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Syria Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 14, 2016 7 Comments
We reported on Friday that top Hezbollah commander Mustafa Badreddine was killed in an explosion in Syria, but that the circumstances were unclear, Another top Hezbollah commander killed – but who dunnit?. Badreddine was considered a master bomb maker, credited with developing that combination of explosives and gas that took down the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut and numerous American and other diplomatic facilities. Badreddine of late was commander of Hezbollah forces propping up the Assad regime, and was hated not only by Israeli but also by many Arab states. So he had plenty of enemies, and plenty of people who wanted him dead. But he also lived in the shadows, with few photos of him prior to his death (Hezbollah has released more photos after his death) and a life lived under assumed names. While pro-Hezbollah Lebanese media immediately blamed Israel. That made perfect sense in light of Israel's presumed assassinations of numerous Hezbollah leaders, including  Imad Mughniyeh (mastermind of almost all attacks on Israel and the U.S.), his son Imad Mughniyeh (who was killed along with several high level operatives and an Iranian general),Hassan Laqqis (key Hezbollah link to Iranian weapons procurement) and Samir Kuntar (who killed an Israeli girl by smashing her head against the rocks on a beach).

Posted by William A. Jacobson on May 13, 2016 4 Comments
There have been a series of assinations of top Hezbollah commanders in the recent past, including Imad Mughniyeh (mastermind of almost all attacks on Israel and the U.S.), his son Imad Mughniyeh (who was killed along with several high level operatives and an Iranian general), Hassan Laqqis (key Hezbollah link to Iranian weapons procurement) and Samir Kuntar (who killed an Israeli girl by smashing her head against the rocks on a beach). In some of the cases (Imad Mughniyeh) Israeli involvement was clear, in the others it's presumed. Hezbollah just lost another top commander, the brother-in-law of Imad Mughniyey, and its top commander in Syria, Mustafa Amine Badreddine. The BBC reports:

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on May 01, 2016 9 Comments
Apparently, the White House is bowing to pressure from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (yes, such a position actually exists) and is going to look for alternate ways to bring Syrian refugees into the country. Fox News reports:
The Obama administration appears to be bowing to international pressure and pursuing under-the-radar “alternative” ways to bring in more Syrian and other refugees -- as soon as this year. The latest indication that the administration is preparing to take in more than the 10,000 Syrians this year it already has committed to follows a March 30 “high-level meeting” on Syrian refugee admission in Geneva, Switzerland -- convened by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. At the meeting, attended by State Department officials, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi called for countries to pursue “alternative avenues” for refugees – such as student and work visas, and expanded family reunification programs.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on April 07, 2016 3 Comments
On Tuesday, German police in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia arrested a Syrian man charged with serious war crimes after arriving from Syria. The former militia commander is suspected of pillaging, plundering and committing brutalities against civilian in the city of Aleppo, Syria. The initial reports have not confirmed if the suspect entered Germany using a false identity or posing as a refugee. In 2015, Germany took in more than a million migrants. The actual figures are believed to be much higher. Just this week, the German newspaper Berliner Zeitung reported that according to Interior Ministry's estimates some 500,000 unregistered migrants were roaming across Germany.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on March 21, 2016 11 Comments
Emails released from Hillary Clinton's Secretary of State cache show Google executives interest in Syria. Jared Cohen, Head of Google Ideas at the time contacted the State Department in 2012 about a project that encouraged Syrian government defectors. Google planned to work with Al Jazeera to disseminate their defector map. The email reads:
Please keep close hold, but my team is planning to launch a tool on Sunday that will publicly track and map the defections in Syria and which parts of the government they are coming from. Our logic behind this is that while many people are tracking the atrocities, nobody is visually representing and mapping the defections, which we believe are important in encouraging more to defect and giving confidence to the opposition.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on March 18, 2016 8 Comments
The subtext in Secretary of State Kerry's agonizing over whether to label ISIS's systematic, premeditated rape and slaughter of Christians, Yazidis and Shi'ites in Syria is what it means for the million-and-a-half skeletons in Turkey's closet.  There is little objective doubt that during World War I, Turkey murdered around 1.5 million Armenians, but Turkey cannot abide the least suggestion that it engaged in genocide, and the US has thus far deferred to Turkish sensibilities. The US's failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide and Turkey's culpability, and to induce Turkey to learn from that dark period in its history undermines the US's ability to identify and condemn genocide elsewhere.  This is the undercurrent in Secretary of State Kerry's bizarre inability to call a spade a spade in Northern Syria. In brief, the 2015 omnibus spending bill included a requirement that the State Department make a determination of whether ISIS was engaged in genocide.  Anticipating and perhaps hoping to guide the results of that State Department review, on Monday the House of Representatives passed an unanimous resolution declaring that ISIS's actions are genocide.  That resolution has no legal effect.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on March 16, 2016 5 Comments
In a rather surprising move, Russia's president Vladimir Putin announced Monday that he would begin withdrawing troops from Syria the very next day.  Those of us watching the Middle East carefully were not only surprised by the move but also intensely curious about possible motivations and what the move will ultimately mean in the region, particularly with regard to Israel. Tuesday, retired U. S. Army lieutenant colonel Ralph Peters offered a compelling analysis of Putin's move and of what it means not only in the Middle East but, ultimately, for the United States. Positing that Putin has quickly seen—Russia's been in Syria only since September—that the power that will emerge in the region will be Iran's, not Russia's, Peters concludes that Putin's decision was based in cold, hard reality. In his article, "The Syrian War Just Taught Putin to Worry About Iran," for the The New York Post, Peters writes:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on March 14, 2016 16 Comments
This is actually a big deal, if for real. The Russian air force and associated troops manning the airfield and anti-aircraft systems have been responsible for many of the recent gains by Syrian, Hezbollah, and Iranian-backed foreign militias fighting to keep Assad in power. Russia Today, generally perceived as pro-Putin, reports:
Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu to start the withdrawal of forces from Syria starting Tuesday. “I consider the objectives that have been set for the Defense Ministry to be generally accomplished. That is why I order to start withdrawal of the main part of our military group from the territory of the Syrian Arab Republic starting from tomorrow,” Putin said on Monday during a meeting with Shoigu and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. To control the observation of ceasefire agreements in the region, Moscow will keep its Hmeymim airbase in Latakia province, Putin said.

Posted by Vijeta Uniyal on February 18, 2016 7 Comments
With each passing day, it gets more and more difficult to ignore the monumental disaster that Obama’s foreign policy actually is. Nowhere is its utter failure more glaringly evident than in the Syrian Civil War. But first, let us not underestimate the pathologies of the Middle East that have led to the present disaster in Syria, but Obama administration’s policies have created perils that we would be dealing with, in decades to come. The geopolitical vacuum created by President Obama’s push to shrink America’s footprint in the Middle East has quickly been filled by Comrade Putin’s soviet-style jackboots. And President Obama-backed Nuclear Deal has single-handedly contributed billions of dollars to Islamic Republic of Iran’s war chest geared at funding global terrorism and regional adventures.

Posted by New Neo on February 13, 2016 9 Comments
James Traub writes in Foreign Policy on the situation facing Sweden in its attempt to absorb the recent wave of Syrian/Iraqi/Afghan newcomers. At the outset of the article, the author may seem to be leaning towards blaming Europe for not being more magnanimous, and to be making a false analogy to WWII refugees---who may indeed have been from other countries, but who nevertheless were part of the same basic Judeo-Christian culture as the Swedes and held pretty much the same values. But that's actually not at all the direction in which the article ultimately goes, nor is it the way a lot of people in Sweden seem to be going at this point. And the trend may continue. But it's hard to talk about it in Sweden:
Diana Janse, a former diplomat and now the senior foreign policy advisor to the Moderate Party (which Swedes view as “conservative”), pointed out to me that some recent generations of Swedish refugees, including Somalis, had been notably unsuccessful joining the job market. How, she wondered, will the 10,000-20,000 young Afghan men who had entered Sweden as “unaccompanied minors” fare? How would they behave in the virtual absence of young Afghan women? But she could barely raise these questions in political debate. “We have this expression in Swedish, asiktskorridor,” she said. “It means ‘opinion corridor’ — the views you can’t move outside of.” Merely to ask whether Sweden could integrate Afghans today as it had Bosnians two decades before was to risk accusations of racism.

Posted by David Gerstman on February 10, 2016 2 Comments
While President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry have assured us that the nuclear deal with Iran has delayed war, Tony Badran in a devastating critique of the administration's foreign policy last week wrote, "Middle Easterners are not so lucky: They get to fight their wars with Iran right now." Back in 2014, Badran noted, President Obama said of the turmoil in the Middle East, "A lot of it has to do with changes that are taking place in the Middle East in which an old order that had been in place for 50 years, 60 years, 100 years was unsustainable, and was going to break up at some point. And now, what we are seeing is the old order not working, but the new order not being born yet -- and it is a rocky road through that process, and a dangerous time through that process." But a few months earlier, Obama, in an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, made very clear that his intent was to make Iran an agent of changing the orders. When Goldberg asked him why the Sunni states seem to fear him so much Obama answered, "I think that there are shifts that are taking place in the region that have caught a lot of them off guard. I think change is always scary. I think there was a comfort with a United States that was comfortable with an existing order and the existing alignments, and was an implacable foe of Iran, even if most of that was rhetorical and didn't actually translate into stopping the nuclear program. But the rhetoric was good. What I've been saying to our partners in the region is, 'We've got to respond and adapt to change.'"

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 07, 2016 5 Comments
The Office of Foreign Assets Control ("OFAC") added five more Russians to the Specially Designated Nationals List pursuant to the Magnitsky Act on February 1. In a press statement, a senior State Department official noted that one of the officials had nothing to do with the murder of the eponymous Sergei Magnitsky, but rather was involved in Russia's brutal war in Chechnya.

Sergei Magnitsky and the Magnitsky Act

The Magnitsky Act is named for Sergei Magnitsky, a Russian attorney arrested on trumped-up charges arising in retaliation for his exposing official Russian corruption in the course of representing of American investor Bill Browder.  Magnitsky died after being beaten by Russian police while in police custody and denied medical treatment despite his injuries and preexisting illness.

Posted by Jonathan Levin on February 02, 2016 4 Comments
As negotiations to negotiate an end to the Syrian civil war plod along, the UN has admitted, internally, that it is powerless to enforce any Syria peace deal. According to Foreign Policy, the UN knows it cannot enforce or even monitor any peace deal it brokers:
In a confidential strategy paper exclusively obtained by Foreign Policy, the office of the United Nations’ top envoy to Syria warns that the U.N. would be unable to monitor or enforce any peace deal that might emerge from landmark political talks underway in Geneva. The paper raised concerns the world might harbor unrealistic expectations about the U.N.’s ability to oversee and verify a cease-fire in a civil war beset by a dizzying array of armed factions and terrorist groups. “The current international and national political context and the current operational environment strongly suggest that a U.N. peacekeeping response relying on international troops or military observers would be an unsuitable modality for ceasefire monitoring,” according to the “Draft Ceasefire Modalities Concept Paper” by U.N. envoy to Syria Staffan de Mistura’s team. In plain English, that means Syria will be far too dangerous for some time for traditional U.N. peacekeepers to handle.

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on January 27, 2016 11 Comments
"Getting rid of Assad" often comes up as a throw away line in political discourse, particularly during Republican presidential debates. Overthrowing or replacing Bashar al Assad would be easy enough, the U.S. has deposed and replaced plenty of tyrants in its day, but seldom does anyone discuss what would happen in this fictions scenario after Assad gets the boot. Danielle Pletka, Senior Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies at AEI explains:

Part 1:

Explore the five groups that could have Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in their crosshairs.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 10, 2016 11 Comments
You probably never heard of Madaya. It's a town in Syria near the Lebanese border that has been under rebel control, and now is under seige by Hezbollah and the Syrian regime. And the people are starving to death. That mass starvation has received very little media coverage in the U.S. until the past couple of days. ABC News (Australian Broadcast Company) reports:
Doctors inside the besieged Syrian town of Madaya say five more people died of starvation on Sunday, including a nine-year-old boy. The town of up to 40,000 people, near the capital Damascus, has been under siege by government forces and Hezbollah militants since July.

Posted by Fuzzy Slippers on December 29, 2015 20 Comments
One of the things that I find amusing about the Democrats' war on the Koch brothers is the fact that it seems to be based more in projection than in fact.  George Soros is notoriously behind and/or involved in a slew of progressive initiatives, websites, and assorted pot stirrings. It's usually a good idea to know what the opposition is thinking, so it's worth taking a look at the article he penned for The Guardian entitled "The terrorists and demagogues want us to be scared. We mustn't give in."   In it, Soros claims that terrorists have discovered that western, "open" societies have a key weakness that can be exploited:  a fear of death. Note how he singles out France's response to the Paris attacks as being particularly "irrational" (as we'll see, he's quite happy with America's president's non-response to terrorism.):
Open societies are always endangered. This is especially true of America and Europe today, as a result of the terrorist attacks in Paris and elsewhere, and the way that America and Europe, particularly France, have reacted to them.

Posted by Mirit Hadar on December 27, 2015 0 Comments
WAJ Intro: Mirit Hadar is our friend in Ithaca. She is Israeli, and is traveling to Greece over winter break as a volunteer with IsraAID. Mirit will post about her journey, at Legal Insurrection and her own website. This is her second post. Part 1 is here. ---------------------------------- Volunteering was mostly about meeting people, seeing new places, and learning from the experience of others who are already here. I must say I felt a little bit misplaced myself, not sure what to do, how I can contribute here and what is my role in all of this. Some people come for few days, some people are here for months and some came to bring supplies for the refugees. People come here to volunteer for different reasons although what unifies them when asked is that they all tell me they feel there was no question in their mind that they must help these refugees. The medical team here is amazing and go out of their way to help people in need. [caption id="attachment_155300" align="alignnone" width="600"]http://mirithadarisraaid.blogspot.gr/2015/12/28-hours-of-intensity-and-susan-sarandon.html [Mirit Hadar with members of IsraAID Medical team, Greece][/caption]
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