Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

the spread of persistent surveillance technologies is particularly worrisome because they remove any limit on how much information police can gather on a person’s movements. “The border is the natural place for the government to start using them, since there is much more public support to deploy these sorts of intrusive technologies there,”

the company’s ultimate goal is to build a “layer” of electronic surveillance equipment across the entire perimeter of the U.S. “Over time, we’ll expand not only to the northern border, but to the ports and harbors across the country,”

In addition to fixed and mobile surveillance towers, other technology that CBP has acquired and deployed includes blimps outfitted with high-powered ground and air radar, sensors buried underground, and facial recognition software at ports of entry. CBP’s drone fleet has been described as the largest of any U.S. agency outside the Department of Defense

Nellie Jo David, a Tohono O’odham tribal member who is writing her dissertation on border security issues at the University of Arizona, says many younger people who have been forced by economic circumstances to work in nearby cities are returning home less and less, because they want to avoid the constant surveillance and harassment. “It’s especially taken a toll on our younger generations.”

Between 2013 and 2016, for example, roughly 40 percent of Border Patrol seizures at immigration enforcement checkpoints involved 1 ounce or less of marijuana confiscated from U.S. citizens.

In the U.S., leading companies with border security contracts include long-established contractors such as Lockheed Martin in addition to recent upstarts such as Anduril Industries, founded by tech mogul Palmer Luckey to feed the growing market for artificial intelligence and surveillance sensors — primarily in the borderlands. Elbit Systems has frequently touted a major advantage over these competitors: the fact that its products are “field-proven” on Palestinians

Verlon Jose, then-tribal vice chair, said that many nation members calculated that the towers would help dissuade the federal government from building a border wall across their lands. The Tohono O’odham are “only as sovereign as the federal government allows us to be,”

Leading Democrats have argued for the development of an ever-more sophisticated border surveillance state as an alternative to Trump’s border wall. “The positive, shall we say, almost technological wall that can be built is what we should be doing,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said in January. But for those crossing the border, the development of this surveillance apparatus has already taken a heavy toll. In January, a study published by researchers from the University of Arizona and Earlham College found that border surveillance towers have prompted migrants to cross along more rugged and circuitous pathways, leading to greater numbers of deaths from dehydration, exhaustion, and exposure.

“Walls are not only a question of blocking people from moving, but they are also serving as borders or frontiers between where you enter the surveillance state,” she said. “The idea is that at the very moment you step near the border, Elbit will catch you. Something similar happens in Palestine.”

CBP is by far the largest law enforcement entity in the U.S., with 61,400 employees and a 2018 budget of $16.3 billion — more than the militaries of Iran, Mexico, Israel, and Pakistan. The Border Patrol has jurisdiction 100 miles inland from U.S. borders, making roughly two-thirds of the U.S. population theoretically subject to its operations, including the entirety of the Tohono O’odham reservation

Border militarism has been spreading worldwide owing to neoliberal economic policies, wars, and the onset of the climate crisis, all of which have contributed to the uprooting of increasingly large numbers of people, notes Reece Jones

the agency uses its sprawling surveillance apparatus for purposes other than border enforcement

documents obtained via public records requests suggest that CBP drone flights included surveillance of Dakota Access pipeline protests

CBP’s repurposing of the surveillance tower and drones to surveil dissidents hints at other possible abuses. “It’s a reminder that technologies that are sold for one purpose, such as protecting the border or stopping terrorists — or whatever the original justification may happen to be — so often get repurposed for other reasons, such as targeting protesters.”

The impacts of the U.S. border on Tohono O’odham people date to the mid-19th century. The tribal nation’s traditional land extended 175 miles into Mexico before being severed by the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, a U.S. acquisition of land from the Mexican government. As many as 2,500 of the tribe’s more than 30,000 members still live on the Mexican side. Tohono O’odham people used to travel between the United States and Mexico fairly easily on roads without checkpoints to visit family, perform ceremonies, or obtain health care. But that was before the Border Patrol arrived en masse in the mid-2000s, turning the reservation into something akin to a military occupation zone. Residents say agents have administered beatings, used pepper spray, pulled people out of vehicles, shot two Tohono O’odham men under suspicious circumstances, and entered people’s homes without warrants. “It is apartheid here,” Ofelia Rivas says. “We have to carry our papers everywhere. And everyone here has experienced the Border Patrol’s abuse in some way.”

Tohono O’odham people have developed common cause with other communities struggling against colonization and border walls. David is among numerous activists from the U.S. and Mexican borderlands who joined a delegation to the West Bank in 2017, convened by Stop the Wall, to build relationships and learn about the impacts of Elbit’s surveillance systems. “I don’t feel safe with them taking over my community, especially if you look at what’s going on in Palestine — they’re bringing the same thing right over here to this land,” she says. “The U.S. government is going to be able to surveil basically anybody on the nation.”

These events have come to light in the wake of a public build-up of suspicion and hostility toward Israel over the nebulous, US-sponsored peace plan dubbed the “deal of the century,” which most Jordanians view as a threat to their country. Jordanians have also been critical of the agreement signed in 2016 for Israel to provide Jordan with natural gas over a 10-year period. Lawmakers, led by the Islamist bloc Al-Islah, have been pressuring the government to cancel the deal.

“The small Muslim shrine on top of the high peak at Jabal an-Nabi Harun was constructed in 1330 by the Mamluk Sultan Al-Nasir Muhammad.” She added, “There is a tomb inside the shrine, but there is no evidence whatsoever that it actually belongs to Aaron. Such shrines to prophets and virtuous men were built at many places by the Ayyubids, Mamluks and Ottomans to enforce the Muslim identity of the state and to vent political discontent by the local populations.

in July the Royal Film Commission in Jordan had approved the shooting in Petra of “Jaber,” a controversial, fictional film whose storyline has Jews settling in the city after the Exodus from Egypt. Jordanians railed that the “Zionist script” fabricates an Israeli claim to the ancient city. Under public pressure, a number of Jordanian actors withdrew from the project, and on Aug. 3, the director, the Jordanian-born US national Mohydeen Izzat Quandour, announced the cancellation of the shooting.

Daoud Kuttab (who also writes for Al-Monitor) wrote, “The reality is that the current leaders in Tel Aviv and Washington have done little to calm jittery Jordanians and Palestinians, who are concerned about the growth of [a] messianic Jewish ideology that tries to connect biblical history with modern day politics.

“Religious sites should be respected, and freedom of worship and visit should not be interfered in, but the problem that faces political leaders and government officials is how to deal with the genuine worry that what appears to be a crazy notion by a few zealous individuals could one day become a political reality.” 

the deep-seated unease felt by a majority of Jordanians about Israeli intentions toward the kingdom in light of increasing tensions between Jordan and Israel over the Haram al-Sharif and the demise of the two-state solution

Another element of this legacy is the paranoia that makes it difficult for regional governments to distinguish between academic researchers and spies

Imagine if Syria had imprisoned a British PhD student and kept them in solitary confinement for seven months with one consular visit—or if Iran covered up the brutal murder of an Italian PhD student by their police forces, as happened in Egypt in 2016. The double standards pertaining to academic freedom and the rule of law in countries formally allied with the United States and Europe and those characterized as rogue actors is so obvious it barely merits pointing out. The Emirati authorities certainly recognize this, and will continue to exploit this double standard so long as it remains intact.

Oil money, along with a new generation of rulers eager to use military intervention to demonstrate their power to domestic and foreign audiences, has made the Gulf not just a major weapons customer but an industry partner. The story of the UAE today is no longer Dubai’s position as a global finance hub, but Abu Dhabi’s position as an emerging player in high-tech weapons development.

it is no coincidence that two decades of research and funding for domestic weapons development in the UAE is now manifested in armed interventions in Yemen, Libya and the horn of Africa

Matt’s arrest and detention, therefore, is a clear message from UAE authorities that research into the country’s growing arms industry is off-limits, in much the same way that researchers and activists working on labor rights have found themselves surveilled, intimidated and imprisoned

The slow erosion of public funding for universities has bled dry the resources reserved to support PhD students, meanwhile trustees and consultants urge the adoption of for-profit business practices that generate return on investment, including partnering with defense technology firms for research grants.[3] The fact that educational institutions must go begging—hat in hand—to billionaire philanthropists and weapons conglomerates reflects both the growing share of defense industry involvement in industrial and research activities as well as the failure of our political system to levy sufficient taxes on the ultra-rich to directly fund basic investments in public education.

what does the weakening of US and European governments vis-à-vis their Gulf counterparts mean for the protection of students and scholars conducting overseas research?

Before my research on the Gulf, my focus was on the role of regional militaries (primarily Egypt and Jordan) in their domestic economies. The more I studied these cases the more I realized their military economies are not some peculiarity of third world political development, but a legacy of colonial militarization, the obstacles facing newly-independent states trying to industrialize their economies, and the extraordinary organizational and financial resources that weapons producers dedicate to proliferating their products all over the globe.

I do not know of any studies estimating the total number of academics and non-government researchers working on security and military-related issues across the globe, but I expect it is in the tens of thousands at the very least. At my home institution alone—The George Washington University—there are maybe a dozen faculty working on everything from the psychology of drone operators to the role gender plays in government defense contracting—and I’m pretty sure none of these people are spies. This kind of security studies—which examines topics like defense technology, the global arms industry and government contracting—is a growing field, not least due to the proliferation of information about these issues coming from the booming private sector. And as multinational defense firms and their complementary industry partners continue to chase investment shifting from the core capitalist countries to emerging regional powers like the Gulf States these latter sites will become increasingly important targets for such research.

Matt’s case should make us question not only the safety of Western researchers and our students but, more importantly, the continued harassment, intimidation and imprisonment of academics and democratic activists across the Middle East.

Greece’s position seems likely to worsen in the near future as Turkey and Russia deepen their ties (despite the fact the Syrian conflict has placed them on opposite sides), with the latter reportedly considering recognizing the former’s statelet in Northern Cyprus and planning to open a military base there.

what explains the decision-making? A clue is offered by Mitsotakis’s book on foreign policy, released in 2006 in Greece (a translation of his Harvard University dissertation). Its main thesis can be summed up in this passage: “the satisfaction of domestic obligations might require foreign-policy decisions that are not the most suitable from the point of view of a rational player, but which provide gains domestically”—or, to paraphrase, the country’s foreign policy should be carved with an eye on domestic politics.

As leaders understand the limits of allies’ backing, reality sinks in. Saudi Arabia, initially encouraged by the Trump administration’s apparent blank check, flexed its regional muscle until a series of brazen Iranian attacks and noticeable U.S. nonresponses showed the kingdom the extent of its exposure, driving it to seek a settlement in Yemen and, perhaps, de-escalation with Iran.

another trend that warrants attention: the phenomenon of mass protests across the globe. It is an equal-opportunity discontent, shaking countries governed by both the left and right, democracies and autocracies, rich and poor, from Latin America to Asia and Africa. Particularly striking are those in the Middle East—because many observers thought that the broken illusions and horrific bloodshed that came in the wake of the 2011 uprisings would dissuade another round.

In Sudan, arguably one of this past year’s better news stories, protests led to long-serving autocrat Omar al-Bashir’s downfall and ushered in a transition that could yield a more democratic and peaceful order. In Algeria, meanwhile, leaders have merely played musical chairs. In too many other places, they have cracked down. Still, in almost all, the pervasive sense of economic injustice that brought people onto the streets remains. If governments new or old cannot address that, the world should expect more cities ablaze this coming year.

More people are being killed as a result of fighting in Afghanistan than in any other current conflict in the world.

In 2018, aggressive international intervention in Yemen prevented what U.N. officials deemed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis from deteriorating further; 2020 could offer a rare opportunity to wind down the war. That chance, however, is the product of a confluence of local, regional, and international factors and, if not seized now, may quickly fade.

Perhaps nowhere are both promise and peril for the coming year starker than in Ethiopia, East Africa’s most populous and influential state.

Mass protests between 2015 and 2018 that brought Abiy to power were motivated primarily by political and socioeconomic grievances. But they had ethnic undertones too, particularly in Ethiopia’s most populous regions, Amhara and Oromia, whose leaders hoped to reduce the long-dominant Tigray minority’s influence. Abiy’s liberalization and efforts to dismantle the existing order have given new energy to ethnonationalism, while weakening the central state.

Burkina Faso is the latest country to fall victim to the instability plaguing Africa’s Sahel region.

Burkina Faso’s volatility matters not only because of harm inflicted on its own citizens, but because the country borders other nations, including several along West Africa’s coast. Those countries have suffered few attacks since jihadis struck resorts in Ivory Coast in 2016. But some evidence, including militants’ own statements, suggest they might use Burkina Faso as a launching pad for operations along the coast or to put down roots in the northernmost regions of countries such as Ivory Coast, Ghana, or Benin.

The war in Libya risks getting worse in the coming months, as rival factions increasingly rely on foreign military backing to change the balance of power. The threat of major violence has loomed since the country split into two parallel administrations following contested elections in 2014. U.N. attempts at reunification faltered, and since 2016 Libya has been divided between the internationally recognized government of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj in Tripoli and a rival government based in eastern Libya. The Islamic State established a small foothold but was defeated; militias fought over Libya’s oil infrastructure on the coast; and tribal clashes unsettled the country’s vast southern desert. But fighting never tipped into a broader confrontation.

In April 2019, forces commanded by Khalifa Haftar, which are backed by the government in the east, laid siege to Tripoli, edging the country toward all-out war.

Emirati drones and airplanes, hundreds of Russian private military contractors, and African soldiers recruited into Haftar’s forces confront Turkish drones and military vehicles, raising the specter of an escalating proxy battle on the Mediterranean

A diplomatic breakthrough to de-escalate tensions between the Gulf states and Iran or between Washington and Tehran remains possible. But, as sanctions take their toll and Iran fights back, time is running out.

After falling off the international radar for years, a flare-up between India and Pakistan in 2019 over the disputed region of Kashmir brought the crisis back into sharp focus. Both countries lay claim to the Himalayan territory, split by an informal boundary, known as the Line of Control, since the first Indian-Pakistani war of 1947-48.

Barzani, whose government relies heavily on U.S. support, did not directly criticize Trump for the Soleimani killing, saying he was “surprised” by it and wanted to de-escalate regional tensions.

ISIS is still managing to carry out 60 attacks a month in Iraq alone against security forces and local rivals, Barzani said, as it regroups around a core of hardened fighters.

what is striking about Barzani’s portrayal of the group is the idea that it is not just surviving but thriving

The Soleimani strike capped months of U.S.-Iran tensions that included Iran-linked attacks on shipping and oil interests in the Persian Gulf and rocket attacks by Iran-backed militias against U.S. troops in Iraq; after Soleimani’s death, Iran sent missiles flying at bases housing U.S. troops in the country. “This confrontation definitely will have a negative effect on the fight against terrorism and ISIS, which should be the priority for all of us,” Barzani said.

the main reason for the ISIS resurgence, Barzani said, is the persistence of the same conditions that allowed it to rise up in the first place. Syria remains in chaos. In Iraq, U.S. and Iraqi leaders alike have, for almost two decades, failed to solve problems such as corruption, poor governance, sectarianism, and economic malaise

The U.S. has pushed other countries to contribute funds to help rebuild ravaged areas, but it has not prioritized these efforts, which have been halting and plagued by local mismanagement. Leaders in Baghdad have made little effort at political reconciliation. Many residents remain in displaced-persons camps. “If people are jobless, if people are hopeless, if people have no security, if people have no opportunity, if there is no political stability, it's always easy for terrorist organizations to manipulate local populations,” Barzani told us. “ISIS is a by-product. So as long as these factors are still valid, there will always be either ISIS or something similar to ISIS.”

U.N. relief officials and aid organizations are bracing for what they fear could be a cataclysmic second phase of the pandemic: spreading in the close-quarters encampments of the world’s more than 25 million refugees and another 40 million internally displaced people.

More than 3 billion people lack access to hand-washing facilities, depriving them of one of the most effective first lines of defense against the spread of the coronavirus, according to UNICEF

the effort to ramp up an international aid response is being hampered by the quest to ensure the safety of international staff. Those concerns have been amplified by the announcement last week that David Beasley, the executive director of the Rome-based World Food Program, had been infected with the coronavirus. Some international relief agencies have recalled senior field officers, fearing they could be infected.

Konyndyk, who worked on the response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa for the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that U.N. and relief agencies are having to balance ensuring the health of their own staff with delivering care to needy communities.

“You would have a hard time designing a more dangerous setting for the spread of this disease than an informal IDP settlement,” he said. “You have a crowded population, very poor sanitation … very poor disease surveillance, very poor health services. This could be extraordinarily dangerous … and I don’t think that’s getting enough global attention yet.”

In conflict-riven countries from Afghanistan to South Sudan to Yemen, dismal health care infrastructures are already overburdened after years of fighting

After five years of war, with millions of people on the brink of famine, Yemen’s population is more vulnerable to a coronavirus outbreak than those of most other countries. The conflict has left most of the country’s population effectively immunocompromised,

“For many population groups, living in overcrowded conditions, social distancing is a challenge or impossible,” according to the Assessment Capacities Project report. Many countries that host refugee camps, such as Afghanistan and Bangladesh, are likely to be overwhelmed by the health needs of their own citizens. Nations with weak health systems “may struggle to screen, test, and contain the epidemic for the host population let alone the refugees,”

In Gaza, the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which provides primary care for about 70 percent of the territory’s more than 1.8 million people, is bracing for the likely arrival of the coronavirus in one of the most densely populated place in the world. The U.N. agency—which the Trump administration defunded last year and has sought to dismantle—has some 22 medical clinics in Gaza, putting it on the front lines of the defense of the coronavirus.

“I’m told that there are 60 ICU beds in the hospitals,” Matthias Schmale, the director of Gaza’s UNRWA operations, told Foreign Policy. “If there is a full-scale outbreak the hospital sector won’t cope.”

The leaders of major relief organizations are pressing donors to grant them greater flexibility to redirect funding from existing programs that are likely to be paralyzed by the pandemic and use that money for programs—including clean water and sanitation projects—that could help stem the crisis.

“As bad as it is now in the well-organized and affluent north, with health systems, good sanitation, and big infrastructure, imagine how it will be when it will hit crowded camps with refugees and displaced people,” said Egeland, who spoke by telephone from quarantine in Norway.

sweeping U.S. and U.N. economic sanctions imposed on governments in Iran, North Korea, and Venezuela are hampering relief efforts.

Egeland acknowledged that most U.N. sanctions regimes, including those for Iran and North Korea, include exemptions for the import of humanitarian goods. But the sanctions have scared financial institutions from providing vital financial services to relief agencies. “Not a single bank had the guts to transfer money, because they were all afraid to be sued by the U.S. government,”

The World Health Organization announced earlier this year that more than $675 million will be required through April—including $61 million for its own activities—to mount an international campaign against the virus. Though WHO’s Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said recently that more money would be needed. On Feb. 17, UNICEF issued an urgent request for $42.3 million to support the coronavirus response. It will be used to reduce transmission of the virus by promoting distance learning for kids who can’t attend school and public information aimed at shooting down misinformation.

Guterres, meanwhile, expressed concern that the pandemic could claw back decades of efforts to raise international health standards and to scale back the most extreme levels of poverty, and undercut U.N. sustainable development goals, which are designed to improve the standard of living around the world by the year 2030.

“COVID-19 is killing people, as well as attacking the real economy at its core—trade, supply chains, businesses, jobs,” Guterres said. “Workers around the world could lose as much as $3.4 trillion.”

“We need to focus on people—the most vulnerable, low-wage workers, small and medium enterprises,” Guterres said. “That means wage support, insurance, social protection, preventing bankruptcies and job loss. That also means designing fiscal and monetary responses to ensure that the burden does not fall on those who can least afford it. The recovery must not come on the backs of the poorest—and we cannot create a legion of new poor. We need to get resources directly into the hands of people.”

Netanyahu’s relationship with Trump, who has brought retrograde antisemitism roaring back into the American mainstream, is among his crowning foreign policy achievements, together with the pro-annexation gifts that the president has bestowed in return. It is therefore no shock that Netanyahu would agree to scratch his back with an eye on the upcoming U.S. election, much as Trump did by releasing his so-called “Deal of the Century” just over a month ahead of Israel’s recent election.

Still, it is disturbing to watch the working logic of the Republican Party now informing the Israeli prime minister’s decisions during a public health crisis: keep Trump happy, even when doing so could cost your own citizens’ lives and/or throw your economy into disarray.

Israeli Defense Minister Naftali Bennett’s decision to place Bethlehem on lockdown, in response to an outbreak of the virus in the city, stood in stark contrast to the self-quarantine measures imposed on Israelis inside the Green Line. Such are the perks of a military dictatorship, including in a city which, as part of Area A, is ostensibly under full Palestinian Authority control.

Israel’s entire state apparatus is engineered to ensure that what is necessary for Palestinians is not so for Jews, and vice-versa, even when they live in the same area.

The separatists' move raises concerns that Yemen could slide further into chaos amid the worldwide coronavirus pandemic.

The years-long conflict in Yemen has killed more than 100,000 people and pushed the Arab world's poorest country to the brink of famine.

The militias that support the GNA are too quarrelsome and undisciplined to mount a sustained campaign. Misrata, home to some of the most powerful armed groups, supports the GNA but is a separate centre of power

In the east General Haftar stokes fear of a Turkish-backed Islamist threat. But Tripoli is 1,000km away. Many of the east’s 2m or so people, though hungry for more autonomy, grumble about the high cost of the war. The LNA consumes a third of the east’s budget. Some 7,000 of its men have been killed in the past year.

“We do not approve the statement that Field-Marshal Haftar will now single-handedly decide how the Libyan people should live,” said Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister. Russia and others are preoccupied with covid-19 and may be questioning whether access to Libya’s oil is worth all the trouble given lower prices. Still, Russia has sent mercenaries to fight the GNA, and the UAE’s support for General Haftar is increasing.

Erdogan, the president of Turkey, is challenging their influence in the eastern Mediterranean. In November he signed a pact with the GNA’s prime minister, Fayez al-Serraj, committing to defend Tripoli in exchange for gas-exploration rights in Libya’s waters. Since then Turkish arms and intelligence, as well as 4,000 fighters from Turkish-controlled parts of Syria, have shifted the balance on the ground in Libya. From the sky Turkish drones have been striking General Haftar’s long supply lines.

the head of the UN mission in Libya, Ghassan Salame, bowed out in March. “I can no longer continue with this level of stress,” he said. His successor, as yet unnamed, will be the fourth person to hold the job since 2014. Trying to put Libya back together is an exhausting task

It is likely that this time the Gulf States will demand the complete shuttering of the Al Jazeera TV Network before any mediation can take place. Additionally, the plug will have to be pulled on networks funded by Qatar such as Al Araby Al Jadeed (The New Arab), originally set up to compete with Al Jazeera and headed by former Arab Israeli politician Azmi Bishara.

will also demand the expulsion of all Muslim Brotherhood leaders and their Hamas affiliate figures from Qatar, along with Azmi Bishara and Islamist writer Yasser Al-Za'atra. Other demands will include the sacking of Al Arab newspaper editor Abdullah Al Athba

It seems though the initial pressure has already somewhat worked on Qatar. Last week Doha deported Saudi activist Mohammed Al-Otaibi who arrived in Qatar in March, while a number of Hamas officials have left Qatar at the country’s request.

Qatar imports over 90 percent of its food, and by one estimate about 40 percent of that comes from the its only land border, which is now closed. Within hours photos started circulating on social media of Qatari supermarket aisles that have been emptied by panicked shoppers. Furthermore Gulf media has hinted at an escalation of the dispute with Qatari commercial and trade ties being severed next.

He and the rest of the drivers are angry. It’s weeks since they risked their lives for a journey that ruined engines and broke axles but still they haven’t been paid. It was a journey to hell and back, he says.

As soon as we entered, we saw IS fighters with their weapons and suicide belts on. They booby-trapped our trucks. If something were to go wrong in the deal, they would bomb the entire convoy. Even their children and women had suicide belts on

We took out around 4,000 people including women and children - our vehicle and their vehicles combined. When we entered Raqqa, we thought there were 200 people to collect. In my vehicle alone, I took 112 people.

the convoy was six to seven kilometres long. It included almost 50 trucks, 13 buses and more than 100 of the Islamic State group’s own vehicles

Ten trucks were loaded with weapons and ammunition

It was also understood that no foreigners would be allowed to leave Raqqa alive. Back in May, US Defence Secretary James Mattis described the fight against IS as a war of “annihilation”.“Our intention is that the foreign fighters do not survive the fight to return home to north Africa, to Europe, to America, to Asia, to Africa. We are not going to allow them to do so,” he said on US television. But foreign fighters – those not from Syria and Iraq - were also able to join the convoy, according to the drivers

The deal to let IS fighters escape from Raqqa – de facto capital of their self-declared caliphate – had been arranged by local officials. It came after four months of fighting that left the city obliterated and almost devoid of people. It would spare lives and bring fighting to an end. The lives of the Arab, Kurdish and other fighters opposing IS would be spared. But it also enabled many hundreds of IS fighters to escape from the city. At the time, neither the US and British-led coalition, nor the SDF, which it backs, wanted to admit their part.

According to Abu Fawzi, there were three or four foreigners with each driver. They would beat him and call him names, such as “infidel”, or “pig”. They might have been helping the fighters escape, but the Arab drivers were abused the entire route, they say. And threatened. “They said, 'Let us know when you rebuild Raqqa - we will come back,’” says Abu Fawzi. “They were defiant and didn’t care. They accused us of kicking them out of Raqqa.” A female foreign fighter threatened him with her AK-47.

“A one-eyed Tunisian fighter told me to fear God,” he says. “In a very calm voice, he asked why I had shaved. He said they would come back and enforce Sharia once again. I told him we have no problem with Sharia laws. We're all Muslims.”

Despite the abuse they suffered, the lorry drivers agreed - when it came to money, IS settled its bills.

IS may have been homicidal psychopaths, but they're always correct with the money

Along the route, many people we spoke to said they heard coalition aircraft, sometimes drones, following the convoy.

When the last of the convoy were about to cross, a US jet flew very low and deployed flares to light up the area. IS fighters shat their pants

Past the last SDF checkpoint, inside IS territory - a village between Markada and Al-Souwar - Abu Fawzi reached his destination. His lorry was full of ammunition and IS fighters wanted it hidden. When he finally made it back to safety, he was asked by the SDF where he’d dumped the goods. “We showed them the location on the map and he marked it so uncle Trump can bomb it later,” he says.

“Those highly placed foreigners have their own networks of smugglers. It’s usually the same people who organised their access to Syria. They co-ordinate with one another.”

battle-hardened militants have spread across Syria and further afield – and many of them aren’t done fighting yet

For prosecutors, who were working with outdated legislation, proving membership of a terrorist group was often the only way to secure convictions of individuals planning violence. For a number of governments around the world – Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Egypt – linking attacks on their soil to “al-Qaida” became a way to shift attention away from their own brutality, corruption and incompetence, and to gain diplomatic or material benefits from Washington. For some officials in Washington, linking terrorist attacks to “state-sponsored” groups became a convenient way to justify policies, such as the continuing isolation of Iran, or military interventions such as the invasion of Iraq. For many analysts and policymakers, who were heavily influenced by the conventional wisdom on terrorism inherited from the cold war, thinking in terms of hierarchical groups and state sponsors was comfortably familiar.

the threat from Islamic militancy was evolving into something different, something closer to the “leaderless resistance” promoted by white supremacists two decades earlier

Having identified this new threat, security officials, journalists and policymakers needed a new vocabulary to describe it. The rise of the term lone wolf wasn’t wholly unprecedented. In the aftermath of 9/11, the US had passed anti-terror legislation that included a so-called “lone wolf provision”. This made it possible to pursue terrorists who were members of groups based abroad but who were acting alone in the US. Yet this provision conformed to the prevailing idea that all terrorists belonged to bigger groups and acted on orders from their superiors. The stereotype of the lone wolf terrorist that dominates today’s media landscape was not yet fully formed.

Before the rise of the lone wolf, security officials used phrases – all equally flawed – such as “homegrowns”, “cleanskins”, “freelancers” or simply “unaffiliated”.

Lone wolves are now apparently everywhere, stalking our streets, schools and airports. Yet, as with the tendency to attribute all terrorist attacks to al-Qaida a decade earlier, this is a dangerous simplification.

many of the attacks that have been confidently identified as lone-wolf operations have turned out to be nothing of the sort. Very often, terrorists who are initially labelled lone wolves, have active links to established groups such as Islamic State and al-Qaida

we may be more likely to find lone wolves among far-right extremists than among their jihadi counterparts

Very often, what appear to be the clearest lone-wolf cases are revealed to be more complex. Even the strange case of the man who killed 86 people with a truck in Nice in July 2016 – with his background of alcohol abuse, casual sex and lack of apparent interest in religion or radical ideologies – may not be a true lone wolf. Eight of his friends and associates have been arrested and police are investigating his potential links to a broader network.

murder of the Labour MP Jo Cox, days before the EU referendum, by a 52-year-old called Thomas Mair, was the culmination of a steady intensification of rightwing extremist violence in the UK that had been largely ignored by the media and policymakers. According to police, on several occasions attackers came close to causing more casualties in a single operation than jihadis had ever inflicted. The closest call came in 2013 when Pavlo Lapshyn, a Ukrainian PhD student in the UK, planted a bomb outside a mosque in Tipton, West Midlands. Fortunately, Lapshyn had got his timings wrong and the congregation had yet to gather when the device exploded. Embedded in the trunks of trees surrounding the building, police found some of the 100 nails Lapshyn had added to the bomb to make it more lethal.

Thomas Mair, who was also widely described as a lone wolf, does appear to have been an authentic loner, yet his involvement in rightwing extremism goes back decades. In May 1999, the National Alliance, a white-supremacist organisation in West Virginia, sent Mair manuals that explained how to construct bombs and assemble homemade pistols. Seventeen years later, when police raided his home after the murder, they found stacks of far-right literature, Nazi memorabilia and cuttings on Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who murdered 77 people in 2011.

Even Breivik himself, who has been called “the deadliest lone-wolf attacker in [Europe’s] history”, was not a true lone wolf. Prior to his arrest, Breivik had long been in contact with far-right organisations. A member of the English Defence League told the Telegraph that Breivik had been in regular contact with its members via Facebook, and had a “hypnotic” effect on them.

very few violent extremists act without letting others know what they may be planning

Any terrorist, however socially or physically isolated, is still part of a broader movement

the idea that terrorists operate alone allows us to break the link between an act of violence and its ideological hinterland. It implies that the responsibility for an individual’s violent extremism lies solely with the individual themselves

Terrorism is not something you do by yourself, it is highly social. People become interested in ideas, ideologies and activities, even appalling ones, because other people are interested in them

open recruitment of Iraqi Shiites to fight in Syria has significantly ebbed, particularly following the cessation of Iraqi operations to crush the Islamic State in Mosul in 2017

The Iraqi groups that still operate in Syria are primarily centered in Damascus or in areas of eastern Syria near Deir ez-Zor. In fact, this zone has become a major geostrategic hotbed for Iranian activity in the Middle East because it is where the so-called land bridge linking Tehran to the Mediterranean is to be constructed

Among the hardcore groups deployed there are Harakat Hezbollah al-Nujaba, Kataib Hezbollah (one of the militias targeted Thursday), Saraya al-Jihad, Lebanese Hezbollah, as well as an Iranian-run Afghan and Pakistani faction

they’ve even reportedly offered payments to local Sunnis to join their paramilitaries or even convert to Shiism

Kataib Hezbollah, in particular, is a central spoke in Tehran’s wheel of aggression in Iraq and therefore a source of enormous resentment among Iraqis. To the Pentagon, it’s one of the most notorious terrorist outfits in Iraq.

The other named group targeted by U.S. forces on Thursday, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada, is simply a splinter from Kataib Hezbollah. It was formed in early 2013, ostensibly due to a leadership dispute within the ranks of its parent organization. Since then, Kataib Sayyid al-Shuhada has posted candidates for Iraqi parliament in national elections and recruited thousands of fighters for combat in Iraq and Syria, all while remaining completely under Iranian control

Iran has always understood that its real power rested with its proxy groups across the region. It’s a smart assumption, predicated on the historical fact that Iran was able, in the last half decade, to extend its influence well beyond its borders with impunity, counting on America’s desperation for a nuclear deal. In other words, it got to do much of what it wanted a bomb to do, without the benefit of a bomb. 

The Middle East is greatly transformed from what it was before Trump became president. Turkey has emerged as a major interventionist power, one increasingly at odds with Iran in northern Iraq. Gulf states, meanwhile, have normalized their relations with Israel in either de jure or de facto manners. And with the destruction of ISIS’s “caliphate” in Syria and Iraq has come a new slate of socioeconomic grievances aimed at central governments and the non-state or para-state structures keeping them afloat. Containing Iran, in short, means undermining the militias, and it seldom matters where along the Soleimani “land bridge” one finds them, as the Israelis know all too well

Disagreement between France and Algeria about the future of nuclear test sites in the Sahara was one reason why the first round of peace talks at Evian, Switzerland, broke down in June 1961

The concern was not only for contested territory in Algeria, but also for independent states bordering the desert, whose leaders warned that nuclear fallout could cross their national borders. Radiation measurements taken in the wake of Gerboise bleue proved many of them right.

France would not, until 1999, call the bloodshed a war, preferring the line that what happened in Algeria, as part of France, amounted to a domestic dispute, rather than UN business. Macron became, in 2018, the first French president to acknowledge “systemic torture” by French troops in Algeria.

The US State Department worried that French attachment to the test sites might thwart the decolonization process.

The Evian Accords marked a nuclear compromise. Finally signed in March 1962, the landmark treaty granted France a five-year lease to the Saharan test sites but did not specify terms of use.

The Hoggar Massif shook 13 times before France handed over its two Saharan test sites to Algeria in 1967. An accident occurred during one of these underground blasts, dubbed Béryl, when containment measures failed. Several French soldiers and two high-ranking French officials suffered the highest radiation exposures, but roughly 240 members of “nomadic populations” in the region received lower doses.

France began construction on its Pacific test range in French Polynesia, the site of nearly 200 nuclear explosions between 1966 and 1996. Most took place underground, but France also conducted atmospheric detonations in Polynesia, and these continued into the 1970s. Even though the Limited Test Ban Treaty had gone into effect in 1963—prohibiting nuclear blasts in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space—France refused to sign it.

Compensation programs map a global history of colonial empire, racial discrimination, and dispossession of indigenous land, but postcolonial inequalities look particularly stark from the Sahara. Including appeals, France has granted 545 of 1,739 total requests filed by French soldiers and civilian participants in the nuclear detonations, as well as exposed populations in Algeria and Polynesia. Only 1 of 52 Algerian dossiers has proven successful.

Macron could declassify archival materials documenting the intensity and scope of radioactive fallout generated by French nuclear blasts. Draconian interpretations of French statutes on the reach of military secrecy continue to block access to the vast majority of military, civil, and diplomatic collections on France’s nuclear weapons program—including radiation effects. Foreign archives have provided useful information, but official documentation from the French government would help exposed populations—like those in the Sahara—understand what happened, evaluate the risks, bolster their claims, and likely find these more successful.

Biden evidently has calculated that the prospects for meaningful progress during his term of office toward anything that could legitimately be considered an Israel-Palestinian peace are dim enough for the necessarily large expenditure of political capital not to be worthwhile. It probably is unrealistic to expect Biden to make a major recalculation about this.

The Overton Window of acceptable American discourse about Israel has shifted, and shifted in a positive direction.

When Netanyahu and other leaders on the Israeli right — which now includes most of the Israeli political spectrum — say anything about a two-state solution, it has been to hold out a false promise and to keep would-be mediators and negotiators occupied while Israeli actions on the ground push such a solution ever further out of reach.

The administration does not need to spin reality. It is quite obvious that Palestinians and Israelis have grossly unequal degrees of freedom, prosperity, and democracy. With open and honest acknowledgement of those realities, and sufficient attention given to them, the president can have a beneficial effect on American discourse on the subject even without spending a lot of political capital on any new Middle East initiative. In so doing, he can increase the chance that at least under a future president, U.S. policies will change in ways that in turn elicit a change in Israeli policy that will make future wars in Gaza less likely.

the vast sums Americans have spent trying to nation-build, spread democracy, or defeat all “terrorists of global reach” inevitably left fewer resources available to help Americans at home (including the veterans of the country’s protracted wars)

the over $6 trillion spent on what Bush dubbed the “war on terror”—including the money spent on unwinnable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq—could surely have been spent helping Americans live more comfortable and secure lives at home (or merely left in taxpayers’ pockets). Add to the list the decisions to promote rapid globalization and financial deregulation, which did significant harm to some sectors of the economy and led to the 2008 financial crisis, and you begin to see why confidence in the elite has taken a hit.

running an ambitious and highly interventionist foreign policy—and, in particular, one that tries to manipulate, manage, and ultimately shape the internal politics of foreign countries—requires a lot of deception. To sustain public support for it, elites have to spend a lot of time inflating threats, exaggerating benefits, acting in secret, and manipulating what the public is told

the architects of failure are rarely, if ever, held accountable

Once back in office, they are free to repeat their previous mistakes, backed by a chorus of pundits whose recommendations never change no matter how often they’ve failed.

The United States set out to remake the world in its image, and when some parts of that world pushed back, it reacted the way that most societies do when they are attacked. Americans got scared, lashed out even more, stopped thinking clearly and strategically, and looked around for someone to blame

the Republican Party’s decision to pin its political future on gerrymandering, voter suppression, and mobilizing a shrinking base and not on trying to appeal to the median voter is surely part of the problem, too, along with the twisted soul of Trump himself

Endless campaigns abroad unleash a host of political forces—militarism, secrecy, enhanced executive authority, xenophobia, faux patriotism, demagoguery, etc.—all of them contrary to the civic virtues on which a healthy democracy depends

History shows that when sponsoring a client dictatorship becomes a sacred pillar of Washington’s foreign policy, client rulers become extremely dependent upon U.S. support, prioritizing their relationship with Washington over their own people. In Jordan’s case, the government has preserved U.S. dominance in the Middle East and protected Israel while neglecting Jordanians’ own woes.

Policymakers fear that reducing any part of their support will destabilize their client state, which could not survive without it. The only option is to perpetuate the current system, even though that regime’s own policies are clearly destabilizing it.

Jordan’s transformation into a U.S. dependency began during the Cold War. Washington replaced the fading British in the late 1950s as its great protector, a logical move given the need to back anti-Soviet regimes everywhere. Jordan had no oil. However, so long as Jordan endured, it could be a geopolitical firebreak insulating Israel and the oil-rich Arabian Peninsula from the radical forces of communism and Arab nationalism.

Washington helped build the Jordanian state. Foreign aid was one mechanism. In many years, U.S. economic aid exceeded all domestic tax revenues, the only thing keeping “Fortress Jordan” from collapsing into insolvency. While Jordan today receives support from many donors, including the International Monetary Fund, U.S. economic support remains uniquely fungible: It comes mostly in cash, it is guaranteed, and it now exceeds $1 billion annually.

the U.S. Agency for International Development began designing and operating much of Jordan’s physical infrastructure in the 1960s, doing the basic task of governance—providing public goods to society—for the monarchy. When Jordanians get water from the tap, no small feat in the bone-dry country, it is because of USAID. Even the Aqaba Special Economic Zone, a mega-project aimed at turning the Red Sea port city of Aqaba into a regional commercial hub, was funded and designed by U.S. technocrats.

The General Intelligence Directorate, glorified by Western journalists as an Arab version of Mossad, spends as much time smothering Jordanian dissent as battling terrorism. It owes much of its skills and resources to the CIA.

Of course, being a U.S. protectorate brings occasional costs. Dependency upon Washington’s goodwill, for instance, gave Abdullah little room to halt the Trump administration’s “deal of the century.” That provocative plan to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma incensed Abdullah, as it favored Israel’s land claims while sidelining Jordan’s traditional front-line role as mediator to the conflict.

Washington cannot imagine any other kind of Jordan, because it never had to. It may yet learn the hard way.

The Middle East remains a revolutionary place, as six of its autocratic rulers have lost power to mass uprisings in the last decade. Whether Jordan is next depends upon if the monarchy can fundamentally rethink its approach, rather than fall back upon the United States for affirmation.

Nowhere is this shift in attitude more abjectly transparent than in the Gulf states’ media outlets, which hew closely to the state line and even go beyond it in an attempt to out-hawk official policy, which by comparison appears reasonable and measured.

few Arab leaders have ever actually done anything for the Palestinians beyond rhetorical support for the cause, but they were happy to use the prospect of Palestine to keep their populations in check. The late former President Hafez al-Assad imposed a multi-decade state of emergency and mobilization to justify his tyrannical hold over Syria while awaiting the mother of all battles with the enemy, all without firing a single shot across the border since 1973. The leader of the beating heart of Arabism intervened in Lebanon’s civil war and had no qualms massacring pan-Arab nationalists and their Palestinian allies, or to recruit his Amal militia allies to starve Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. His son and successor, President Bashar al-Assad, negotiated with Israel via intermediaries, ready to sell out his allies in Iran and Hezbollah, even as he declared his fealty to the resistance.

Jordan violently suppressed demonstrators protesting the attacks on Gaza, who apparently did not receive the memo that 27 years should have been enough time to accept Israel’s position on the conflict. In Egypt, despite its testy relationship with Hamas and its participation in the blockade of Gaza, it is still political and social suicide to publicly embrace normalization as a concept.

There was great presumption and folly in the grandiose naming of a convenient political deal between unelected monarchs and a premier accused of bribery and corruption, which was brokered by an American president who paid hush money to a porn star, after the patriarch of the prophets of Israel and Islam.

an obvious and transparent outgrowth of the Gulf states’ normalization deals with Israel, though it is curious to me why they feel the need to amplify Israel’s narrative of the conflict if they did not think public opinion was already on the side of normalization

The Gulf states have long had backchannels and secret dealings with the Israelis and developed a penchant for Israeli digital surveillance tools. Egypt needed Israel to destroy extremist militants in Sinai. And Morocco, Oman, and Qatar all had different levels of diplomatic ties.

We don’t know broadly whether a majority of Arabs care about Palestine or not, though every indicator points to the fact that they still do

Riyadh’s media outlets have taken on a prominent role in expressing public sympathy for Israel and its positions

In Saudi Arabia, a monumental shift is underway to neuter the power of the clerical establishment in favor of a more nationalistic vision of progress that gives primacy to Saudi identity. According to Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince, in a recent interview, this identity derives from religious heritage but also from cultural and historic traditions. MBS has defanged the hated Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, introduced social reforms that dismantle some of the restrictions on women, detained numerous clerics who criticized his policies, both foreign and domestic, and has been elevated by his surrogates into an almost messianic figure sent to renew the faith and empower Saudi identity through KPI-infused economic progress initiatives like Vision 2030. He has also, of course, arrested those who sought to pursue activism and reform and those who criticized the pace and manner of his revolution.

where nationalist pride is intermingled with the quality of life and performance metrics of a technocratic capitalist state, albeit one where the reins are held by only a handful of families