Attack in Egypt's Sinai leaves many dead
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Largest U.S. refinery now belongs to Saudi Arabia - 0 views
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Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco appear to be getting a divorce, breaking up their joint venture in U.S.-based refining assets.
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Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco appear to be getting a divorce, breaking up their joint venture in U.S.-based refining assets.
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Royal Dutch Shell and Saudi Aramco appear to be getting a divorce, breaking up their joint venture in U.S.-based refining assets.
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Militants shell Aleppo, killing 16, injuring dozens amid fragile Syria ceasefire - 0 views
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Al-Qaeda-linked militants have shelled the Syrian city of Aleppo, killing 16 people and injuring 86, state news agency SANA reports, as the fragile ceasefire is being threatened by resurging violence. A source at Aleppo police command told SANA on Monday that shells fired by al-Nusra fighters landed in Aleppo's al-Sulaimaniyeh neighborhood, claiming lives of four, three of them children, and injuring 19 others, many in critical conditions.
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Russia takes concrete steps towards Syria ceasefire, Turkey continues shelling - MoD - ... - 0 views
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shared by ralph0 on 07 Mar 16
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Turkey shelling Syrian Kurdish militia in northern Aleppo - YPG - RT News - 0 views
www.rt.com/...334811-turkey-shell-ypg-syria
syria ceasefire democracy hypocrisy turkey kurdish shelling
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How is Turkey getting away with this? It is noteworthy that the Aleppo mentioned is not the city, but the province which extends much further north. However, I still fail to understand how countries can get away with blurring lines and breaking international law, while I have to pay simple traffic fines. What will be the response of the idealistic democracies of the West?
Israeli shelling destroys poet Othman Hussein's Gaza home | The Electronic Intifada - 0 views
UN shelter in Gaza 'struck by Israeli shells' - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
Flechette Shells: an illegal weapon | B'Tselem - 0 views
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Attack in Egypt's Sinai leaves many dead - Middle East - Al Jazeera English - 0 views
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65-year-old woman was injured by shrapnel during the exchange of fire and was rushed to hospital for treatment.
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army has launched a massive crackdown against armed groups in Sinai area that has killed scores of policemen and soldier
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Civilians in the mostly Bedouin towns of Sinai had been caught in the crossfire before, with several killed by an errant mortar round.
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A daring plan to rebuild Syria - no matter who wins the war - Ideas - The Boston Globe - 0 views
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The first year of Syria’s uprising, 2011, largely spared Aleppo, the country’s economic engine, largest city, and home of its most prized heritage sites. Fighting engulfed Aleppo in 2012 and has never let up since, making the city a symbol of the civil war’s grinding destruction
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ven as the fighting continues, a movement is brewing among planners, activists and bureaucrats—some still in Aleppo, others in Damascus, Turkey, and Lebanon—to prepare, right now, for the reconstruction effort that will come whenever peace finally arrives.
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In a glass tower belonging to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia, a project called the National Agenda for the Future of Syria has brought together teams of engineers, architects, water experts, conservationists, and development experts to grapple with seemingly impossible technical problems
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The team planning the country’s future is a diverse one. Some are employed by the government of Syria, others by the rebels’ rival provisional government. Still others work for the UN, private construction companies, or nongovernmental organizations involved in conservation, like the World Monuments Fund
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As the group’s members outline a path toward renewal, they’re considering everything from corruption and constitutional reform to power grids, antiquities, and health care systems.
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Aleppo is split between a regime side with vestiges of basic services, and a mostly depopulated rebel-controlled zone, into which the Islamic State and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front have made inroads over the last year
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The population exodus has claimed most of the city’s craftsmen, medical personnel, academics, and industrialists
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It took decades to clear the moonscapes of rubble and to rebuild, in famous targets like Dresden and Hiroshima but in countless other places as well, from Coventry to Nanking. Some places never recovered their vitality.
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Of course, Syrian planners cannot help but pay attention to the model closest to home: Beirut, a city almost synonymous with civil war and flawed reconstructio
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We don’t want to end up like Beirut,” one of the Syrian planners says, referring to the physical problems but also to a postwar process in which militia leaders turned to corrupt reconstruction ventures as a new source of funds and power
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Syria’s national recovery will depend in large part on whether its industrial powerhouse Aleppo can bounce back
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The city’s workshops, famed above all for their fine textiles, export millions of dollars’ worth of goods every week even now, and the economy has expanded to include modern industry as well.
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A river of rubble marks the no-man’s land separating the two sides. The only way to cross is to leave the city, follow a wide arc, and reenter from the far side.
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Parts of the old city won’t be inhabitable for years, he told me by Skype, because the ground has literally shifted as a result of bombing and shelling
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The first and more obvious is creating realistic options to fix the country after the war—in some cases literal plans for building infrastructure systems and positioning construction equipment, in other cases guidelines for shaping governanc
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They’re familiar with global “best practices,” but also with how things work in Syria, so they’re not going to propose pie-in-the-sky idea
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If some version of the current regime remains in charge, it will probably direct massive contracts toward patrons in Russia, China, or Iran. The opposition, by contrast, would lean toward firms from the West, Turkey, and the Gulf.
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At the current level of destruction, the project planners estimate the reconstruction will cost at least $100 billion
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Recently a panel of architects and heritage experts from Sweden, Bosnia, Syria, and Lebanon convened in Beirut to discuss lessons for Syria’s reconstruction—one of the many distinct initiatives parallel to the Future of Syria project.
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“You should never rebuild the way it was,” said Arna Mackic, an architect from Mostar. That Bosnian city was divided during the 1990s civil war into Muslim and Catholic sides, destroying the city center and the famous Stari Most bridge over the Neretva River. “The war changes us. You should show that in rebuilding.”
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Instead, Mackik says, the sectarian communities keep to their own enclaves. Bereft of any common symbols, the city took a poll to figure out what kind of statue to erect in the city center. All the local figures were too polarizing. In the end they settled on a gold-colored statue of the martial arts star Bruce Lee
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is that it could offer the city’s people a form of participatory democracy that has so far eluded the Syrian regime and sadly, the opposition as well.
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A great deal of money has been invested in Syria’s destruction— by the regime, the local parties to the conflict, and many foreign powers. A great deal of money will be made in the aftermath, in a reconstruction project that stands to dwarf anything seen since after World War II.
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Aid for Yemen Dwindles as Need Rises Amid Chaos - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Residents said that water had been cut off for days and that electricity was out for hours at a time.
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raising fears of a lengthy war that is expanding the destabilizing regional conflict between the Persian Gulf monarchies and Iran.
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aid agencies intensified their warnings on Tuesday about the toll on civilians and hospitals, which are running critically low on medical supplies.
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The Houthis, acknowledging their alliance with Iran but denying acting on its orders, have been able to extend their offensive despite intensifying airstrikes by Saudi warplanes across Yemen.
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physicians had treated more than 500 people in the last two weeks in Aden, including burn victims from explosions at an ammunition depot and passengers on a bus that had apparently come under shelling.
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Strife in Libya Could Presage Long Civil War - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Mr. Badi’s assault on Libya’s main international airport has now drawn the country’s fractious militias, tribes and towns into a single national conflagration that threatens to become a prolonged civil war. Both sides see the fight as part of a larger regional struggle, fraught with the risks of a return to repressive authoritarianism or a slide toward Islamist extremism.
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the violence threatens to turn Libya into a pocket of chaos destabilizing North Africa for years to come.
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Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group involved in the assault on the American diplomatic Mission in Benghazi in 2012
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The ideological differences are blurry at best: both sides publicly profess a similar conservative but democratic vision.
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Motorists wait in lines stretching more than three miles at shuttered gas stations, waiting for them to open. Food prices are soaring, uncollected garbage is piling up in the streets and bicycles, once unheard-of, are increasingly common.
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In Benghazi, Libya’s second-largest city, the fighting has closed both its airport and seaport, strangling the city.
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the rush toward war is also lifting the fortunes of the Islamist extremists of Ansar al-Shariah, the Benghazi militant group.
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The United Nations, the United States and the other Western powers have withdrawn their diplomats and closed their missions
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Until now, a rough balance of power among local brigades had preserved a kind of equilibrium, if not stability
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the transitional government scarcely existed outside of the luxury hotels where its officials gathered, no other force was strong enough to dominate. No single interest divided the competing cities and factions.
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But that semblance of unity is now in tatters, and with it the hope that nonviolent negotiations might settle the competition for power and, implicitly, Libya’s oil.
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In May, a renegade former general, Khalifa Hifter, declared that he would seize power by force to purge Libya of Islamists, beginning in Benghazi. He vowed to eradicate the hard-line Islamists of Ansar al-Shariah, blamed for a long series of bombings and assassinations.
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he has mustered a small fleet of helicopters and warplanes that have bombed rival bases around Benghazi, a steep escalation of the violence.
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moderate Islamists and other brigades who had distanced themselves from Ansar al-Shariah began closing ranks, welcoming the group into a newly formed council of “revolutionary” militias
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a broad alliance of Benghazi militias that now includes Ansar al-Shariah issued a defiant statement denouncing relative moderates like the Libyan Muslim Brotherhood. “We will not accept the project of democracy, secular parties, nor the parties that falsely claim the Islamic cause,”
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the general’s blitz has now stalled, it polarized the country, drawing alarms from some cities and tribes but applause from others.
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the loudest applause came from the western mountain town of Zintan, where local militia leaders had recruited hundreds of former Qaddafi soldiers into special brigades
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the rival coastal city of Misurata, where militias have allied with the Islamists in political battles and jostled with the Zintanis for influence in the capital
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the Misurata and Islamist militias developed a reputation for besieging government buildings and kidnapping high officials to try to pressure the Parliament. But in recent months the Zintanis and their anti-Islamist allies have stormed the Parliament and kidnapped senior lawmakers as well.
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the newly elected Parliament, led at first, on a seniority basis, by a member supportive of Mr. Hifter, announced plans to convene in Tobruk, an eastern city under the general’s control.
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Tripoli’s backup airport, under the control of an Islamist militia, has cut off flights to Tobruk, even blocking a trip by the prime minister.
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a spokesman for the old disbanded Parliament, favored by the Islamists and Misuratans, declared that it would reconvene in Tripoli
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In Tobruk, a spokesman for the new Parliament declared that the Islamist- and Misuratan-allied militias were terrorists, suggesting that Libya might soon have two legislatures with competing armies
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Each side has the support of competing satellite television networks financed and, often, broadcast from abroad, typically from Qatar for the Islamists and from the United Arab Emirates for their foes.
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Hassan Tatanaki, a Libyan-born business mogul who owns one of the anti-Islamist satellite networks, speaking in an interview from an office in the Emirates. “We are in a state of war and this is no time for compromise.”
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Fighters and tribes who fought one another during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi are now coming together on the same side of the new fight, especially with the Zintanis against the Islamists. Some former Qaddafi officers who had fled Libya are even coming back to take up arms again.
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“It is not pro- or anti-Qaddafi any more — it is about Libya,” said a former Qaddafi officer in a military uniform
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Beneath the battle against “extremists,” he said, was an even deeper, ethnic struggle: the tribes of Arab descent, like the Zintanis, against those of Berber, Circassian or Turkish ancestry, like the Misuratis. “The victory will be for the Arab tribes,”
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Article explains the civil war that is erupting in Libya. Islamist extremists are trying to take over the country and towns and tribes of Libya are choosing sides. Tripoli has been the biggest battle ground and its airport was destroyed.
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This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
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This NYT article gives an excellent outline of the prominent factions fighting in Libya, and the purpose and goals of those factions as of Aug, 2014.
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Turkey's 'provocative' military actions could jeopardize Syria ceasefire - Russian mili... - 0 views
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ISIS Detainee Tells U.S. of Militants' Plan to Use Mustard Gas - The New York Times - 0 views
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The Islamic State’s use of chemical weapons in Iraq and Syria has been known, but Mr. Afari’s capture has provided the United States with the opportunity to learn detailed information about the group’s secretive program, including where chemical agents were being stored and produced.
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Mr. al-Afari was captured last month by a new Special Operations force made up primarily of Delta Force commandos shortly after they arrived in Iraq. They are the first major American combat force on the ground there since the United States pulled out of the country at the end of 2011.
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Until recently, the United States has largely targeted Islamic State fighters with airstrikes. But the 200-member Special Operations team has been assigned to both kill and capture Islamic State operatives, the latter for use in gathering intelligence. Military officials said the team had set up safe houses and worked with Iraqi and Kurdish forces to establish informant networks and conduct raids on Islamic State leaders and other important militants.
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Under interrogation, Mr. Afari, told his captors how the group had weaponized sulfur mustard and loaded it into artillery shells, the officials said.
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US special forces were able to take an ISIS member into custody. Through questioning, the military men were able to learn that ISIS is now beginning to make plans to use mustard gas as a chemical weapon. The Red Cross has been identified because of the possible use of chemical weapons.
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An Islamic State detainee currently in American custody at a temporary detention facility in Erbil, Iraq, is a specialist in chemical weapons whom American military officials are questioning about the militant Sunni group's plans to use the banned substances in Iraq and Syria, Defense officials said. The member of ISIS who is probably dead at this point reports say, told the miltants that they were planning on using mustard gas with upcoming attacks planned.