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rerobinson03

Strange Political Bedfellows - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...alition-netanyahu-bennett.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • It includes eight parties, drawn from the hard right, the left and the center — and one Arab party. A more intuitive governing coalition would have comprised only of parties on the right, which together hold a slim majority of Israel’s Parliament.
  • Netanyahu — like Trump, his ally in global affairs — is the subject of serious allegations of abuse of government. Prosecutors indicted Netanyahu on corruption charges in 2019, and the trial has been delayed partly because of Covid-19 restrictions.
  • His attempts to fend off the charges and remain in power have left many Israelis worried about a collapse in judicial independence and the rule of law, much as Democrats were anxious about Trump’s norm-breaking, as David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy explained to me. But there is also a big difference: While Republicans have overwhelmingly stood by Trump, a meaningful number of Netanyahu’s ideological allies have chosen to break with him.
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  • Over the last few days, factions from the right, center and left decided that they wanted to be done with Netanyahu. They agreed to a power-sharing agreement in which Bennett and his nationalist Yamina party would hold the prime minister’s position for the first half of the four-year term, to be followed by Yair Lapid, of the centrist Yesh Atid party, who would hold it for the second half.
  • o keep the coalition together, they have vowed to avoid new policies on Israeli-Palestinian issues at the beginning and to focus on areas where compromise seems more plausible, like education and infrastructure.
rerobinson03

Libyan Fighters Attacked by a Potentially Unaided Drone, UN Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...libya-drone.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 03 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • A military drone that attacked soldiers during a battle in Libya’s civil war last year may have done so without human control, according to a recent report commissioned by the United Nations.
  • The weapons systems, it said, “were programmed to attack targets without requiring data connectivity between the operator and the munition: in effect a true ‘fire, forget and find’ capability.”
  • Human-operated drones have been used in military strikes for over a decade. President Barack Obama for years embraced drone strikes as a counterterrorism strategy, and President Donald J. Trump expanded the use of drones in Africa.
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  • She noted that the report stated the Kargu-2 and “other loitering munitions” attacked convoys and retreating fighters. Loitering munitions, which are simpler autonomous weapons that are designed to hover on their own in an area before crashing into a target, have been used in several other conflicts, Ms. Franke said.
  • In October, the two warring factions agreed to a cease-fire, raising hopes for an end to years of shifting conflict.
aleija

Opinion | Anti-Zionism Isn't Anti-Semitism? Someone Didn't Get the Memo. - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...nti-zionism-anti-semitism.html

opinion politics history

shared by aleija on 26 May 21 - No Cached
  • Not the people who, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Jews,” according to a witness, assaulted Jewish diners at a Los Angeles sushi restaurant. Not the people who threw fireworks in New York’s diamond district. Not the people who brutally beat up a man wearing a yarmulke in Times Square. Not the people who drove through London slurring Jews and yelling, “Rape their daughters.” Not the people who gathered outside a synagogue in Germany shouting slurs. Not the people who, at a protest in Brussels, chanted, “Jews, remember Khaybar. The army of Muhammad is returning.”
  • Apparently, these hashtags count as legitimate political speech at Twitter, a company whose objections to bigotry are otherwise so strong that it once banned a Canadian feminist for the sin of tweeting remarks about transgender women like “men aren’t women.”
  • It’s a curious silence. In the land of inclusiveness, Jews are denied inclusion.
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  • But if there’s been a massive online campaign of progressive allyship with Jews, I’ve missed it. If corporate executives have sent out workplace memos expressing concern for the safety of Jewish employees, I’ve missed it. If academic associations have issued public letters denouncing the use of anti-Semitic tropes by pro-Palestinian activists, I’ve missed them.
  • It is especially despicable when Israel is singled out in ways that apply to no other country. To take just one example, when was the last time you heard of a campus demonstration or a call for boycotts and divestment in response to Turkey’s 47-year occupation of northern Cyprus or its routine bombardment, using American-made jets, of Kurdish militants in Iraq?
  • But, again, this doesn’t go far enough. The accusations made against Israel — stealing Palestinian land (despite the fact that Israel vacated the territory from which it was subsequently attacked) and wanton violence against Palestinian civilians, particularly children (despite the fact that Israel regularly warned its targets to vacate buildings before targeting them) — can’t help but make me think of ancient libels about Jewish greed and bloodlust.
  • This ought to be whistling loudly in the ears of progressives who claim to be horrified by every form of prejudice. Instead, they have indulged an anti-Israel movement that keeps descending into the crudest forms of anti-Semitism.
  • Progressives will have to come to their own reckoning about what to do about the burgeoning anti-Semitism in their midst. As for Jews, they should take the events of the last few days less as an outrage than as an omen.
martinelligi

Lebanon: 'mafias' and 'militias' run the country, activists and journalist say - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by martinelligi on 30 May 21 - No Cached
  • Lebanon is facing economic collapse. Since late 2019, the country's currency has lost over 90% of its value, and people's life savings are locked up in banks that have imposed discretionary capital controls. The financial meltdown has pushed half of Lebanon's population below the poverty line, according to the
  • Political turmoil has exacerbated the crisis. The government resigned after hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate -- neglected and mismanaged for years by Beirut port officials -- exploded, leaving more than 200 people dead and thousands more injured. The heart of the city still stands disfigured with countless buildings damaged and destroyed.
  • The latest political dispute is between Prime Minister-designate Saad Hariri and President Michel Aoun. Hariri has promised, once he finally has a government in place, to stop Lebanon's collapse and restart negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) over a desperately needed bailout.
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  • According to Transparency International's Corruption Perception Index, Lebanon ranks 149 out of 180 countries, indicating high corruption levels. And the World Bank has blamed the economic depression on a "deliberate lack of effective policy action by authorities," according to its fall 2020 report.
kaylynfreeman

Israel Lifts Most of Its Covid Restrictions - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...israel-covid-restrictions.html

Pandemic

shared by kaylynfreeman on 01 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • With new coronavirus cases dropping to below 20 a day, Israel on Tuesday retired its Green Pass system and will now allow equal access to restaurants, sports events, cultural activities and the like to vaccinated and unvaccinated citizens.
  • For now, the only remaining pandemic restriction inside the country is a requirement to wear masks in closed public spaces, although that, too, is under discussion by health officials. The main efforts to control the coronavirus are now centered on restrictions for travel in and out of Israel, based on testing and quarantine. Strict limitations remain on the entry of people who are not Israeli citizens.
  • About 81 percent of Israel’s adult population has been fully vaccinated, but about 2.6 million children under 16 are still not eligible, out of a total population of just over nine million. Up to a million people have chosen not to be inoculated, despite Israel’s enviable supply of vaccine doses.
rerobinson03

C.I.A. Scrambles for New Approach in Afghanistan - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...cia-afghanistan-pakistan.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 07 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The C.I.A., which has been at the heart of the 20-year American presence in Afghanistan, will soon lose bases in the country from where it has run combat missions and drone strikes while closely monitoring the Taliban and other groups such as Al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The agency’s analysts are warning of the ever-growing risks of a Taliban takeover.
  • Any deal now would have to work around the uncomfortable reality that Pakistan’s government has long supported the Taliban. In discussions between American and Pakistani officials, the Pakistanis have demanded a variety of restrictions in exchange for the use of a base in the country, and they have effectively required that they sign off on any targets that either the C.I.A. or the military would want to hit inside Afghanistan, according to three Americans familiar with the discussions.
  • Recent C.I.A. and military intelligence reports on Afghanistan have been increasingly pessimistic. They have highlighted gains by the Taliban and other militant groups in the south and east, and warned that Kabul could fall to the Taliban within years and return to becoming a safe haven for militants bent on striking the West, according to several people familiar with the assessments.As a result, U.S. officials see the need for a long-term intelligence-gathering presence — in addition to military and C.I.A. counterterrorism operations — in Afghanistan long after the deadline that Mr. Biden has set for troops to leave the country. But the scramble for bases illustrates how U.S. officials still lack a long-term plan to address security in a country where they have spent trillions of dollars and lost more than 2,400 troops over nearly two decades.
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  • The C.I.A. used the Shamsi air base in western Pakistan to carry out hundreds of drone strikes during a surge that began in 2008 and lasted during the early years of the Obama administration. The strikes focused primarily on suspected Qaeda operatives in Pakistan’s mountainous tribal areas, but they also crossed the border into Afghanistan.
  • Pakistan is a longtime patron of the Taliban; it sees the group as a critical proxy force in Afghanistan against other groups that have ties to India. Pakistan’s spy agency provided weapons and training for Taliban fighters for years, as well as protection for the group’s leaders. The government in Islamabad is unlikely to sign off on any U.S. strikes against the Taliban that are launched from a base in Pakistan.
  • Two decades of war in Afghanistan have helped transform the spy agency into a paramilitary organization: It carries out hundreds of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, trains Afghan commando units and maintains a large presence of C.I.A.
  • Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken spoke this month with his counterpart in Tajikistan, though it is not clear if base access was discussed during the call. Any negotiations with those countries are likely to take considerable time to work out. A State Department spokeswoman would say only that Mr. Blinken was engaging partner countries on how the United States was reorganizing its counterterrorism capabilities.
ethanshilling

As Virus Rages in South America, No End in Sight to Covid-19 Suffering - The New York T... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...covid-latin-america.html

pandemic

shared by ethanshilling on 30 Apr 21 - No Cached
  • In the capital of Colombia, Bogotá, the mayor is warning residents to brace for “the worst two weeks of our lives.”
  • “I have tried to be optimistic,” he also wrote in a recent essay. “I want to think that the worst is over. But that turns out, I believe, to be counter-evident.”
  • Even Venezuela, where the authoritarian government is notorious for hiding health statistics and any suggestion of disarray, says that coronavirus deaths are up 86 percent since January.
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  • As vaccinations mount in some of the world’s wealthiest countries and people cautiously envision life after the pandemic, the crisis in Latin America — and in South America in particular — is taking an alarming turn for the worse, potentially threatening the progress made well beyond its borders.
  • Latin America was already one of the world’s hardest hit regions in 2020, with bodies sometimes abandoned on sidewalks and new burial grounds cut into thick forest.
  • But the region has another thorny challenge, health officials say: living side-by-side with Brazil, a country of more than 200 million whose president has consistently dismissed the threat of the virus and denounced measures to control it, helping fuel a dangerous variant that is now stalking the continent.
  • Inequality, a longstanding scourge that had been easing before the pandemic, is widening once again, and millions have been tossed back into the precarious positions they thought they had escaped during a relative boom.
  • “This is a story that is just beginning to be told,” Alejandro Gaviria, an economist and former health minister of Colombia who leads the nation’s Universidad de los Andes, said in an interview.
  • But with millions of people working in the informal sector, enforcing quarantines became unsustainable. Cases rose quickly and hospitals soon fell into crisis.
  • “The worst-case scenario is the development of a new variant that is not protected by current vaccines,” he said. “It’s not just an ethical and moral imperative, but a health imperative, to control this all over the world.”
  • Across the region, doctors say that the patients coming into hospitals are now far younger and far sicker than before. They’re also more likely to have had the virus already.
  • Official daily death tolls have exceeded previous records in recent days in most of South America’s biggest countries. Yet scientists say that the worst is yet to come.
  • The region is not prepared. Colombia has been able to issue a first vaccine to just 6 percent of its population, according to Our World in Data, a project at the University of Oxford. Several of its neighbors have achieved half that, or less.
  • By contrast, the United States, which bought up vaccines ahead of other countries, is at 43 percent.
  • The virus arrived in Peru in March last year, like much of Latin America, and the government moved quickly to lock down the country.
  • Uruguay, once lauded as a model for keeping the coronavirus under control, now has one of the highest death rates in the world, while the grim daily tallies of the dead have hit records in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Peru in recent days.
  • Last month was the deadliest of the pandemic by far, according to official data, with health experts blaming the increase on holiday gatherings, crippled health systems and the new variants.
  • Vaccines arrived in Peru in February, followed quickly by anger after some politically connected people jumped the line to get vaccinated first.
  • Rafael Córdova, 50, a father of three, sat on a square drawn in the sand that marked his claim to land overlooking the Pan-American Highway and the Pacific Coast.
  • in May, he became sick with Covid and was fired. He believes his bosses let him go because they feared that he would sicken others, or that his family would blame them if he died.
  • “I left the hospital with my daughter in a black plastic bag and got in a taxi and went to the cemetery,” he said. “There was no Mass, no wake. No flowers. Nothing.”
rerobinson03

Suez Canal Blocked After Giant Container Ship Gets Stuck - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...suez-canal-blocked-ship.html

shared by rerobinson03 on 24 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • By Wednesday morning, more than 100 ships were stuck at each end of the 120-mile canal, which connects the Red Sea to the Mediterranean and carries roughly 10 percent of worldwide shipping traffic. Only the Panama Canal looms as large in the global passage of goods.
  • And if the ship is not freed within a few days, it would add one more burden to a global shipping industry already reeling from the coronavirus pandemic, creating delays, shortages of goods and higher prices for consumers.
  • The ship’s size has magnified every challenge. Though a gust of wind may seem an improbable David to the ship’s Goliath, the containers stacked at least nine-high atop the deck would have acted like a giant sail, Capt. Konrad said, giving Tuesday’s high winds more surface area to push against.As container ships have grown in scale, culminating in a new generation of ultra-large ships that includes the 1,312-foot-long Ever Given, the Suez Canal and global ports have struggled to keep pace. Parts of the canal were widened several years ago, though not enough to eliminate the tension for pilots charged with navigating it. Crew sizes have not increased to match the vessels, said Capt. Konrad, and technology for piloting through narrow channels has not improved.
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  • But if the ship’s extraction takes longer, it could pose a substantial risk for an already-overwhelmed industry. Global trade has been disrupted as locked-down American consumers ordered vast quantities of factory goods from Asia, yielding a monthslong shortage of shipping containers, the metal boxes that carry parts and finished products around the globe.The blockage of the Suez Canal will affect the movement of things like exercise bikes and printers built in Chinese factories destined for American households, and soybeans grown on American farms and shipped to food processors in Southeast Asia.
  • ut first comes the technical quagmire of freeing the Ever Given. Pictures from the canal showed the container-laden ship sitting sideways at such an angle that the name of the company that operates it, Evergreen, was clearly visible from the ship behind it.“Ship in front of us ran aground while going through the canal and is now stuck sideways,” an Instagram user who gave her name as Julianne Cona, a ship’s engineer onboard another vessel, posted alongside a photo of the stricken ship on Tuesday evening. “Looks like we might be here for a little bit…”
ethanshilling

As Ethiopia Fights in Tigray Region, a Crackdown on Journalists - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...hiopia-tigray-journalists.html

ethiopia crisis

shared by ethanshilling on 14 May 21 - No Cached
  • One Ethiopian journalist was taken away by police officers as his distraught 10-year-old daughter clung to him. Another fled the country after she said armed men ransacked her home and threatened to kill her.
  • Six months into the war in Tigray, where thousands have died amid reports of widespread human rights abuses, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia has sought to quell critical coverage of the conflict with a campaign of arrests, intimidation and obstruction targeting the independent news media, according to human rights campaigners and media freedom organizations.
  • “It’s a sharply disappointing state of affairs given the hope and optimism of early 2018 when Mr. Abiy became prime minister,” said Muthoki Mumo, representative for sub-Saharan Africa for the Committee to Protect Journalists.
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  • When Mr. Abiy came to power, Ethiopia was among the most repressive countries for journalists in Africa, and he quickly won global praise for a series of sweeping reforms.
  • But Mr. Abiy’s ambitious reforms quickly ran into stiff headwinds, including opposition from regional political parties and outbreaks of ethnic violence in several restive regions. His government began to revert to the old ways, shutting down the internet during political protests and detaining journalists under laws that had been introduced by the previous government.
  • After Mr. Abiy began a military operation in Tigray on Nov. 4, hoping to oust a regional ruling party that had challenged his authority, press freedoms deteriorated further.
  • Last week, government officials confirmed that they had revoked the accreditation of Simon Marks, an Irish reporter based in Ethiopia working for The New York Times.
  • In a war that has already caused thousands of deaths, displaced at least two million people and led to charges of ethnic cleansing, news media coverage has become a “very sensitive” topic for the government, said Befeqadu Hailu, an Ethiopian journalist imprisoned for 18 months by the previous regime.
  • Mr. Marks, who works for The Times and other publications, has reported from Ethiopia since 2019.
  • A day earlier, Mr. Marks had returned to Addis Ababa from Tigray, where he interviewed civilians who described atrocities by Ethiopian and Eritrean soldiers, and women who said they suffered horrendous sexual assaults.
  • Officials told Mr. Marks that The Times’ coverage of Ethiopia had “caused huge diplomatic pressure” and that senior government officials had authorized the decision to cancel his papers.
  • The next test of Ethiopia’s openness is likely to be the June 5 election, the first for Mr. Abiy since being appointed prime minister in 2018.
aleija

Opinion | The Supreme Court Upheld Trump's Muslim Ban. Let's Not Forget That. - The New... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...supreme-court-muslim-ban.html

history Politics policy trump

shared by aleija on 28 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • One of President Biden’s first acts, the repeal of the Trump administration’s ban on entry into the United States by citizens of five predominantly Muslim countries, was a cause for relief, even celebration.
  • By a vote of 5 to 4, the court ruled that the president was within his lawful authority in issuing what the justices in the majority euphemistically termed “entry restrictions,” discarding as irrelevant the abundant evidence that he was driven by religious prejudice.
  • The reason is that while the Muslim ban is gone, Trump v. Hawaii isn’t.
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  • Trump v. Hawaii’s lengthy 87 pages include a majority opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, concurring opinions by Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, and dissenting opinions by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor. I hadn’t picked it up since first reading it on that frantic June day when the 2017-18 term ended and Justice Kennedy announced his retirement. I went back to it the other day, curious to see how reading it would feel in light of all the additional data points we have accumulated about the Trump presidency.
  • In other words, parents of religious-school students ended up with a privilege that no other parents in the state enjoyed, all in the name of preventing discrimination against religion.
  • “An anxious world must know,” he wrote in conclusion, “that our government remains committed always to the liberties the Constitution seeks to preserve and protect, so that freedom extends outward, and lasts.”
  • Words of warning, certainly. A note of desperate hope? Perhaps.
katherineharron

Trump says he's 'the one that did the capturing' in Syria - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 22 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Donald Trump spoke at length during a Cabinet meeting on Monday about his decision to withdraw US troops from northern Syria -- arguing that the US never agreed to protect Syrian Kurds forever, suggesting the US may secure an oil deal for the Kurds to bolster their finances and saying he's "the one that did the capturing" of ISIS fighters in Syria.
  • The President repeatedly said during the Cabinet meeting that a main reason behind his decision to have the US exit northern Syria was that it was something he campaigned on. He argued that though his stance was not popular in Washington, crowds at his rallies cheered loudly when he said he'd bring American troops home.
  • Trump appeared to be referring to a small number of US forces located near Syria's oil fields as well as the US base at At Tanf in southern Syria which is located near the border with Jordan and is seen by many analysts see as a curb on Iran's influence in the region. The Trump administration had previously said that the At Tanf forces would remain despite the pullout from Syria. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed Monday that the forces near the oil fields would also remain for the time being and that they were not part of the current withdrawal phase.
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  • Trump also took credit for "capturing" ISIS fighters in Syria, arguing that former President Barack Obama was not as successful.
  • Trump argued that though the US fought with Kurdish allies in northern Syria to defeat ISIS, the US "never agreed to protect the Kurds.
  • "We fought with them for three and a half to four years. We never agreed to protect the Kurds for the rest of their lives," he said, asking, "Where's an agreement that said we have to stay in the Middle East for the rest of humanity, for the rest of civilization to protect the Kurds?"
  • "If shooting didn't start for a couple of days, I don't think the Kurds wouldn't have moved. I don't think, frankly, you would have been able to make a very easy deal with Turkey ... It was so nasty that when we went to Turkey and when we went to the Kurds, they agreed to do things that they never would have done before the shooting started," he added, emphasizing that if Kurds wouldn't have gone through "two and a half days of hell," "I don't think you would have been able to make a deal."
  • Trump asserted that the "ceasefire is absolutely holding."
  • "We see a stabilization of the lines if you will on the ground. And we do get reports of intermittent fires, this and that. That doesn't surprise me necessarily but that's what we're picking up, that's what we're seeing so far," Defense Secretary Mark Esper said Sunday
blythewallick

On Day 1,001, Trump Made It Clear: Being 'Presidential' Is Boring - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-presidency.html

politics US trump

shared by blythewallick on 19 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • At one point during one of his most unpresidential of days, President Trump insisted that he knew how to be presidential.
  • “It’s much easier being presidential, it’s easy,” he told a stadium full of more than 20,000 boisterous supporters in MAGA hats and T-shirts cheering his every word on Thursday night. “All you have to do is act like a stiff.”
  • t was a day when he announced without any evident embarrassment that officials of the federal government that answers to him had scoured the country for a site for next year’s Group of 7 summit meeting and determined that the perfect location, the very best site in all the United States, just happened to be a property he owned in Florida.
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  • It was a day when he sent out his top aide, an adviser who has served as “acting” White House chief of staff for nearly 10 months without ever being granted the respect of earning the title outright, to try to quell the whole impeachment furor, only to have him essentially admit the quid pro quo that the president had so adamantly denied. It was a day that ended with a rally where one of the warm-up acts, the Texas lieutenant governor, declared that liberals “are not our opponents, they are our enemy,” and the president called the speaker of the House “crazy,” a rival candidate “very dumb,” a House committee chairman a “fraud” and the governor of another state a “crackpot.”
  • “Unconventional” was the word the president himself used repeatedly on Thursday. He used it specifically to describe his let-them-go-to-war policy with respect to two American allies, Turkey and the Kurds, followed by a cease-fire days later. All part of the plan, he assured Americans. Just a little “tough love” to get the two sides to resolve their differences.
  • The notion that it might make the United States look like all those countries it used to lecture about self-dealing was of no concern. The president knew it would be controversial, his top aide said, and boldly went ahead anyway regardless of the anticipated blowback, as if it were an act of political courage.
  • He has been doing this now for 1,001 days. Whether it will last another thousand days or nearly another thousand beyond that remains unclear. But his presidency, so unpresidential and unconventional, is definitively his. “I’ve been a politician for three years,” he exclaimed. “I can’t believe that.”On that, at least, he was not alone.
katherineharron

Live Updates: Syria-Turkey ceasefire - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

syria

shared by katherineharron on 20 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Almost 500 US personnel are on the troop convoy moving through northern Syria right now, a US official told CNN today.
  • A US official confirmed the ground move, the largest the US has made in Syria so far, marks the symbolic end of the major US presence in the region.
  • Well, I think we have abandoned our Syrian Kurdish partners. They took over 10,000 losses as the defeat of Islamic State was carried out," he told CNN's Jake Tapper. "The elimination of the caliphate that ISIS had certainly with our advice and assistance and enabling and then very suddenly, this is not a phased deliberate plan withdrawal, this is a very sudden exit."
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  • A US convoy departing from Kobani Landing Zone (KLZ) on Sunday will have "robust air assets monitoring the progress of the convoy" during troop re-deployment, as part of the "deliberate withdrawal from Northeast Syria," according to a statement from US Colonel Myles B. Caggins III, a Coalition military spokesman.
  • Attacks from the Turkish military and Turkish back militants have resulted in "16 martyrs and three wounded in our ranks," in a 24 hour period, according to an official statement released today by the Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) press office.
  • Turkish forces and their allies continue to launch attacks on Syrian villages despite agreeing to a ceasefire, according to the statement, which says Turkish forces have targeted villages near Ras al-Ain "by aerial bombardments and brought in more troops and preparations for the ceasefire areas
  • The Turkish Defense Ministry tweeted on Sunday saying, "Despite the agreement with the US, there have been 22 harassment/violations," since the ceasefire began on Thursday. 
  • Earlier Sunday, US Defense Secretary Mark Esper said that the US-brokered ceasefire in northern Syria "generally seems to be holding" despite "reports of intermittent fires," but he could not say who is committing those violations. 
  • A US official confirmed the ground move, the largest the US has made in Syria so far, marks the symbolic end of the major US presence in the region. 
  • A senior US official later clarified that the location of the 1,000 troops is fluid, indicating it’s possible that not all 1,000 would be relocated to western Iraq. Any relocation out of Syria will be done in conjunction with host country governments, the official added
  • Pompeo said he got a report this morning from senior leaders indicating there is “relatively little fighting” in the region. He said the hope is that the ceasefire between Turkish and Syrian-Kurdish forces will hold.
  • The secretary of state quelled this concern, saying that the statement the US released jointly with Turkey after negotiations this week made it clear there would not be attacks on minorities in the region.
blythewallick

ISIS Reaps Gains of U.S. Pullout From Syria - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...isis-syria-us.html

politics US trump crisis culture

shared by blythewallick on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • American forces and their Kurdish-led partners in Syria had been conducting as many as a dozen counterterrorism missions a day against Islamic State militants, officials said. That has stopped.
  • And across Syria’s porous border with Iraq, Islamic State fighters are conducting a campaign of assassination against local village headmen, in part to intimidate government informants.
  • “There is no question that ISIS is one of the big winners in what is happening in Syria,” said Lina Khatib, director of the Middle East and North Africa Program at Chatham House, a research center in London.
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  • When President Trump announced this month that he would pull American troops out of northern Syria and make way for a Turkish attack on the Kurds, Washington’s onetime allies, many warned that he was removing the spearhead of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.
  • Although Mr. Trump has repeatedly declared victory over the Islamic State — even boasting to congressional leaders last week that he had personally “captured ISIS” — it remains a threat. After the loss in March of the last patch of the territory it once held across Syria and Iraq, the Islamic State dispersed its supporters and fighters to blend in with the larger population or to hide out in remote deserts and mountains.
  • Changes in the political context in Syria and Iraq have diminished the Islamic State’s ability to whip up sectarian animosity out of the frustrations of Sunni Muslims over the Shiite or Shiite-linked authorities in Syria and Iraq — the militants’ trademark.
  • Mr. Trump first said last December that he intended to withdraw the last 2,000 American troops from Syria; the Pentagon scaled that back, pulling out about half of those troops.
  • And within hours of Mr. Trump’s announcement almost two weeks ago that American forces were moving away from the Syrian border with Turkey, two ISIS suicide bombers attacked a base of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the Syrian city of Raqqa.
  • But now the American withdrawal and the Turkish incursion are threatening the informal supervision of those former prisoners, Ms. Khalifa said, creating a risk that some might gravitate back to fighting for the Islamic State.
  • Mr. Trump, for his part, has insisted repeatedly that Turkey should take over the fight against the Islamic State in Syria. “It’s going to be your responsibility,” Mr. Trump said he told the country’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
johnsonel7

Putin's dreams have just come true - CNN - 1 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

Syria Russia Trump Kurds ISIS

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Syrian Kurds, however, were both disciplined and pragmatic. But they could not be harnessed as a purely Kurdish force, plowing into Sunni Arab areas held by ISIS. So a fig leaf was created -- a new name for the Syrian Kurdish fighting units, normally called the Kurdish People's Protection Units, or YPG.
  • Reflecting how little the Trump administration cared for the details as it rushed to clean up its self-inflicted mess, Vice President Mike Pence mistakenly referred to the SDF as the "Syrian Defence Forces" several times as he announced a ceasefire that further betrayed them. And, earlier, President Donald Trump blurted out the poorly-kept secret that the PKK were in their ranksAmerica's imperfect pact with the Kurds was always going to fall apart one day. But nobody could have imagined the SDF's 10,000-plus dead sons and daughters would have been betrayed by overwhelming ignorance, fealty to Turkish and Russian interests, and the toxic aversion to details that the Trump administration displayed.
  • Moscow is unlikely to be too fussed. Their key goal is becoming the new power in the region, and this settlement, almost directly replacing US forces with their own police and political clout, does that.
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  • There was always some inevitability to the alliance between Syrian Kurds and the regime. So isn't this just the US doing what it had to do, but at a faster pace, as Trump likes to suggest? No. As the US mission is now left with the worst of all worlds
  • In short, elite troops must still go after ISIS and keep Iran in check, from a much worse geographical position than before, in territory more home to Syrian Sunni Arabs. Plus, regime and Russian forces are now calling the shots with -- and depriving them of -- their angry former Kurdish allies.
  • Remember, NATO was formed to keep Russia's former Soviet empire in check. Now, Russian military police have unrestrained access to hundreds of kilometers of NATO's southern border, at the invitation of a NATO member.
johnsonel7

Opinion | America's Great Betrayal - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...syria-turkey-us.html

Pax Americana trump history

shared by johnsonel7 on 21 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The sudden decision to pull about 1,000 American troops out of northern Syria, and leave Kurdish allies in the lurch after they did so much to fight off the Islamic State, has already had terrible consequences. The Kurds have been forced to make a deal with the murderous regime of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, hoping it will protect them against being massacred by incoming Turkish troops who regard them as mortal enemies.
  • This world order — call it Pax Americana or American imperialism, as you like — has been fraying since the fall of the Soviet Union. The Cold War had given United States–led alliances a purpose. The “war on terror” was never a convincing substitute. And the disastrous attempt by George W. Bush to reorder the Middle East by invading Iraq, ostensibly to liberate benighted Arabs, made the idealistic justification for Pax Americana look like a cynical sham.
  • By the end of the last century, even as Communism, at least in Europe, had ceased to be an existential threat, the dependence of democratic allies on the United States began to cause greater strains. Mr. Trump is not the first president to voice his resentment about Europeans and East Asians taking American security too much for granted and not paying their fair share; Barack Obama said so, too. Only, Mr. Trump’s resentments are expressed with more vulgarity and less knowledge.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Pax Americana is now faced with a dilemma that European empires had to contend with before. Even as it becomes clear that nations should be weaned from foreign hegemony, the transition is almost always messy and sometimes bloody.
  • Apart from the risk of war, Mr. Trump’s posturing is having another serious consequence. The strength of the United States never relied only on its often-misguided use of military power. American democracy, with all its flaws, was a model, even an ideal, for much of the world. Refugees from tyranny and war continued to see the United States as a haven
  • This is the true end of Pax Americana, the best of it anyway. The reckless unpicking of military alliances and the betrayal of allies are already bad enough. But there is something even worse afoot. People all over the world still look to the United States as an example. But now it is the enemies of liberal values who view with glee how American leadership is wrecking the very things that Mr. Roosevelt once fought for.
remystewart

Trump Claims Credit for a Syria Cease-Fire to Be Enforced by Turkey and Russia - The Ne... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...mp-syria-turkey-ceasefire.html

Trump Politics Syria

shared by remystewart on 23 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • President Trump announced on Wednesday that the United States has brokered a permanent cease-fire in northeast Syria, taking credit for a tentative deal that will be enforced by Turkey and Russia, and lifting sanctions he had imposed after Turkey invaded Kurdish-run areas south of its border.
  • He made no apology for an accompanying withdrawal of American troops from the area, which left their Kurdish allies facing the Turkish assault.
  • “As a result of the cease-fire, and at the direction of President Donald J. Trump, Treasury is delisting two Turkish ministries and three of the country’s senior officials,” said Secretary Steven Mnuchin said in a statement.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump said at the time that steel tariffs on Turkey would rise to 50 percent from 25 percent.
  • The crisis erupted after Mr. Erdogan told Mr. Trump in an Oct. 6 phone call that he intended to invade northeastern Syria. Mr. Trump withdrew several dozen American troops in the region to clear them from harm’s way, effectively giving Turkey a green light for the incursion. Mr. Trump’s decision blindsided many senior administration officials.
johnsonel7

Europe never really dealt with its ISIS fighters. A reckoning is coming - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

european union syria Trump

shared by johnsonel7 on 01 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • But to have reacted with surprise at this much-telegraphed decision reveals a staggering level of naivety. Worse still, their failure to anticipate the behavior of America's mercurial President reveals both cowardice and stupidity -- not among the tiny number of special forces from the United Kingdom, France, Denmark and elsewhere, who were sent to help with the defeat of ISIS, of course. But certainly among the leaders of wealthy western nations that have the greatest strategic interest in what happens in the Middle East
  • Having seen Trump nearly abandon Syria in December, surely it would have made sense if the UK, France, Germany, Italy et al reinforced the international coalition effort inside Syria.
  • On top of that, there's the gigantic matter of refugees. Turkey is hosting some 3.5 million Syrians. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has repeatedly threatened to open the country's borders and allow another flood of humanity to engulf the European continent
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  • It is not, however, too late. But it is time that European nations, who have the most to lose and most to gain from a stable Middle East in general, and Syria especially, focus on the chaos on their doorstep.Their armed forces need to be able to function outside of an American life support system and show some initiative, rather than wailing when the White House does something surprising.
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