranian revolution occurred in 1979; the Shah was overthrown and replaced by a theocracy that had for ultimate goal the re-Islamization of the local society and the exportation of the revolution to the rest of the Muslim world.

The whole of the Arab world felt threatened by the Persian religious onslaught and especially the petro-dollar monarchies that have in their ranks marginalized Shiite minorities. To mobilize political support in the Arab world, these countries invoked pre-Islamic Arab-Persian enmity and wars.

Islamic religious sects in the Middle East and North Africa

Austere Wahhabism

Wahhabism, as a movement, is generally associated with Saudi Arabia, and followers of this conservative ideology are inspired by the teachings of the fundamentalists of the kingdom. Abdulaziz Ibn Saud, who founded the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, was a local ruler in the Arabian Peninsula when the World War I began. Following the outbreak of war, the British, who were fighting the Ottomans, established diplomatic ties with Abdulaziz, and the two sides signed the Treaty of Darin as early as 1915, which made the territory controlled by the House of Saud a British protectorate.

Abdulaziz was a descendent of Muhammad Al Saud, who ruled the Najd area of the peninsula in the 18th century and was a friend of the Wahhabism founder Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Wahhabism is a popular revivalist movement instigated by an eighteenth century theologian, Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703–1792) from Najd, Saudi Arabia. It is a religious movement among fundamentalist Islamic believers, with an aspiration to return to the earliest fundamental Islamic sources of the Koran and Hadith, with inspiration from the teachings of medieval theologian Ibn Taymiyyah and the early jurist Ahmad ibn Hanbal. Muhammad Al Saud was the one who first chose Wahhabism for his tribe.

Feeling threatened by the Iranian grand project, the Saudis, with the help of billions of petro-dollars, tried to bring the inter-governmental Islamic organizations under their influence, institutions like: OIC (Organization of Islamic Cooperation,) IDB (Islamic Development Bank,) ISESCO (Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,) etc. and export their brand of Islam: Wahhabism through civil society organizations in the Muslim world. Because of the money incentive many Muslims adopted Wahhabism, in spite of its harsh scripture and ideology.

To counter combative Iranian Shiism, the Saudis bankrolled Ben Laden in his Afghan Jihad machinery against the Soviets. The Americans blessed the enterprise and provided sophisticated weaponry to defeat the Soviets. Osama Bin Laden recruited Jihadists from all over the Muslim world. Once the war was won in 1989, Osama Bin Laden and the Jihadists felt forgotten and marginalized by the Saudis and the Americans together.

Ultimately, the Jihadists were made to return to their respective countries and tried to put their military experience to use to overthrow existing regimes, they were either killed or sent to prison. As for Bin Laden, to inscribe his name in gold in the annals of history, he masterminded the unfortunate and condemnable 11 of September events that changed the world.

Salafiyya

Originating in medieval Islamic texts, the concept of salafiyya has come to refer to a wide variety of things over the years. The Arabic word derives from the terms “as-salaf as-salih,” which means: “the venerable ancestors” or “the venerable predecessors.”

The dominant tradition in salafiyya has to do with “getting back to the roots” of Islam and restoring traditional beliefs and practices as well as the rule of the Caliphate. Sometimes, this effort is moderate and can even incorporate modernist influences, as with the case of al-Afghani (a salafist reformer from the 1800’s who tried to reconcile modernism and Islam).vi

Salafiyya thrives on the economic hardships endured by most Muslims in the Middle East. Religious leaders tell them that the earliest Muslims knew no such hardships because they faithfully applied the principle of zakat, or alms for the poor. Because of this, even the richest and powerful Muslims had to donate to ensure that the poorest were sustained.

Unhappy with the religious state of Affairs in the Arab world, a more violent Islamic sect came into being: the Salafiyya Jihadiya, it had in mind a return to the ancient times of the Caliphate by the means of blood and fear. After terrorist attacks in Morocco on May 2003 and various other counties, this movement was decapitated and is leaders imprisoned, as for the remaining they adopted a vociferous attitude making use of verbal violence only or were literally co-opted by local Arab regimes.

However, it does not mean that the Salafiyya Jihadiya is disarmed; it is resuscitating in troubled spots such as Syria and Iraq where they can indulge in their violent religious ideology without the fear of retribution. Their vision of the future is the re-Islamization of society and the return to the past model of the caliphate: ISIS is, somewhat, the flag bearer of this approach, today.

Beyond that they have no model of society, other than the orthodox Islamic way of life based on the strict application of shari’a law. So the basic concept of return to the “good past” can only be achieved through religious violence in three ways:

1. Takfir,vii excommunication from the religious community of all those who are against the main trend of salafiyya. This could actually mean, unfortunately, most of the time, the call for their assassination because they are seen as a hazard to this school of thought. The assassination is often undertaken by religious zealots by firing at blank range point or by utilizing the al-Qaeda like notorious terrorists;
   2- Tarhib, terrorizing the population by letting them know that if they don’t carry out what their sheiks tell them they would be committed to go to hell for not following the edicts of the “true” Islamic religion. This approach works very well with the illiterate poor whose knowledge of religion and the world is very limited; and
   3- Jihad, the holy war to eliminate all the miscreants and the infidels to make way to Islam
   Salafiyya jihadiya is active and prospering, today, in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Mauritania, Tunisia and Libya. It has tried to get a foothold in Morocco but was defeated by the government anti-terrorist laws and lack of following and interest among the population.

Muslim Brotherhood/Ikhwan

The Muslim Brothers movement was founded in Ismailia, Egypt in March 1928 by Hassan al-Banna, along with six workers of the Suez Canal Company, as a pan-Islamic, religious, political, and social movement.

Hassan al-Banna was influenced by the reformers Mohammed Abdou and Rachid Reda.

He believed that real renaissance can only be achieved through the return to the orthodox religion and the application of the tenets of Islam faithfully.

The Brotherhood’s credo was and is:

“Allah is our objective; the Quran is our law, the Prophet is our leader; Jihad is our way; and dying in the way of Allah is the highest of our aspirations.”

The submission of the brotherhood’s members under this credo is the unquestionable proof to their absolute obedience to the Muslim Brotherhood’s leadership.

Since its founding, the Muslim Brotherhood has been very close to the aspirations of the poor and working class of Egypt and its actions in favor of the rank and file has earned it sympathy all over the Arab region and the Muslim World and led to the creation of local chapters of this interesting religious institution in various countries:

1. Justice and Development Party in Morocco, currently leading the government;
2. In Bahrain, the Muslim Brotherhood is represented by the al-Islah Society and its political wing, the al-Manbar Islamic Society. Following parliamentary elections in 2002, al-Manbar became the largest party with eight seats in the forty seats of the Chamber of Deputies. Prominent members of Al Menbar include Dr Salah Abdulrahman, Dr. Salah Al Jowder, and the outspoken MP, Muhammad Khaled. The party has, generally, backed government-sponsored legislation on economic issues, but has sought a clampdown on pop concerts, sorcery and soothsayers. It has, strongly, opposed the government’s accession to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rightsviii on the grounds that this would give Muslim citizens the right to change religion, something which is not acceptable at all in dar al-Islam.
3. The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria was founded in 1945, a year before independence from France. In the first decade or so of independence it was part of the legal opposition, and in the 1961 parliamentary elections it won ten seats (5.8% of the house). But after the 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power it was banned. It played a major role in the mainly Sunni-based movement that opposed the secularist, pan-Arab Baath party. This conflict developed into an armed struggle that continued until culminating in the Hama uprisingsix of 1982, when the rebellion was crushed by the military of Hafed al-Assad.
4. The Jordanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was formed in 1942, and is a strong factor in Jordanian politics. While most political parties and movements were banned for a long time in Jordan such as Hizb at-Tahrir, the Brotherhood was exempted and allowed to operate by the Jordanian monarchy. The Jordanian Brotherhood has formed its own political party, the Islamic Action Front, which has the largest number of seats of any party in the Jordanian parliament.
5. The Iraqi Islamic Party was formed in 1960 as the Iraqi branch of the Brotherhood, but was banned from 1961, during the nationalist rule of Abdelkarim Qasem. As government repression hardened under the Baath Party from February 1963, the group was forced to continue underground. After the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime in 2003, the Islamic Party has reemerged as one of the main advocates of the country’s Sunni community. The Islamic Party has been sharply critical of the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, but participates in the political process. Its leader is Tariq Al-Hashimi.
6. In Palestine, in 1987, following the Intifada, the Islamic Resistance Movement, or Hamas was established from Brotherhood-affiliated charities and social institutions that had gained a strong foothold among the local population. During the first Intifada (1987–93), Hamas militarized and transformed itself into one of the strongest Palestinian militant groups.
7. The Muslim Brotherhood in Kuwait is represented in the Kuwaiti parliament by Hadas.
8. The Muslim Brotherhood is the political arm of the Yemeni Congregation for Reform, commonly known as Islah. Former President Ali Abdellah Saleh made a lot of effort to entrench the accusations of Islah being in league with al-Qaeda, but he failed to present any, even a weak, evidence to support his claims.
9. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the Islamic world in general, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood has influenced the Tunisian Islamists. One of the notable organizations that was influenced and inspired by the Brotherhood is Ennahda (The Revival or Renaissance Party), which is Tunisia’s major Islamist political grouping. An Islamist, Rachid Ghannouchi, founded the organization in 1981 while studying in Damascus and Paris and embraced the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which he disseminated on his return to Tunisia.
10. The Libyan branch of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1949, but it was not able to operate openly until after the 2011 Libyan civil war. It held its first public press conference on 17 November 2011, and on 24 December the Brotherhood announced that it would form the Justice and Construction Party (JCP) and contest the General National Congress the following year.
11. In 2007 the National Rally for Reform and Development, better known as Tawassoul, was legalized as a political party. The party is associated with the Mauritanian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Shia Islam

The adepts of Shia Islam believe that before his death in 632, the prophet Muhammad selected Ali Ibnu Abi Talib, a member of his household, known as ahl al-bayt, as his legitimate successor and that his companions designated Abu Bakr as a Caliph, instead. As a result, the Shiites do venerate Ali, almost as a prophet and take upon themselves the blame for his assassination in 661. Thus, on the beginning of every Hijra year, during the Ashura celebration, they publically flagellate themselves to mark his martyrdom.

The Shia are a majority in Iran and also in Bahrain. In the aftermath of the Arab Spring, The Bahraini Shia took to the streets to protest political unfairness: a majority Shia ruled by a minority Sunni government. Scared by the prospects that Bahrain might fall to Shia rule, Saudi Arabia and the Sunni Gulf states invaded Bahrain to tilt the scale in favor of Sunni rule, for fear this country will become a client state of Iran like what happened in Iraq after the demise of the Sunni dictator Saddam.

Indeed, today’s Iraq is plagued by a protracted civil war between the Shia-majority government and the Sunni ISIS in the north and this strife will certainly not end with the fall of ISIS, at the hands of the international coalition. The Sunnis will continue their fight believing, hard as a nai,l that their country has been made a province of Iran and that the government takes orders from the latter in Tehran.

The Shia are present, also, in Kuwait, Qatar, Oman and Saudi Arabia where they are not tolerated by the central government. Indeed, the Saudis to show their distaste of this minority group executed their religious leader Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, who led a popular uprising in the Eastern oil-rich province of Dahran.x

In Lebanon, the Shias, living mostly in the south, have, under the fierce Hezbullah leadership, set up a state within a state which is in war with Israel and in cold war with the Lebanese Sunnis.

Saudi Arabia is, presently, fighting a sectarian war against Iran by proxy in both Yemen, where Houthis aided by the ex-dictator Ali Saleh, have taken over the country. To restore the Sunni rule, Saudi Arabia has mounted a Sunni Arab coalition to dislodge the Shia from the capital Sanaa. Concurrently, it is fighting another war in Syria, with the hope to put an end to the Shia minority government of Assad, behind whom Iran is putting all her weight, as well as, fierce Hezbullah fighters.

For Dieter Bednarz, Christoph Reuter and Bernhard Zand, from the German media Spiegel, the war in Yemen is directed at Iran:xi

“The Saudi military coalition began its intervention in Yemen in the name of security. But after just a week, it has become clear that the top priority of the alliance is not that of creating a balance of power between the two adversarial camps in the Yemen conflict — which pits Shiite Houthi rebels, who have joined together with former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh (who was ousted in a 2011 “Arab Spring” uprising), against Saudi-backed government troops. Indeed, the conflict is more of a complicated domestic struggle than a purely sectarian fight. Still, the Saudi monarchy’s intervention is primarily aimed at its ideological rival: Iran. At the same time, the military operation is a chance for Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud to demonstrate his independence from the US — as well as to perhaps prove his country’s military leadership in the region as a complement to its longstanding economic strength. What is clear, however, is that the brewing Sunni-Shiite struggle in the Middle East has the potential for not just destroying Yemen, but also for turning into a disaster for Saudi Arabia.”

The Sunni-Shia gap is widening more and more as Iran is trying to become nuclear. This has pushed conservative Saudi Arabia to contemplate possible alliance with its arch enemy Israel.

All in all, Shias who are growing in numbers in the Arab world are discriminated against and the same is true of the Sunnis in Iran and it is more likely that things will get worse in the future as both Saudi Arabia and Iran are jockeying for leadership of the Middle East and the Muslim world.

For Murtaza Hussain, a Toronto-based writer and analyst with a focus on issues related to Middle Eastern politics, It is not the 14-century old schism between Sunnis and Shias that is responsible for the sectarian strife but rather modern made ideology of identities:xii

“Those who ignorantly claim that progress can be attained through the enforcement of strict ideological purity should take heed of the past and resist the temptation towards religious chauvinism. The conflict which some claim exists today between Sunni and Shia Muslims is a product of very recent global events; blowback from the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the petro-dollar fuelled global rise of Wahhabi reactionaries. It is decidedly not the continuation of any “1,400 year war” between Sunnis and Shias but is driven instead by the very modern phenomena of identity politics. Factions on both sides have created false histories for their own political benefit and have manufactured symbols and rituals which draw upon ancient history but are in fact entirely modern creations. Furthermore, Western military powers have sought to amplify these divisions to generate internecine conflicts within Muslim societies and engineer a bloodbath which will be to their own benefit.”

Ethnic diversity at the crossroads of civilizations

Situated between Africa, Asia, and Europe, the Middle East has been a crossroads for traders, travelers, and empire builders for thousands of years. Africans, Central Asians, and Celts have all added to the ethnic mix. Major ethnic groups in the greater Middle East today include Arabs, Iranians (also known as Persians), Turks, Jews, Kurds, Berber/Amazigh, Armenians, Nubians, Azeris, and Greeks.

Most of the countries in this region are multiethnic. But, even as diversity enhances the cultural richness of a society, it unfortunately may, also, lead to political conflict.

The Kurds, for example, do not have their own nation-state, but are instead spread across Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. Their political and military attempts to create an autonomous Kurdistan have been strongly resisted by those states.

Likewise the Berber/Amazigh who inhabit Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Mauritania, are still struggling to have their culture and language fully recognized by the governments of these countries, who are in their majority not democratically elected and fear that such an act will erode their power base and lead to legitimate demands of power-sharing.

The multiplicity of languages spoken in the greater Middle East reflects its ethnic diversity. Most of these languages come from three major language families:

• Semitic (including Arabic, Hebrew, Tamazight and Aramaic)
• Indo-European (Kurdish, Persian, Armenian)
• Turkic (Turkish, Azeri)

These language families reflect the successive migrations of different peoples into the region. A quick examination of these languages reveals the influence they have had on each other. Persian, for example, is written in Arabic script, while Turkish incorporates vocabulary words from Persian and Arabic. Arabic itself is spoken in regional dialectics that are not always mutually understood. Some ethnic and religious communities have preserved “native” languages for religious use, such as Coptic and Greek or for cultural identity as is the case for the Berbers/Amazigh.

Other Religions Of The Book Of The Middle East

In the cultural mosaic of the Middle East, besides Islam, the predominant faith in the region, there are other religions of the book: Christianity and Judaism and not to forget, of course, Druze. The faithful of some of theses religions are certainly minority groups numerically speaking, but culturally they have quite an important imprint on society and they are economically and politically very potent.

The Middle East is the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all monotheistic religions that grew from the same tradition. Each religion used the texts from earlier groups, and so they share many rules and beliefs. For example, Islam and Judaism observe the same dietary rules and have a similar focus on religion as a foundation for civil law. All three share a tradition of prophets, from Adam and Abraham to Solomon and Joseph. Jesus is significant for both Christianity and Islam, and Muslims, in addition, follow the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad.

Christianity

The lack of official data on the Christian populations of the Middle East makes it difficult to confirm, but it is estimated that there are between 12 and 16 million Christians living in this area. Christianity is, also, a monotheistic religion with its origins in the Middle East, and its teachings are based on the old and new testaments of the Bible. Many different Christian sects have their origins in the Middle East and are still present in the region. Just a few examples of these sects include: Maronite Christians, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, Coptic and Chaldean Christians, among many others.

The Copts

Copts in Egypt constitute the largest Christian community in the Middle East, as well as the largest religious minority in the region, accounting for an estimated 10% of the Egyptian population. Most Copts adhere to the Coptic Church of Alexandria. The remainder of around 800,000 is divided between the Coptic Catholic and various Coptic Protestant churches.

Their position improved dramatically under the rule of Muhammad Ali in the early 19th century. He abolished the jizya (a poll tax on non-Muslims) and allowed Egyptians (Copts as well as Muslims) to enroll in the army.

Copts participated in the Egyptian national movement for independence and occupied many influential positions. Two significant cultural achievements include the founding of the Coptic Museum in 1910 and the Higher Institute of Coptic Studies in 1954. Some prominent Coptic thinkers from this period are Salama Moussa, Louis Awwad and Secretary General of the Wafd Party Makram Obayd.

The Arab Christians

The Arab Christians are an estimated 13 million Christians still living in the Middle East in countries like Syria, Jordan, Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Israel and Lebanon. They are in Business, education, finance, banking and politics.

The Christian presence in the Middle East dates back, of course, to the advent of Jesus Christ during the Roman Empire. That 2,000-year presence has gone uninterrupted since, especially in the countries of the Levant: Lebanon, Palestine/Israel, Syria and Egypt. But, it has been far from a unified presence.
The Eastern and Western Church don’t quite see eye to eye and haven’t for about 1,500 years.

Lebanon’s Maronites split off from the Vatican, in a huff, centuries ago, then agreed to return to the fold, preserving to their rites, dogmas and customs of their choice.

Much of the region either forcibly or voluntarily converted to Islam in the 7th and 8th centuries. In the Middle Ages, the European Crusades attempted, brutally, repeatedly but ultimately unsuccessfully, to restore Christian hegemony over the region.

Since then, only Lebanon has maintained a Christian population approaching anything like a plurality, although Egypt maintains the single-largest Christian population in the Middle East.

Judaism

Israel

The historical predecessor of both Christianity and Islam is Judaism, and it is practiced by approximately 6 million people in the Middle East. It is, also, a monotheistic religion based on the Torah, which is also the old testament of the Christian Bible. Judaism is the official religion of the state of Israel.

Judaism is the religious culture of the Jewish people. It is one of the first recorded monotheistic faiths and one of the oldest religious traditions still practiced today. The tenets and history of Judaism are the major part of the foundation of other Abrahamic religions, including Christianity and Islam. For all of these reasons, Judaism has been a major force in shaping the world.

Judaism originated as the religion of nomadic people in the western part of the Fertile Crescent. The Hebrew people believed that there was only one God. Monotheism was a unique idea in the world when it originated 3,500 years ago.

By the 1980s Jews of Middle Eastern origin – adot ha-mizrah – comprised well over half of Israel’s Jewish population. Migration to Israel by Jews from the former Soviet Union made the percentages of Middle Eastern and European origin groups equal in the 1990s. By 2000 the Jewish community in Turkey stood at about 20,000. Iranian Jewry functioned actively until the revolution of 1979 that established the Islamic republic. Jews then immigrated to Israel, Europe, and the United States, and in 1989 about 22,000 remained in Iran. Very few Jews now reside in the Arab world; the largest group – about 3,000 – lives in Morocco. Since the 1980s Morocco has encouraged Jewish tourists from Israel and elsewhere, and Tunisia has done the same since the 1990s.

The poor relations between Israel and most of its Arab neighbors are sometimes described in terms of a perpetual religious conflict between Jews and Muslims. This reading, however, is too simplistic. Although control over important historical sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a factor in the disagreements, many of the details that stall negotiations have to do with control of land and access to water resources and most importantly the restoration of the Palestinian state and homeland.

Furthermore, many Palestinians who demand restitution for their property are Christian, not Muslim, and Egypt’s historic treaty with Israel provides a model for how Muslim and Jewish neighbors can live peaceably.

Judaism in Morocco

Jews have lived in Morocco for nearly two millennia, and Morocco’s Jewish community, which once numbered more than 250,000, remains the largest in the Muslim world. They are estimated at about 3,000 today. They migrated to Morocco in the year 72 AD, at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple by the Romans.

For two thousand years of their existence, Moroccan Jews Have showed great love and allegiance to Morocco, their land and country, and this unique feeling is even stronger today for those who have left the country. There is a tremendous ongoing dialogue, esteem and cooperation between Muslims and Jews within Morocco. A good illustration of that is the grotto that exists in the city of Sefrou, nicknamed Little Jerusalem, which is called: Kaf al-Moumen, “The Cave of the Faithfull”, where a Muslim and a Jewish saints are, supposedly, buried and are revered by both Muslims and Jews in turn.xiii

There is an incredible symbiosis between Islam and Judaism in Morocco and this is the result of strong commonality resulting from a solid cultural substratum. Indeed, while the Moroccan Jews show obsequious love to their country of origin and come back to celebrate the religious rite of Hailula, their Muslim brethren regret their departure through such films as: “Tinghir, Jerusalem: echoes of the Mellah.”xiv In the wake of the Arab Spring, the Moroccan constitution was overhauled and Hebraic tradition was highlighted in its wording and considered a major confluent of Moroccan identity and culture.xv

“A sovereign Muslim State, attached to its national unity and to its territorial integrity, the Kingdom of Morocco intends to preserve, in its plentitude and its diversity, its one and indivisible national identity. Its unity, is forged by the convergence of its Arab-Islamist, Berber [amazighe] and Saharan-Hassanic [saharo-hassanie] components, nourished and enriched by its African, Andalusian, Hebraic (emphasis mine, Mohamed Chtatou) and Mediterranean influences [affluents].”

Druze

The Druze populations live primarily in Lebanon and Syria, and they are another monotheistic religion of the Middle East. Although commonly not regarded as Muslims by others, the Druze do consider themselves a sect of Islam that split from the Shi’a. The Druze believe that the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim was an incarnation of God who disappeared in 1021 but will return, bringing a Golden Age to believers.

Conclusion

The times are changing in the Middle East region and the Arabs have to come to term to many hard realities if they want to survive as a race and civilization:

1. They have to solve the identity issue once for all by accepting the cultural and political rights of the ethnic and religious minorities in their ranks;
2. They have to opt for full democracy, if they want to survive;
3. Provide equal opportunity to everyone and especially women and the youth;
4. Stop justifying everything by religion;
5. Empower the youth and women;
6. Abolish tribal practices and patriarchal traditions; and
7. Accept the tenets of diversity in faith, ethnicity and language.

If these principles are not implemented soon, the region will be engulfed in serious strife and conflicts that will take decades to settle.

Endnotes:
i. This paper focuses in the Arab Middle East and North Africa exclusively.
ii. https://www.academia.edu/8694740/Chaos_is_coming_to_the_Middle_East
iii. Brett, M. & E. Fentress. 1996. The Berbers, Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
This book, by an archaeologist and a historian, provides an excellent summary of Berber history and culture. It casts a critical eye on the traditional historical sources (almost all written by the conquerors, not by the Berbers themselves) and re-examines them in the light of contemporary archaeological and anthropological evidence. It is especially good in two areas: the Berbers’ relationship to Islam (their adopted religion) and the relative freedom of women in Berber society. The black-and-white illustrations and maps are of uneven quality but nevertheless helpful in visualizing this complex and little-known culture.
iv. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-35515769
v. http://www.fairobserver.com/author/Casper%20Wuite/
vi. Sayyid Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī  (Dari/Persian: سید جمال‌‌‌الدین افغانی‎‎), also known as Sayyid Jamāl ad-Dīn Asadābādī (Persian: سید جمال‌‌‌الدین اسد‌آبادی‎‎) and commonly known as Al-Afghani (1838/1839 – 9 March 1897), was a political activist and Islamic ideologist in the Muslim world during the late 19th century, particularly in the Middle East, South Asia and Europe. One of the founders of Islamic Modernism and an advocate of Pan-Islamic unity, he has been described as being less interested in minor differences in Islamic jurisprudence than he was in organizing a Muslim response to Western pressure.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jam%C4%81l_al-D%C4%ABn_al-Afgh%C4%81n%C4%AB
vii. In Islamic law, takfir or takfeer (Arabic: تكفير‎‎ takfīr) refers to the practice of excommunication, one Muslim declaring another Muslim as kafir (non-believer). The act which precipitates takfir is termed the mukaffir. An ill-founded takfir accusation is a major forbidden act.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takfir
viii. http://www.ohchr.org/EN/ProfessionalInterest/Pages/CCPR.aspx
ix. The Hama massacre (Arabic: مجزرة حماة‎‎) occurred in February 1982, when the Syrian Arab Army and the Defense Companies, under the orders of the country’s president Hafez al-Assad, besieged the town of Hama for 27 days in order to quell an uprising by the Muslim Brotherhood against al-Assad’s government. Themassacre, carried out by the Syrian Army under commanding General Rifaat al-Assad, effectively ended the campaign begun in 1976 by Sunni Muslim groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood, against the government.
Initial diplomatic reports from Western countries stated that 1,000 were killed. Subsequent estimates vary, with the lower estimates claiming that at least 10,000 Syrian citizens were killed, while others put the number at 20,000 (Robert Fisk), or 40,000 (Syrian Human Rights Committee). About 1,000 Syrian soldiers were killed during the operation and large parts of the old city were destroyed. The attack has been described as one of “the single deadliest acts by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East”. According to Syrian opposition, the vast majority of the victims were civilians.
According to Syrian media, anti-government rebels initiated the fighting, who “pounced on our comrades while sleeping in their homes and killed whomever they could kill of women and children, mutilating the bodies of the martyrs in the streets, driven, like mad dogs, by their black hatred.” Security forces then “rose to confront these crimes” and “taught the murderers a lesson that has snuffed out their breath”.
Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Hama_massacre
x. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/04/world/middleeast/iran-saudi-arabia-execution-sheikh-nimr.html
xi. http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/saudi-arabia-and-iran-fighting-proxy-war-in-yemen-a-1027056.html
xii. http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/07/2013719220768151.html
xiii. http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Morocco-A-true-melting-pot-of-creeds-and-cultures-450908
xiv. https://vimeo.com/37479002
xv. https://www.constituteproject.org/constitution/Morocco_2011.pdf

Sri Lanka’s military spokesman, Brigadier Roshan Seneviratne, said that nearly four thousand five hundred tri forces deserters, who are considered as Absent Without Official Leave (AWOL), have been arrested so far.

Eight officers and four thousand four hundred and ten (4,410) other rank personnel have been arrested through July 27 since the end of the General Amnesty on midnight December 31, 2016.

Accordingly, eight officers and three thousand five hundred and twenty nine (3,529) other rank personnel of the Army, eight hundred and five (805) Navy and seventy six (76) Air Force deserters have been taken into custody.

Sri Lanka Corps of Military Police (SLCMP) together with the Police conduct island-wide operations to apprehend deserters and disciplinary action will be taken against them thereafter.

By Sam Kimball*

Summer sun beats down like a spotlight on the Tigris River meandering through the town of Shirqat, the narrow band of water the only border between territory held by Iraqi forces on one side, and militants from the so-called Islamic State on the other.

Through the ripples of heat rising off the rich green riverbanks, the black IS flag can be seen flying atop buildings and hills east of the river. Daily, clusters of families cross the Tigris in a frenzy on tiny rafts, fleeing from life under IS control. Army units on the western bank receive the exhausted escapees in Shirqat, separating the men from women, shuttling them to reception and screening centers.

Many of these people have escaped from Hawija, some 50 kilometres east of Shirqat. Now that Mosul has been liberated, Hawija is the largest IS-controlled territory in Iraq. An estimated 70,000 people live there in a stage of siege, with militants in control and supply routes cut off by militias allied with the Iraqi army.

After living more than three years under IS occupation, more and more Iraqis are fleeing the city and crossing the river to freedom. Escapees told IRIN that inside Hawija, public executions by IS, malnutrition, and disease are rife. Life in the city, and its dozens of surrounding villages, has become a brutal routine of bare survival.

Once thought to be before Mosul in the queue for an anti-IS operation, the campaign to take back Hawija has been complicated by competing – but allied – forces around the city, and concerns about sectarian revenge in a Sunni-majority city that has a reputation for opposing the Shia-led central government.

Years of fear

Sitting with folded legs on the floor of a pre-camp reception centre in Shirqat staffed by local volunteers, with bits of her dyed-orange hair peeking out from her headscarf, Hindia Khalaf Atallah, 57, spoke of a life of extremes under IS rule.

“We’ve been under siege,” she told IRIN. “IS destroyed us. Life was horrible. Lots of people killed themselves because of this calamity. Night would come, and there was no food to put into our mouths.”

When the militants first declared their control of Hawija, around the same time they took Mosul in June 2014, Atallah said some locals welcomed their arrival, as IS styled themselves revolutionaries coming to protect the Sunnis of Iraq, after mass Sunni-led protests against the Baghdad government the year before.

Atallah said the early days of IS rule were different. “They didn’t hit anyone. They didn’t force us to wear the niqab [face covering for women],” she explained.

But as the militants began to lose ground to Iraqi forces across the country, their rule became more nihilistic. “Now, for women who try to flee, a bullet in the leg. For men, execution,” Atallah said.

“All the executions were done at the square. If there was someone who helped people cross [out of IS territory], he would be executed. If he was a member of the Iraqi police services, he would be executed. What a hell of a life!”

Hawija was completely surrounded and cut off a year ago by a coalition of Iraqi militias known as Popular Mobilisation Forces, Kurdish peshmerga, and the Iraqi army. Prices of basic products skyrocketed, and people found themselves surviving off bare grain.

“A kilo of dates was 20,000 Iraqi dinars [almost $17]. That was the cheapest food you could buy,” Atallah said. “Our life was happy… But now what do we have? I haven’t had a sip of tea since December [2016],” she said, angrily. “We don’t even have enough money to buy a quarter kilo of sugar.”

Flight

Despite the obvious risks, Atallah decided to flee in June. Leaving Hawija under the cover of darkness, she lied her way through IS checkpoints, telling the militants she was on her way to see a sick cousin in a village nearby. She hid in acquaintances’ homes on her way out, running between villages on foot.

Eventually, Atallah and a small group of escapees she had banded with found someone willing to drive them as far as Sdira, a village on a bank of the Tigris near Shirqat, which has been partially liberated from IS.

“He said this is the way,” Atallah recalled. “He gave us directions. He said he couldn’t drive us [to Shirqat], or [IS] would catch him and execute him. We ran and ran until we got here.” An Iraqi army boat found them at night on the riverside, and they crossed over the next morning to the safety of Shirqat.

Sami, 28, asked that his name be changed for fear of reprisals. He had arrived in Shirqat from a village near Hawija on the same day he spoke to IRIN.

Along with several other male arrivals, Sami was lounging outside the main door of the bare concrete building being used as a reception centre in the middle of Shirqat, across from a military post. Sporting sandals and nylon track pants, Sami wore a thick beard, moustache shaved – IS militants demanded that all men grow their beards this way.

“[Before the siege] I weighed 95 kilograms. Now I’m 70,” he told IRIN. “But I’m alright. I can work. For those who can’t work, who can’t buy flour, they are much worse off.”

Sami noted that the visual IS presence in Hawija had become thinner in recent months as drones and airplanes flew over, striking the militants. The fighters hid out of view most of the time, fearing airstrikes. Yet still, residents felt they were being surveyed by IS, and public executions and whippings struck enough terror among the populace that few considered fleeing.

“They don’t stop you [from fleeing],” he explained. “But it’s fear. Fear of [IS]. Fear of being killed, that stops us. They’ve taken many who tried to flee, accused them, and executed them.”

“I was waiting for death. Each minute, I expected it,” he said, coldly.

Eventually, Sami chanced it. But he said that even for those who did manage to get beyond the grasp of the IS militants holding Hawija, there was still extreme danger.

His brother fled the city six months earlier to some nearby mountains. “They were walking, and a family of 15 stepped on a mine. The mine exploded and not one of them survived,” his brother told him. “Many people escaping through the mountains have died that way.”

Scarce help

Even for those who do make it out all the way to Shirqat, there’s not much of a welcome. Many of those caring for the escapees are volunteers, working with extremely limited resources to fill the gaps in responding to a humanitarian crisis that has pushed Iraq beyond breaking point.

Wa’ed Karaf, 45, was an employee at the Ministry of Manufacturing and Metals before the conflict with IS. He receives people displaced from Hawija on a daily basis at the reception centre he established in late 2016, working in collaboration with the child-focused Swiss relief agency Terre des hommes.

Karaf noted the spread of destructive and painful diseases among those trapped in Hawija with no medicine, like diarrhoea, scabies, shingles and Ischaemia, which can cause tissue damage and even the loss of limbs.

“There is a problem of government neglect here in Salah al-Din province,” he told IRIN. “There are supposed to be a lot of organisations here working with the displaced. But we haven’t seen anything being implemented on the ground.

“All we have here is the [UK-based NGO] Muslim Aid distributing food. The Ministry of Migration and Displacement gives some assistance, but it’s very little.”

Karaf accused the central government of purposefully neglecting Salah al-Din province, where Shirqat is, because it has a large Sunni population. Sunnis make up about a quarter of Iraq’s populace, but many complain that since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 they’ve been increasingly marginalised by the Shia-majority government.

Karaf had little faith in the ability of the Baghdad government to bring life back to the area and get the displaced back on their feet, even when Hawija is eventually liberated. The greatest impediment, according to him, is the Iraqi politicians themselves.

“They make special deals. [In this area], the electricity is bad. [There are] almost no health services, little to no municipal services. Billions of dollars spent in Iraq since 2003, but where did it go?” he asked.

Caroline Gluck, a senior public information officer with the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, took issue with Karaf’s claims that no services were being provided in Shirqat other than by Muslim Aid.

She said UNHCR had accommodated the majority of the displaced families from Hawija in six nearby camps and stressed not only the involvement of UNHCR and other UN agencies but also of the Iraqi government.

Gluck said many of those who managed to escape Hawija still faced hunger and poor health in their host communities. Along with the rest of the country’s three million internally displaced people, they also have to overcome significant bureaucratic hurdles before they can even think about getting their lives back on track.

“When people come out of Hawija, often they have no documents with them,” Gluck said. “And without their national identity cards, it’s extremely difficult to access services as well as get through checkpoints. Having documents is vital for getting children to school and hospitals [after they’ve been displaced].”

What does the future hold?

Last month, IRIN caught up with Brigadier General Hayder al-Darradi, commander of the Iraqi Army’s 60^th Brigade, reposing on a plastic chair on the terrace of the mayor’s home in Shirqat, after he and his brigade had returned from a midnight patrol along the Tigris.

“According to what we know about the plan, immediately after the end of Ramadan, we will begin to liberate Hawija,” he said.

That time has come and gone, but the army has yet to move in.

A Sunni Arab town in the Kurdish-majority governorate of Kirkuk, Hawija has had a troubled history, which may be delaying the operation and increasing fears about sectarian tensions after the fighting is over.

In 2013, protests rocked the small city. They drew Sunni Arabs into the streets to decry systematic marginalisation by the largely Shia-led government in Baghdad, at the time presided over by Nouri al-Maliki. Dozens of protestors were killed by security forces.

Saieb al-Gaylani, senior facilitator and peace builder with the United States Institute for Peace, told IRIN any move on Hawija would likely be last on the list because Iraqi leaders hadn’t decided what to do with the area.

“They are still talking about who will do what after liberation – who will stay, and who will wield power there,” he said. “They still have not sat together and answered these many questions.”

Joel Wing, a writer and analyst at the Musings on Iraq blog, saw the competing forces surrounding Hawija as another major issue.

“It’s not only competition between the peshmerga, PMFs, and Iraqi Security Forces, but also between Iraqi Security Forces themselves, like the Federal Police and Golden Division [special forces],” he said.

They’ll be seeking prestige, Wing said, each unit chasing the highest number of IS militants killed or villages taken.

But the greatest coming danger to the people of Hawija is the possibility for revenge against those believed to have backed IS, said al-Gailani. “I am expecting it to happen in Hawija. But by threatening or killing those [some civilians] feel might have supported IS, they are creating a new IS. Punishment is not the job of tribes or militias. It is the job of the law.”

His fears have been borne out, at least to some extent, in other parts of Iraq: There have been reported executions of men fleeing Mosul and militias were accused of serious abuses against civilians after the liberation of Fallujah.

Brigadier General al-Darradi, himself a Shia from Baghdad, was dismissive of the possibility of revenge attacks on the Sunnis of Hawija.

“In Baghdad, we use to hear that Shirqat is all terrorists, Mosul is all terrorists, Hawija is all terrorists. But we haven’t seen this sectarianism on the ground. It’s just in the media.”

Sami, the recent Hawija escapee in Shirqat, wanted to return home and dared to look toward a better future.

“I want security,” he said. “And I want our people to be unified. I want them to love one another. And I don’t want us to be afraid – we’ve been silent when we see something going wrong. We can’t be silent anymore. This is what I hope.”

About the author:
* Sam Kimball, Freelance journalist based in Erbil

Source:
This article was published by IRIN

Saudi Arabia considers Qatar’s demands for an internationalization of the Hajj pilgrimage a declaration of war against the Kingdom, Foreign Minister Adel Al-Jubeir said on Sunday.

Speaking to Al Arabiya and Al Hadath TV channels at the end of Sunday’s meeting of the Anti-Terror Quartet (ATQ), Al-Jubeir said: “Qatar’s demands to internationalize the holy sites is aggressive and a declaration of war against the kingdom.”

He added: “We reserve the right to respond to anyone who is working on the internationalization of the holy sites.”

The ATQ — comprising Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain — has previously issued a list of 13 demands for Qatar, which include curtailing its support for the Muslim Brotherhood, shutting down the Al Jazeera channel, closing a Turkish military base and downgrading its relations with Gulf enemy Iran.

On Sunday, the foreign ministers of the four countries said they were ready for dialogue with Qatar if it showed willingness to tackle their demands.

In their joint statement, the ministers denounced the deliberate act of Qatari authorities to obstruct the performance of Hajj rituals by Qatari nationals.

They commended the facilities provided by the government of King Salman to all pilgrims.

According to Reuters, Al-Jubeir said Qatar was not serious in tackling the countries’ demands.

“We are ready to talk with Qatar on the implementation of the demands, on the implementation of the principles, if Qatar is serious, but it has been clear that it is not,” the minister told a joint news conference after the meeting.

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed Al-Khalifa added: “The four countries are ready for dialogue with Qatar with the condition that it announces its sincere willingness to stop funding terrorism and extremism and its commitment to not interfere in other countries’ foreign affairs and respond to the 13 demands.”

The four countries added 18 more groups and individuals they say are linked to Qatar to their terrorist lists last week. They cut ties with Qatar on June 5, accusing it of backing militant groups.

The four ministers had met previously in Cairo in early July to discuss Qatar’s response to the list, which they described at the time as “negative.”

In the weeks since that meeting, the ATQ appears to have reined back some of those demands, urging Qatar to commit to six principles on combatting extremism and terrorism and to negotiate a plan with specific measures to implement.

More than 750 American diplomats will have to leave Russia as a result of Washington’s own policies, Russian President Vladimir Putin has said in an exclusive interview with the Rossiya 1 TV channel.

“The American side has made a move which, it is important to note, hasn’t been provoked by anything, to worsen Russian-US relations. [It includes] unlawful restrictions, attempts to influence other states of the world, including our allies, who are interested in developing and keeping relations with Russia,” Putin told channel host, Vladimir Solovyov, Sunday.

“We’ve been waiting for quite a long time that maybe something would change for the better, we had hopes that the situation would change. But it looks like, it’s not going to change in the near future… I decided that it is time for us to show that we will not leave anything unanswered,” the Russian president added.

Earlier this week, following the US Congress’ approval of new sanctions against Russia, Iran and North Korea, the Russian foreign ministry announced that Moscow told Washington to reduce the number of its diplomatic staff in Russia to 455 people.

The number of US diplomatic service staff in Russia was ordered to be reduced in order to equal the number of Russian diplomats in the US by September 1. As of now, it “greatly exceeds” the number of Russia’s embassy staff in the US, the ministry said. The American diplomatic mission includes more than 1,200 personnel.

“From the perspective of a working diplomatic mission, [the measure] is fairly sensitive,” Putin said.

The Russian leader went on to say that there is a number of “important spheres of cooperation” between Moscow and Washington, which he hoped would not suffer because of America’s anti-Russian policies. Those mostly include the joint fight against terrorism, obligations in nuclear arms control, and space projects rather than economic relations, Putin said.

Moscow has much wider trade and economic relations with China, the EU and other countries than with the US, the president added.

Putin however underlined that Moscow and Washington had recently reached “concrete” results in de-escalating the crisis in war-torn Syria, which are in the interests of the entire Middle East region.

“We also work together on fighting illegal migration and organized crime in a broad sense. There are also issues of cybersecurity,” Putin pointed out, having also referred to joint Russia-US scientific projects in space, such as plans to jointly explore Venus.

“The main thing is, that we have a multi-faceted cooperation in many fields. Of course, Moscow has a lot to say and there is a number of spheres of cooperation that we could potentially cut and it would be sensitive for the US side. But I think we shouldn’t do it. It would harm development of international relations. I hope it won’t get to that point. As of today, I’m against it.”

Leading scientists from around the world convened this week at the International Congress for Conservation Biology in Cartagena, Colombia, to discuss how to better leverage science to combat illegal wildlife trade — both within countries and across international borders.

“The scope and scale of illegal wildlife trafficking today is unprecedented,” said Meredith Gore, an associate professor of fisheries and wildlife at Michigan State University and Jefferson Science Fellow at the U.S. Department of State. “Illegal wildlife trafficking is a crime that can converge with other serious crimes, such as drug trafficking.”

Gore joined other researchers from universities, conservation NGOs, international organizations and national governments to identify new opportunities to bring the full spectrum of scientific knowledge to bear on the problem.

Illegal exploitation and trade of wildlife is a globally recognized problem posing risks to plants, animals and humans. Illegal wildlife trade threatens the security and prosperity of people. Poor inspection processes at border crossings allow the spread of animal diseases. Park rangers are killed by organized criminals linked to global illegal markets, and local communities see their livelihoods threatened by the disappearance of natural resources, according to Gore.

Reductions in biodiversity from illegal wildlife trade can have other substantial negative human health impacts, including the loss of potential sources of pharmaceuticals, experimental models for studying disease, crop pollination and micronutrients for humans lacking alternative sources of protein.

Globally, illegal wildlife trade is often framed as a security issue that converges with other serious and often transnational crimes such as drug, gun and human trafficking. The United States, Peru, China, Mozambique and United Kingdom have passed new, or bolstered existing, legislation designed to enhance efforts to combat illegal wildlife trade and reduce risks to security.

Criminologists, computer scientists, geographers and social marketers voiced a willingness to share data, collaborate on problem solving and use new methods for communicating science with decision makers.

“Tackling the illegal wildlife trade will require a deep understanding of human behavior, of the poachers that engage in the supply side of the trade, and the consumers that drive the demand for wildlife products,” said Diogo Verissimo, David H. Smith Conservation Fellow, Johns Hopkins University.

Science can help measure the scope, scale and impact of illegal wildlife trade, map illicit networks and assess the effect of social marketing and other interventions designed to reduce demand.

“If we are going to fight organized crime, we have to be organized in our response,” said Adrian Reuter, Latin America Wildlife Trafficking Coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Offering HIV testing to people at health checks when they register at a new GP surgery in high-prevalence areas is cost-effective and will save lives, according to a study involving over 86,000 people from 40 GP surgeries, led by Queen Mary University of London (QMUL) and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.

The researchers are calling on health care commissioners to invest urgently in the roll out of HIV screening to all 74 high HIV prevalence local authorities in England (those with more than 2 diagnosed HIV infections per 1,000 adults).

People with HIV have a near normal life expectancy if they are diagnosed early and have treatment, and those taking effective treatment are no longer infectious to other people. But in the UK around 13,500 people do not know that they have HIV, meaning they miss out on treatment, remain infectious to others and become more expensive to treat in the future.

HIV treatment is expensive and increased testing could potentially further increase costs. Health care planners need reliable estimates of cost-effectiveness of screening but estimates are few and until now, have not been based on robust data from randomised controlled trials.

Dr Werner Leber from QMUL said: “We’ve shown that HIV screening in UK primary care is cost effective and potentially cost saving, which is contrary to widespread belief. This is an important finding given today’s austerity. Financial pressures, particularly within local authority’s public health budgets, mean that the costs of HIV testing are under intense scrutiny, and in some areas investment in testing has fallen.”

Dr Clare Highton, City and Hackney Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) said: “Public health, specialist and CCG commissioners should take note of these important results showing the value for money of screening for HIV in primary care. This intervention means that people with HIV are able to live longer and healthier lives and the spread of infection to other people is halted.”

The study, published in The Lancet HIV, examined data from an earlier research trial in Hackney – a socioeconomically deprived inner London borough with an HIV prevalence rate of 8 per 1000 adults. The trial involved 40 general practices, where they tested the effect of rapid fingerprick HIV testing as part of the standard health check during registration, and found it led to a four-fold higher HIV diagnosis rate.

Using a mathematical model that includes all the costs associated with HIV testing and treatment, the team now show that primary care HIV screening in high prevalence settings becomes cost-effective in 33 years (according to National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE] criteria).

Factoring in the higher costs of care for people whose HIV is diagnosed late, they were able to predict that HIV screening could become cost-effective far sooner than this, and may even become cost-saving if the long-term healthcare costs of late-diagnosed patients are much higher than those of patients diagnosed earlier, as has been observed in Canada.

Eleven authorities have HIV prevalence similar to Hackney and 74 of 325 authorities in England are defined by NICE as high prevalence and could benefit from screening. The estimated annual cost of rolling out the screening programme to all 11 Hackney-level HIV prevalence authorities would be approximately £600,000 (£4 million for roll-out to all 74 high prevalence authorities). This does not include increased healthcare costs resulting from earlier HIV diagnosis and treatment which would fall under other NHS budgets.

Dr Rebecca Baggaley, lead author of the study and Honorary Lecturer at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, stated that: “Currently NICE uses a threshold of £20,000 to £30,000 per Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY) gained to gauge whether the health benefits of an intervention offer value for money to the NHS and its patients. ‘QALY’ is a widely used measure of health that combines length and quality of life. We found that over 40 years, primary care-based HIV screening in high prevalence areas would cost an estimated £26,626 per QALY gained and therefore warrants funding in the UK.”

The study has some limitations as some data, including probability of viral transmission to partners and quality of life, have been estimated based on international literature and may therefore not accurately reflect the Hackney situation.

By Fatjona Mejdini

Albanian diplomats, politicians and football fans are uniting in opposition to a Croatian court ruling, which backed Serbia’s request to extradite the man who flew a drone bearing a flag of Greater Albania at a match in Belgrade.

Croatian Supreme Court is yet to decide whether notorious drone flyer Ismail Morina will be sent to Serbia, after a court in Dubrovnik backed Belgrade’s extradition request on Thursday.

On Saturday, Albanian football fans protested in front of the Prime Minister’s office, urging the authorities to intervene in stopping the extradition.

Morina infuriated Serbian nationalists in October 2014 when he flew a drone carrying a flag depicting a map of Greater Albania during a football match in Belgrade.

Albanian nationalists admire him for the same reason. “Ismail Ballist Morina is a hero for Albanians, although since the day he flew the drone he has been persecuted by the courts,” Albanian “Red and Black” fans wrote on Facebook, inviting people to join their protest.

They promised more protests until Morina – now detained – is free. Many took to Facebook to declare their frustration with the Dubrovnik court, publishing banners with Morina’s portrait and the words “Set him free”.

Croatian police in Dubrovnik detained him in June, acting on a Serbian arrest warrant, while he was heading to Italy where he has lived for years with his family.

Morina’s Croatian lawyer, Darko Butigan, on Saturday told Albania’s Top Channel TV that Serbia had charged him with inciting criminal acts between nations, a charge that can lead up to eight years in prison.

Butigan said the charges were baseless, and he had appealed the decision to Croatia’s Supreme Court, but also has asked European institutions to intervene.

“The extradition cannot be carried out until the procedure that we have followed for his protection finishes … We have done this because we believe that in Serbia, Morina is not going to get a fair trial, based on his Albanian nationality,” he said.

Morina’s lawyer is not the only one making attempts to stop his extradition to Serbia.

Albania’s Justice Ministry on Friday asked its Croatian counterpart to suspend the request for extradition in Serbia, considering it at odds with European conventions on extradition and human rights.

On Sunday, the Albanian Football Federation announced that, together with Prime Minister Edi Rama, it was appealing to the Croatian authorities to stop the extradition.

Morina’s brother has also called on Albanians authorities to help stop his brother’s extradition.

Morina has has brushes with the law in Albania, too. Albanian police arrested him in October 2015, while he was driving, after finding a pistol on him and another one hidden in the car.

They also found 36 tickets with the names of people who were going to attend a football match against Serbia in Elbasan. On December 2015, he was released from detention.

By Talmiz Ahmad*

On July 28, the Supreme Court of Pakistan delivered its verdict on the petitions filed before it by the Imran Khan-led Tehreek-e-Insaf party that had alleged that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif had — in his nomination papers submitted to the election commission — failed to disclose wealth amassed by him and his family.

Information about the Sharif family’s properties abroad first came to light when the papers of the Panama-based law firm, Mossack Fonseca, were leaked and published in 2016, when it was revealed that the family had bought three luxury properties in London, registered in the names of Sharif’s then-minor children.

The court in its verdict said that the prime minister had failed to live up to the attributes of “sadiq” (truthfulness) and “ameen” (righteousness) that are constitutionally demanded of incumbents of high office in the country.

After the verdict, Sharif resigned as prime minister and now faces the prospect of imprisonment if the court-mandated investigation by the National Accountability Bureau conclusively proves he and his family are guilty of corruption.

In Pakistan’s 70-year history, no prime minister has yet served a five-year term. With his ouster, Sharif joins the ranks of the deposed prime ministers. In almost every instance, these leaders were ousted by the armed forces — whether via a military coup, or through the army using the judiciary to do the hatchet job.

Given this background, it is not surprising that most comment in global media has tended to be sympathetic to the fallen prime minister, seeing him as a victim of an army-judiciary coup and his ouster as a setback for democracy. That view is supported by the fact that the petitions against Sharif were filed by Imran Khan’s party, which is viewed as being backed by the army.

Indeed, the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) set up by the Supreme Court in April 2017 included not just civilian investigators but also two people representing the country’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence. Finally, the court issued its verdict and demanded that Sharif step down without a trial or conviction.

Followers of this view point out that Sharif had fallen out of favor with the military due to his public exposure of the army’s affiliation with militancy, which had led to Pakistan’s “international isolation.” Linked with this is the suggestion that Sharif would pursue a peace process with India.

But this argument makes little sense. First, Sharif, perhaps learning from his earlier confrontation with the army in the late 1990s, has shown little inclination to take it on again. He has been most vociferous in his anti-India remarks and has made references to the Kashmir issue at all international forums.

Imran Khan’s political fortunes are clearly on a downward trajectory: His party’s administration in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (KPK) has been unimpressive, even as he is increasingly seen as a Pathan rather than a national leader. And there are muted suggestions that some of his earlier financial dealings would not bear much scrutiny. All in all, it is unlikely that he will romp into the prime minister’s mansion after general elections.

The most likely scenario is that Sharif’s ouster is the result of judicial activism to cleanse Pakistani politics of its endemic corruption, and in this effort the Pakistani army has been a willing ally.

The army in Pakistan is the self-appointed guardian of the country’s nationhood and values, and has consistently found its politicians incompetent and corrupt. Today, it sees Pakistan truly on the edge of an abyss, torn by internal divisions and internecine violence, and facing increasing international opprobrium, particularly from the US. In this scenario, the army’s two-point agenda is: Successful implementation of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) projects and sustaining a strategic partnership with China.

The army was increasingly concerned that the Sharif government was ineffective in handling the local problems that CPEC projects have thrown up, mainly along Pakistan’s simmering faultlines, such as the Baluch-Punjabi divide, the center-provinces disputes and issues relating to Pathan aspirations, and perceived inefficiencies on the part of the government in the allocation of funds, personnel and achieving progress on the ground.

This is where Nawaz Sharif’s brother, Shahbaz, comes into the picture. He is seen as an excellent administrator, a shrewd businessman and someone capable of taking tough decisions; he seems the right man to see CPEC through. His elevation ends — for now — the political career of Nawaz’s preferred successor, his daughter Maryam, who stands indicted in the “Panamagate” scandal with her father.

Those who believe that Sharif’s ouster is bad news for democracy should take a fresh look at recent developments in other South Asian countries where corruption — once accepted as a normal part of political life — is no longer acceptable and its exposure is effectively used to oust governments and politicians from public life. Sharif’s departure fits this pattern: What we could be seeing in Pakistan is a new chapter in its political life.

• Talmiz Ahmad, a former Indian diplomat, holds the Ram Sathe Chair for International Studies, Symbiosis International University, Pune, India.

‘Splendid first-strike’ and ‘strategic ambiguity’ are lately being discussed as the twin strong emerging components of Indian nuclear policy. In previous few years, the BJP’s manifesto and views expressed by former Indian officials hinted towards the inside deliberations regarding India’s use of nuclear weapons.

The debate rekindled when the renowned strategist Vipin Narang, at a recently held Carnegie International Nuclear Policy Conference, cited excerpts from the book of India’s Former National Security Adviser Shivshankar Menon and claimed the “increasing evidence that India will not allow Pakistan to go first. And that India’s opening salvo may not be conventional strikes trying to pick off just Nasr batteries in the theater, but a full ‘comprehensive counterforce strike’ that attempts to completely disarm Pakistan of its nuclear weapons so that India does not have to engage in iterative tit-for-tat exchanges and expose its own cities to nuclear destruction.”

This stirred up a number of suspicions; First, India is moving from its No-First Use (NFU) policy. Although the stated stance in its official doctrine of 2003, that undertakes massive nuclear retaliation in response to a preemptive strike (by an adversary) to inflict unacceptable damage and nuclear use against chemical/ biological weapons, have had already questioned the sanctity of India’s NFU posture.

The NFU refers to a policy that state possessing nuclear weapon will not use them unless first attacked by an opponent’s nuclear strike. Second, the precept specifies that this strike by India would be ‘counterforce’ that refers to target enemy’s nuclear weapons and military infrastructure rather than existing counter-value strategy, which aims at targeting adversary’s civilians and cities.

In the words of Charles Bolton, Counterforce is “maintenance of superiority in nuclear weapons and their delivery systems sufficient to destroy the enemy’s nuclear striking power, with enough force left over to hold the enemy’s cities hostage against a threat of retaliation by any of his delivery systems that may have escaped the destruction.” Developing a variety of short-range/tactical missiles, having different ranges and yields, infer that a country is holding on to a war-fighting or war-winning strategy.

Analysts have different assessment on the number of weapons needed to implement such a strategy required to be in hundreds. However critics say that “as with tactical nuclear weapons, quality is more important for strategic weapons than quality. If, as has been suggested already, these weapons should be used only in a counterforce mode, they should need to be extremely accurate. To be sure, not all counterforce strikes require the highest degree of accuracy. Airfields, naval bases, army bases and many military manufacturing facilities are large enough to make it possible for many present-day missiles to hit them with relative ease. But there are certain other military targets, such as missiles silos (those still loaded after the first strike), command headquarters, and communication facilities, that would challenge missile and warhead technology to the utmost.

Nonetheless, weapons capable of hitting these kinds of targets are required for maintaining a credible nuclear deterrent. No doubt, this means that expenditures on these weapons should not be diminished significantly in the future.”

These shifts indicate India is aiming for high level of readiness and launch-on-warning mode of its nuclear arsenals. The trends are consistent to pre-emptive tendency and are paradoxical to Indian stated minimum deterrence posture and centralized command and control. Whereas, the development of shorter range ballistic missiles defy massive retaliation policy.

Previously, the retaliatory policy or NFU gave India a rationale to develop new capabilities and improve range and yield of its nuclear missiles to build defense against opponent. Resultantly, the introduction of Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) and sea-based capabilities in South Asia triggered an unnecessary arms race in the region. Now this latest ambiguous mixture of offensive defensive capabilities is treacherous and confuses the concept of deterrence stability in the region. However, India’s ‘ace in hole’, the flexibility of fist use in no-first use policy, if exists, will adversely impact the region. The mounting strategic ambiguities will not only invigorate the ‘use them or lose them’ dilemma in crisis time but also perplex the deterrence posture, induce aggressive strategies, lead to war-fighting capabilities, lower the threshold and increase the alertness level in already murky South Asia.

For the last 70 years India and Russia have remained friends supporting each other, signing lucrative military deals and deepening their bilateral relations on international diplomatic forums. But since  2016 their bilateral relations have not been on smooth keels.

It is pertinent to discuss here that it is the global relations because of which Russia is losing interests in its long term ally and inclined towards Pakistan. According to many observers Russia is very keen about foreign relations on long-term basis.

As Russia is well aware about China-Pakistan long term relations and never intended to hurt its partners, so after the West’s imposed sanctions after the Crimea’s annexation, Russia was seeking strategic partners and the reproached towards China.

Furthermore, India’s new generation is more attractive for US. According to a survey conducted by Pew Research Center, there are 70% Indians looking favorably US and 43% were looking Russia who was supporting India both militarily and diplomatically since last 70 years. According to same survey, there are 8% Indians look negatively US and 16% were negative towards Russia. so it can be said that Russia is losing its trust-worthiness in India despite of the fact that Russia is continue to be the key supplier of military weapons to India.

However, Putin is the master mind of long term plans in relations with other countries, eventually he moved towards the favorable relations with Pakistan. The equation of Russia’s relations with South Asian region reveals that where on one side Pakistan is India’s traditional rival and trust worthy friend of China, and the rapprochement of Russia towards China with the bonus factor of China’s opposition to US and its global views gives Pakistan more strategic importance.

Russia also supported Pakistan on the last BRIC’s Summit in Goa in the matter of India’s allegations of sponsored terrorism. Recent examples of Russia-Pakistan are 3 joint military drills since 2014; 2 naval drills (Arabian Monsoon 2014 and Arabian Monsoon 2015) and one is Druzbha 2016 and one is expected in 2017. Both Russia and Pakistan are reportedly holding negotiations on the purchase of Russian S-35 war- planes. Last year, Pakistan bought four Mi-35 helicopter gunships from Russia and in the 12 months, Pakistani army officials have visited Russia on a regular basis searching for new military deals.

As a result, Russian arms manufacturers are persistently increasing their reach to sell their military equipment. And Pakistan is the seventh importer of defense equipment.

Regarding these developments, India has serious concerns as India’s ambassador to Russia, Pankaj Saran, said, “Russia’s military cooperation with Pakistan which is a State that sponsors and practices terrorism as a matter of State policy is a wrong approach and it will only create further problems.”

Simultaneously India must be careful about such statements as India’s deliberations for the purchase of Russian S-400, stealth frigates and second nuclear submarine from the latter. On the other side, India does not want to lose Russia’s new military weapons as it is reportedly intended to pay a whopping $5 billion to get Russia’s revolutionary S-400 Triumf surface-to-air missile system which is one of the most advanced antimissile systems in the whole world. It is a true time to say that Pakistan is winning a lot having two allies Russia and China both simultaneously. However Russia and China are giving some prospects to Pakistan of becoming stronger nation. in the South Asia’s geostrategic fulcrum China’s is keen towards Russia’s joining in the recent significant development of China Pakistan Economic Corridor.

Li Xing has written that, “Russia’s participation in the CPEC, including the use of the Gwadar Port, could give a boost to Sino-Russian cooperation and be a demonstration project of One Belt and One Road (OBOR) that will enhance future multinational cooperation”.

According to some observers China’s eagerness for Russia’s joining in CPEC is merely to appease or calm India which is openly opposing CPEC claiming that it passes through their held or occupied territories. As CPEC is part of China’s vision for the next era of globalization and help its export and investment engines run for years in coming future. On international forum China has openly opposed India’s deliberations in getting participation in Nuclear Supplier Group. One could be optimistic that Russia could play a convincing role in smoothing India-Pakistan bilateral relations that would be the catalyst for the markets in the region.

In the recent developments Pakistan has approved a Russian interest for using the Gwadar Port, for its exports and on the other side media reports were swirling that Russia planned to merge the Moscow-led Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) with the CPEC.

In nutshell, the contemporary international political scenario depicts that the whole realignment of global powers in South Asia is favorable for Pakistan if Pakistan would be well aware of its economic, military and fiscal policies in coming future to become the influential and integral part of the upcoming multi-polar new world order with all these developments otherwise it would be a catastrophe for Pakistan if it would be grasped in the major powers’ power politics.

*Asia Maqsood is Research Associate at Strategic Vision Institute Islamabad.