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Contents:
The Middle East: In the Shadow of the Gunmen: Jonathan Spyer, PJ Media, Apr. 4, 2015 — In a process of profound importance, five Arab states in the Middle East have effectively ceased to exist over the last decade.
Syria’s Diabolic Lesson for Iran: Benny Avni, New York Post, Mar. 24, 2015— Wonder what might happen after we sign a nuke deal with Iran?
Tibi: Shame on Arab World for Ignoring Massacre of Palestinians at Syria Refugee Camp: Lahav Harkov & Khaled Abu Toameh, Jerusalem Post, Apr. 6, 2015 — The Islamic State's violent takeover of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria is a mark of Cain on the foreheads of the international community and the Arab world specifically, MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint List) said Monday.
Canadians Support the War on Terror, Even if the Opposition Doesn’t: Chris Vander Doelen, National Post, Apr. 7, 2015 — On Monday the Canadian parliament voted to extend Canada’s military mission in the Middle East against the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS).
Jihadist Cash Lures Syrian War Refugees as Aid Dwindles: Nafeesa Syeed & Dana Khraich, Bloomberg, Apr. 5, 2015
Islamic State Conquers Yarmouk in Macabre Win for Syrian Troops: Patrick Martin, Globe & Mail, Apr. 8, 2015
Iran Nuclear Deal Gives Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Reason to Worry: Sam Dagher, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 8, 2015
14 Million Children Suffering as Result of War in Syria and Iraq, Unicef Says: Nick Cumming-Bruce, New York Times, Mar. 12, 2015
THE MIDDLE EAST: IN THE SHADOW OF THE GUNMEN
Jonathan Spyer
PJ Media, Apr. 4, 2015
In a process of profound importance, five Arab states in the Middle East have effectively ceased to exist over the last decade. The five states in question are Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen and Libya. It is possible that more will follow. The causes of their disappearance are not all the same. In two cases (Iraq, Libya) it was western military intervention which began the process of collapse. In another case (Lebanon) it is intervention from a Middle Eastern state (Iran) which is at the root of the definitive hollowing out of the state. But in all these cases, the result has been remarkably similar — it is the ceding of power from strong central authorities to a variety of political-military organizations, usually but not always organized around a shared sectarian or ethnic origin. The Middle East today is overshadowed by this process. We are living in the time of the militias.
Observe: in Syria, the clearest-cut case, the country is now effectively separated into separated ethnic and sectarian enclaves — an area dominated by Bashar Assad in the south and west, an area dominated by the Sunni jihadi Islamic State group in the east, three non-contiguous Kurdish enclaves across the north, an area under the domination of al-Qaeda and its allies in the northwest and a small area in the southwest held jointly by al-Qaeda and a variety of other Sunni Arab militias supported by the west.
The important point to note here is that the area controlled by Assad (around 40% of the total area of Syria) does not essentially differ in its militia-nature from the other areas. On the contrary, Assad has been able to survive because he is aligned with the force best designed to successfully exploit the fragmentation of Arab states and the emergence of militias seeking to impose their authority on the ruins of the state.
This force is Iran, and more specifically the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps and its Qods Force. This force is a unique body. It exists for the precise purpose of building proxy paramilitary organizations to serve the Iranian regional interest. At a time like the present, the possession of such a force is an enormous advantage.
Assad’s large, mainly Sunni Arab conventional army became largely useless to him in 2011/12. The IRGC stepped in and created for him one of its own preferred force types. Today, this militia (the National Defense Forces) along with other Iranian-created or -sponsored militia forces from neighboring Iraq and Lebanon are largely responsible for Assad’s survival. But he survives as a warlord and militia chief, not as a “president” or the head of a state.
In Iraq, the country is today separated into three areas, a Kurdish north, an area in the center controlled by Sunni jihadis and a Shia area in the south. Again, the Shia south, which is still seen in the west as the “legitimate” government of Iraq, is in fact an area in which Shia militias are the key element, operating freely and acting according to their own will. Often, this will is the product of the desires of the Qods Force, and its commander General Qassem Suleimani.
In Lebanon, in a notably different process, an Iran-created militia, Hizballah, acquired the dominant role in the area once ruled by the state, because the state was a hollow construct long competed over by rival sectarian militias, and because Iranian and Syrian support enabled Hizballah to acquire a level of strength which no other homegrown political-military force could match. It may well be that this is now changing, as al-Qaeda associated Sunni militias enter the arena.
In Yemen, where the state and central government was also weak, the Iranian supported militia Ansar Allah (the “Houthis”) seized the capital in January. Sunni elements in the south, including one of the strongest franchises of al-Qaeda, are fighting against them. A mobilization of Arab air and sea power is underway to prevent Iran’s proxies from seizing the Bab-el-Mandeb strait. Control of this vital waterway, between the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, would tilt the regional balance yet further in Iran’s favor.
Finally, in Libya, the western destruction of the Gadaffi regime has led to the splitting of the country between two rival governments — one supported by the Egyptians in Tobruk, another backed by Islamist militias in Tripoli.
Five Arab states, effectively no longer in existence. In all, militia power has replaced ordered government.
What does all this mean for the region? It means that a huge chunk of the long misgoverned Middle East has exchanged an age of despotic torpor for an age of chaos. The Iranians, because of their matchless IRGC, are best equipped to make gains from this.
But nowhere (with the partial exception of tiny Lebanon) have the Iranians yet succeeded in keeping a country united under the control of their local proxy. This is not a story of an unstoppable Iranian advance, like a juggernaut, across the region. Their successes are notable, but partial in each area of operation. Sunni and Kurdish forces prevent their complete victory and are likely to continue to do so.
Where will all this end — what will the landscape look like when the storm passes? Impossible to say. But it may be said with certainty that the shadow of the gunmen is today hanging over the Middle East, all the way from the Iraq–Iran border to the Mediterranean coast and from the Gulf of Aden to Libya.
SYRIA’S DIABOLIC LESSON FOR IRAN
Benny Avni
New York Post, Mar. 24, 2015
Wonder what might happen after we sign a nuke deal with Iran? Take a look at Syria, where Syrian strongman Bashar al-Assad is up to his old tricks — using chemical weapons despite his “deal” to get rid of them. And no one seems to care. Why would Iran be any different?
Last week, Syrian army helicopters dropped barrels filled with chlorine on a small Syrian village, killing six. A group backed by Western powers, the Syrian National Coalition, demanded urgent action. “Videos show medics rushing to treat choking victims, and children in burial shrouds foaming from the mouth,” the SNC wrote the UN Security Council, insisting it enforce a no-fly zone over Syria to stop future chemical attacks. The council (and everyone else) yawned.
Assad, of course, knew exactly what he was doing. Only days earlier, all 15 members of the council condemned chlorine use in Syria. British UN Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant warned that “if we receive further credible reports of use of chlorine as a weapon, then this council will take action.” Secretary of State John Kerry huffed that the United States was “very concerned.” Assad must have been quivering in his sandals.
See, Assad knows what President Obama cares most about: “deals.” Getting the Syrian leader to sign a treaty that bans the use of chemical warfare is, in fact, the singular success Obama can point to in a miserable war that just marked its fourth anniversary. The war, by the way, has now exacted more than 210,000 deaths, and left millions homeless. As former CIA chief David Petraeus says, it’s created a Mideast “Chernobyl” that spews “radioactive instability and extremist ideology over the entire region.”
America stood aside as the horrors unfolded, with just one exception — Obama’s “red line”: No chemical weapons. Or else. Only, even that proved an idle threat. Instead, Russia concocted a “deal” that would let Obama off the hook. Assad agreed to remove all chemical agents and destroy all labs under the UN’s watchful eye. Ta-da: Obama’s “red line” had been defended, without a shot fired. Military intervention was averted. Diplomacy had won out. A specialized UN agency would verify it all.
It was all grand — except that Assad continues to use chemical weapons. And now, here we go again: Kerry appears on the verge of a deal with Assad’s senior partner, Iran, that will rely on the same sort of good faith, compliance and verification mechanisms. To see why this won’t work, look again at the Syrian deal: Assad was indeed forced to remove and destroy his chemical agents and production facilities, and that was touted as a victory.
But our UN ambassador, Samantha Power, now says “significant discrepancies remain with Syria’s declaration,” hinting at problems with our ability to verify Assad’s compliance. Indeed, Yukiya Amano, the head of the UN-affiliated atomic agency, indicated that verifying Tehran’s compliance may face similar problems, telling PBS on Monday that despite past agreements the agency can’t yet say Iran’s nuclear program is peaceful.
Assad also found a loophole that allows him to use his favorite weapon without violating the deal: chlorine. Unlike, say, sarin, the possession of chlorine is perfectly legal: It’s used in swimming pools, after all. Fact is, chemical warfare has always played a major role in the Syrian army’s war doctrine. So now Assad’s choppers increasingly drop barrels full of chlorine on his enemies. And now the world’s attention is elsewhere. Indeed, Assad is now our tacit ally in the war against ISIS, so why bug him about some violations of his chemical deal?
Yes, Kerry did denounce last week’s chemical attack. But of far more importance to him were his meetings with Iranian officials in Switzerland, where he’s hoping to conclude a nuclear deal as early as this week. Any action against Iran’s ally, Assad, may complicate Kerry’s delicate negotiations. It’s certainly cause to worry. Seeing how easy it was for Assad to wave off the deal he’d made with America should be a lesson about what we can expect of Iran’s behavior. And seeing Assad’s victims offers a taste of the consequences.
TIBI: SHAME ON ARAB WORLD FOR IGNORING MASSACRE OF
PALESTINIANS AT SYRIA REFUGEE CAMP
Lahav Harkov & Khaled Abu Toameh
Jerusalem Post, Apr. 6, 2015
The Islamic State's violent takeover of the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp in Syria is a mark of Cain on the foreheads of the international community and the Arab world specifically, MK Ahmed Tibi (Joint List) said Monday. “What’s happening in the Yarmouk camp is a crime against humanity,” Tibi said. “Over a thousand Palestinians were killed.”
The Yarmouk camp, on the outskirts of Damascus, was once home to over 100,000 residents, but now has only 18,000, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). It was under siege by the Syrian government for over two years, and was a battleground before that, devastated by street fighting, air attacks and shelling. Islamic State has taken over 90 percent of Yarmouk, according to a Syrian human rights group, though the Syrian army surrounds the area, which is a few kilometers from President Bashar Assad’s palace. Hundreds of Palestinians fled the camp in recent days, adding to the tens of thousands who have left in the four years since the civil war in Syria began.
Tibi, who visited the camp once while on a trip to Syria, said it was “between a rock and a hard place after two years under siege by the [Syrian] government, and now ISIS is in there committing horrific crimes.” “ISIS is a fascist movement that is now publishing photos of heads it chopped off – including a photo of the imam of the mosque, a Hamas supporter – and claiming he is an apostate,” Tibi said in reference to reports from the camp that ISIS terrorists killed senior Hamas operative Sheikh Abu Salah Taha.
Reports have claimed that Taha had been captured and beheaded by Islamic State during fighting inside the camp. However, a source in the camp denied that severed head belonged to the Hamas-affiliated imam, and said he was still alive. Tibi said the international community, including the Arab world, should be ashamed of allowing the violence in Yarmouk to take place. “I feel anger and great sadness about what is happening in what is left of the camp,” he stated. “There is a moral double standard. If other people were the victims, not Palestinians, it would be different.”
The Joint List MK called Yarmouk “another case where the refugees who suffered in the Nakba of 1948 are now suffering again,” using the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” which Palestinians and many Israeli-Arabs use to refer to the 1948 Israeli War of Independence. “The killing of Palestinians is terrible,” Tibi added.
Yarmouk’s residents are registered as either Palestinian refugees of the War of Independence or their descendants. They are granted refugee status by UNRWA in a policy that differs from the UN’s definition of refugees in other conflicts. Meanwhile, the PLO on Monday called for ending the “tragedy” of Yarmouk and pursuing efforts to evict Islamic State from the camp. The appeal came as a senior PLO delegation led by Ahmed Majdalani headed from Ramallah to Syria to discuss ways of ending the fighting.
Other Palestinian sources denied reports that fierce clashes had erupted between Islamic State and armed groups inside the camp early Monday. The sources said the two sides exchanged gunfire only for a brief period, adding that the situation had been “calm” since the Syrian army dropped eight barrels of explosives on parts of Yarmouk late Sunday night.
UNRWA has expressed concern over the deteriorating situation in Yarmouk. “Never has the hour been more desperate in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk, in Damascus,” the UN organization said in a statement. “The lives of civilians in Yarmouk have never been more profoundly threatened.”
CANADIANS SUPPORT THE WAR ON TERROR,
EVEN IF THE OPPOSITION DOESN’T
Chris Vander Doelen
National Post, Apr. 7, 2015
On Monday the Canadian parliament voted to extend Canada’s military mission in the Middle East against the Islamic State in Iraq and Al-Sham (ISIS). While all opposition parties rejected the extension, the Conservatives, who hold a majority of seats in the House of Commons, easily prevailed.
Canada’s six CF-18 Hornet fighter jets, two CP-140 Aurora surveillance aircraft, one C-150 refuelling aircraft and 600 Canadian support crew will remain in Kuwait. Fewer than 100 special forces members in northern Iraq will continue to help train the Kurdish peshmerga. What is new is that airstrikes will be expanded to target ISIS in northern Syria.
The government has argued that ISIS poses a double threat: the first is to civilians in the Middle East, the second is to Canada and its allies. Indeed, reports by journalists and human rights organizations have revealed a brutality that knows no bounds: children have been killed, sexually abused and forced to become child soldiers, while women have become sexual slaves.
Yet NDP leader Thomas Mulcair opposed the extension without seriously referring to the group’s atrocities. Leading up to the vote he vowed that if the mission were extended “despite our opposition to it, yes, when we form government on Oct. 19, we would bring our troops back home,” adding: “when it is a UN mission, when it is a NATO mission, we are open to it. But here, this is an American-led mission. We think it’s wrong for Canada to be involved.”
Trudeau, who last fall opposed the initial mission and argued Canada should focus its efforts on delivering humanitarian aid to those fleeing ISIS, was much more circumspect than Mulcair, having taken a major hit in the polls for being seen as weak in confronting the jihadist group. No doubt many Liberals wondered what position the party would take, given that it played a leadership role in advancing the Responsibility to Protect (a mass atrocity prevention initiative) at the United Nations. In the end, Trudeau opposed it and argued it did not serve Canada’s “national interests.”
Yet the United Nations recently issued a report that said ISIS appears to have been carrying out a genocide in Iraq against the Yazidi minority. Like the Kurdish town of Kobane in Syria, many of the Yazidis in Iraq owe their lives to American airstrikes.
That is not the only reason to think that the fight against ISIS counts as a “just war.” The Vatican backs military action to prevent ISIS from continuing to massacre religious and ethnic minorities. “We have to stop this kind of genocide,” said Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the Vatican’s top envoy at the United Nations in Geneva. “Otherwise we’ll be crying out in the future about why we didn’t do something, why we allowed such a terrible tragedy to happen.”
As a signatory of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, Canada is expected not to turn a blind eye to massive human suffering. Every generation or so we have witnessed groups emerge, drunk on an ideology based on supremacy and destruction, that eventually aim to put their ideas into action, resulting in the mass slaughter of civilians. ISIS has all the hallmarks of becoming the Khmer Rouge of the early 21st century, save for its ambitions are not confined to one country’s national borders.
While the bulk of ISIS’s forces are confined to a sizeable chunk of land in Iraq and Syria, its reach goes much further. Recently it claimed responsibility for the Bardo museum attack in Tunisia that left over 20 people dead. It also claimed responsibility for the bombing of two Shia mosques in Yemen. ISIS is also strongly entrenched in Libya and recently formed an alliance with Boko Haram, the group currently destabilizing Nigeria and Cameroon. To make matters worse, ISIS is actively working to recruit new fighters and incite individuals in the West, including Canada, to carry terrorist attacks.
In a recent essay, Nobel Prize winning author V.S. Naipaul warned, “ISIS is dedicated to a contemporary holocaust. It has pledged itself to the murder of Shias, Jews, Christians, Copts, Yazidis and anyone it can, however fancifully, accuse of being a spy. It has wiped out the civilian populations of whole regions and towns. ISIS could very credibly abandon the label of Caliphate and call itself the Fourth Reich.”
To Mr. Mulcair and Mr. Trudeau: isolationism and humanitarian aid will do nothing to stop ISIS’s atrocities or protect Canada. Religious extremism is the defining issue of our time. Social democrats and liberals outside of Canada realize this. Do not wallow in denial for partisan political gain.
Jihadist Cash Lures Syrian War Refugees as Aid Dwindles: Nafeesa Syeed & Dana Khraich, Bloomberg, Apr. 5, 2015 — Mohammad Deen, a Syrian refugee and father of six, struggles to find the money to meet his children’s needs and worries who else might step in with an offer to help.
Islamic State Conquers Yarmouk in Macabre Win for Syrian Troops: Patrick Martin, Globe & Mail, Apr. 8, 2015 —Islamic State fighters have taken control of Yarmouk, a mostly Palestinian neighbourhood in the southern suburbs of Damascus, after brushing aside what remained of resistance in this one-time centre of the Palestinian diaspora.
Iran Nuclear Deal Gives Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Reason to Worry: Sam Dagher, Wall Street Journal, Apr. 8, 2015 —Like Israel and Saudi Arabia, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has his own reasons to be worried about Iran’s framework nuclear agreement with the U.S. and other world powers.
14 Million Children Suffering as Result of War in Syria and Iraq, Unicef Says: Nick Cumming-Bruce, New York Times, Mar. 12, 2015 —Around 14 million children are suffering hardship and trauma from the war in Syria and Iraq, the United Nations children’s agency said on Thursday, highlighting the needs of children struggling to cope with severe violence, and the danger to the rest of the world of failing to help a generation preyed on by extremist groups.
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