Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

ESPN Ban Chief Wahoo

cleveland-indians.jpg_1718483346

By Jacqueline Keeler – teleSUR – April 8, 2016

On Thursday morning, Bomani Jones, co-host of ESPN’s “Highly Questionable,” was asked to cover up his Cleveland “Caucasians” T-shirt he wore on another ESPN show “Mike and Mike.”

It’s hard to imagine the sports channel asking a guest to cover up a Cleveland Indians T-shirt featuring Chief Wahoo isn’t it? I mean, has that ever happened?

Twitter was filled with tweets from outraged white and even Black viewers. They were quick to jump on the idea that caricaturing white people — even to make a point, is wrong. One tweeted, “Oh and it couldn’t be more obvious you hate white people #racist.”

And that begs the question, if it’s so obvious that being turned into a mascot is wrong when it’s a white person being caricatured and stereotyped (and let’s face it, the Chief Wahoo mascot is far more grotesque than the one featured on “‘Caucasians” T-shirt) how is it Native people are still not being heard on this issue? Even after 50 years of protests?

I wrote two years ago this month a piece for Salon.com called “My life as a Cleveland Indian: The enduring disgrace of racist sports mascots” in response to the viral photo that showed a Cleveland fan in Chief Wahoo redface attempting to shake hands with a Native American protester, Rob Roche. This week, the fan, Pedro Rodriguez, returned to re-enact the picture. It was hailed as progress because this time, he came without the redface and headdress, but he still had on the shirt decorated with that smiling face of racism, Chief Wahoo.

I am, myself, a Cleveland American Indian. I was born there, the child of Relocation, a program that was a component of the Termination Act passed by Congress in 1956 to terminate tribes and relocate our people to urban centers. My parents were part of a generation of young people “went on Relocation” to go to college and find jobs not in cities that had relocation centers all over the country, Cleveland was one such city.

When my parents arrived in the 1960s, there was in Cleveland, a burgeoning Native community of some 20,000 young people from Alaska to Maine. It was from this youthful community (most were college-aged or just married) that the first protests against Chief Wahoo emerged in the late 1960s.

So this is not a new issue, not for me or my family. In fact, in 2014 my children and I, joined by members the Portland Native American community, protested at Nike World Headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon for their selling Chief Wahoo apparel. Nike responded in a press release where the company claimed that it’s powerless to stop selling Chief Wahoo because they were bound by their MLB contracts.

In this statement, Nike said, “Nike has a contractual partnership with Major League Baseball as the licensing agent for MLB team-approved marks. Each MLB team is responsible for choosing their team logos and marks and we understand that the Cleveland Indians are engaging their fans and the local community in conversation concerning their logo.”

I responded writing in response, “we feel Nike’s argument makes no sense because the logical conclusion to it is that they would sell any derogatory mascot if asked to do so — no matter how badly it reflects upon their brand. Are they really saying that if a community and a team agreed they would sell apparel with a Sambo mascot? We feel that there is a moral imperative and that since the American Indian community in Cleveland has been outspoken on the issue of Chief Wahoo for 45 years the opinions of the community have been ignored and no meaningful dialogue has occurred.”

In both Nike and ESPN’s case a double standard exists between Chief Wahoo and how other Americans of other race, creed and ethnicity are treated. I applaud Bomani Jones for taking a stand on this and not covering up his shirt. A shirt created by Shelf Life Clothing to point out the racism the Cleveland mascot promotes.

I also applaud the Cleveland City Council and leaders like Councilman Zack Reed who are taking steps to ban Chief Wahoo from the city of my birth. On Monday, opening day for the Cleveland MLB team, the city council passed an ordinance which will result in the removal of banners that feature Chief Wahoo from all downtown utility poles.

When I spoke to Reed, he compared Chief Wahoo to the Confederate flag and said that no amount of racism is acceptable to represent the city.

“You can’t scale back racism. It is what it is,” he said. “If you look up there at those banners downtown you can see Chief Wahoo and we want it gone whether big or small, we want it gone.”

I hope ESPN decides they want Chief Wahoo gone, too. No amount of racism is acceptable. And that goes for Nike, too.

 

April 9, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Location Location Location: The Unintended Symbolism of the White House Haft-Sîn

White House Nowruz, 2015
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep In America | April 8, 2016

This week, Michelle Obama hosted the second annual White House Nowruz, a celebration of the Iranian New Year. Though a relatively apolitical affair, the placement of the reception’s traditional haft-sîn, however, should have raised some eyebrows.

Nowruz, which literally means “new day” in Farsi, is an ancient festival of new beginnings, deeply rooted in Zoroastrianism, celebrating the first day of Spring and the Persian calendar.

Of the myriad traditions and festivities associated with Nowruz, the most universally recognizable may be that of the haft-sîn (هفت سین‎), a table arrangement decorated with seven (haft) items – each beginning with the Persian letter S (sîn) – and symbolizing renewal, reconciliation, good luck, and prosperity.

The shindig, MC’ed by comedian Maz Jobrani and catered by renowned Persian chef Najmieh Batmanglij, was held on April 6 – a few days after the official holiday season (which lasts roughly 13 days) had actually ended.

The White House, naturally, had its own haft-sîn on display at its Nowruz party. However, its location in the East Room, where the celebration has been held both years, was a bit curious and (probably) unintentionally laden with symbolism all its own.

Nowruz-sevelt

The table containing such traditional items as wheat grass (sabzeh), garlic (sīr), vinegar (serkeh), apple (seeb), wheat germ pudding (samanu), sumac berries (somaq), and dried fruit (senjed) was placed – as it was last year as well – right beneath John Singer Sargent’s 1903 presidential portrait of Theodore Roosevelt.

A haft-sîn in the White House’s East Room, on April 6, 2016.

One of the principal promoters of American imperialism at the end of the 19th century and in the first decade of the 20th, Roosevelt once wrote, “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one.” It is said he carried around a list of six target nations on three continents.

In December 1904, Roosevelt issued his official Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, declaring that the United States would not hesitate to use what he called its “international police power” to destroy and replace regimes deemed hostile to American interests. Though initially used to justify military intervention, invasion and occupation of Western Hemisphere nations such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, Roosevelt sent a similar message to the entire world in late 1907, when he deployed the nation’s Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe in a show of power. The fleet consisted of 16 battleships and support vessels, crewed by 14,000 sailors. It sailed for 14 months, covering over 43,000 miles and made twenty port calls on six different continents.

Just as it is common practice today for U.S. presidents to deliver Nowruz remarks to the people, and sometimes leaders, of Iran, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries “American presidents were encouraged to exchange telegrams with the Shah of Iran on the occasion of the Persian New Year’s Day.”

“In 1902,” note scholars Kamran Scot Aghaie and Afshin Marashi, “President Theodore Roosevelt even presented the Shah of Iran, Muzaffar al-Din, and his brother, Zill al-Sultan, with a copy of his book, Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, recognizing that hunting was a favorite pastime of the Persian royal family as well.”

At the time, Iranian leaders saw the United States – which had no imperial presence in the Middle East at that point – as a potential non-interventionist ally against persistent Russian and British encroachment on Iranian sovereignty. Following the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in 1906, Russia and Britain both occupied Iran in 1907 in an effort to dissolve the parliament and prop up the waning Qajar dynasty, dividing the country between them until 1911. Roosevelt remained neutral, however, a position subsequently maintained by Taft and all successive U.S. administrations through World War II, when Russia and the United Kingdom again invaded and occupied Iran to secure wartime supply routes for the Allied Powers and replaced the then Shah, Reza Pahlavi, with his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

Kermit’s Coup

On August 19, 1953, Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown in a military coup planned and orchestrated by the United States and Britain after nationalizing Iran’s oil industry. Pro-Shah riots were staged, hundreds were killed, newspapers supportive of Mossadegh were ransacked and shuttered, and the prime minister was arrested and tried for treason.

The main architect of the coup, executed at the behest of British petroleum interests and under the guise of pro-active anti-communism, was the chief of the CIA’s Near East and Africa division, Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. – grandson of President Teddy Roosevelt.

The ouster of Mossadegh, and the reinstallation of the Shah, by American intelligence operatives is a seminal moment in Iranian history and political consciousness, setting the stage for a quarter-century of tyrannical dictatorship propped up by torture, corruption and U.S. military aid, as well as establishing the United States as an interventionist power in the region. Popular backlash against the Shah, and his American backers, culminated in his overthrow by the Iranian Revolution, and the establishment of an Islamic Republic in 1979.

Roosevelt’s Shadow

By honoring Iranian culture with a haft-sîn table set under the watchful gaze of Teddy Roosevelt – the godfather of American military intervention and the grandfather of the man responsible for Operation Ajax in 1953 – the White House is unwittingly sending a message of continued hostility and imperial hubris toward Iran.

In his annual Nowruz message, delivered right before his historic trip to Cuba, President Obama said that, “even after decades of mistrust, it is possible for old adversaries to start down a new path.” At a time when Iran is fully upholding its end of the nuclear accord, while the residual effects of U.S. sanctions continue to cause problems for Iranians, optics remain important.

One possible step on the path to better relations would be to move the haft-sîn to the other side of the room.

April 9, 2016 Posted by | Militarism, Progressive Hypocrite, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

Plutonium mess: SC wrangling with DOE over nuclear waste facility, Russia grows angry

RT | April 8, 2016

Despite concessions from the Department of Energy, South Carolina has no intention of dropping its lawsuit against the DOE for failing to build a nuclear waste disposal plant. The delay is also scuppering a deal the US made to treat Russia’s plutonium.

Approved by Congress as far back as 1998, the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, or MOX, is designed to turn weapons-grade plutonium into power plant reactor fuel. Moscow and Washington signed a deal in 2000 under which 34 tons of nuclear waste would be shipped from Russia and then processed at the facility.

Since then, everything has gone wrong for MOX. The project’s cost was initially estimated at $1.7 billion, but by 2013 it had risen to $7.7. In addition, approximately $5 billion, three times the original estimate, has already been spent since construction began in 2007. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and contractors working on the project say it is currently 70 percent complete.

However, MOX was never favored by the Obama administration. When the US president came to power, he ordered the closure of the proposed facility to make way for an alternative plant in New Mexico, which would use a cheaper processing method known as dilution and disposal. The DOE also maintains that MOX is only 40 percent complete and would cost $1 billion a year to operate.

“We are in a situation where the MOX approach has extreme uncertainties,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee last month. Moniz said previously that the Russian contract could be moved to the New Mexico facility.

The stakes were raised after a clause in the contract between the state and the federal government was activated at the beginning of the year, when the government failed to remove one ton of plutonium from South Carolina as stipulated. The fine for the delay is $1 million per day, with a cap of $100 million.

South Carolina is now lodging a lawsuit to recover the money from the federal budget and make sure that MOX is completed.

The DOE has attempted to compromise by offering to remove 6 tons of plutonium unrelated to the Russian deal, but South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley says the state will not abandon its legal claim, as “the DOE has not lived up to promises made in the past.”

‘Not what we agreed on,’ says Putin

While South Carolina squeezes from one side, Washington is also facing mounting pressure from Russia on the other.

On Thursday, Vladimir Putin voiced Moscow’s growing frustration, both with the delay and the US’ decision to turn to dilution and disposal.

“We signed an agreement that the plutonium will be processed in a certain way, for which facilities would be purpose built,” the Russian President said during a media session. “We have met our commitments, and constructed the necessary facilities. The US has not.”

For Russia, the use of a cheaper processing method constitutes a breach of contract.

“With the dilution and disposal method, the nuclear fuel retains its breakout potential, so it can extracted, processed and weaponized again. That is not what we agreed on,” said Putin, who personally oversaw the signing of the original deal during his first term as the Russian President.

Despite Putin’s unequivocal rhetoric, Washington officials have been maintaining their best poker faces so far.

“Accommodating a new US method would not require renegotiation of the agreement. We will not speculate on Russian intentions behind the reported remarks,” said State Department spokesperson Jennifer Bavisotto on Friday.

April 9, 2016 Posted by | Environmentalism, Militarism, Nuclear Power | , , | Leave a comment

The Return of the Brutal Savage and the Science for War

By Stephen Corry | CounterPunch | April 8, 2016

The last few years have seen an alarming increase in claims that tribal peoples have been shown to be more violent than we are. This is supposed to prove that our ancestors were also brutal savages. Such a message has profound implications for how we view human nature – whether or not we see war as innate to the human condition and so, by extension, broadly unavoidable. It also underpins how industrialized society treats those it sees as “backward.” In reality though it’s nothing more than an old colonialist belief, masquerading once again as “science.” There’s no evidence to support it.

The American anthropologist, Napoleon Chagnon, is invariably cited in support of this brutal savage myth. He studied the Yanomami Indians of Amazonia from the 1960s onwards (he spells the tribe “Yanomamö”) and you’d be hard pressed to find a book or article on tribal violence which doesn’t refer to his work. Popular writers such as Steven Pinker and Jared Diamond frequently make much of Chagnon’s thesis, so it’s worth giving a thumbnail sketch of why in reality it proves little about the Yanomami, and nothing about human evolution.

First, it’s important to dispatch a red herring from the murky cauldron being cooked up by the brutal savage promoters: They often point to Darkness in El Dorado, a book by Patrick Tierney, which attacked Chagnon’s work, but went too far. Tierney raised the possibility that one of Chagnon’s colleagues may have deliberately introduced a deadly measles epidemic to the Indians. That simply wasn’t true: In fact, the epidemic was inadvertently started by American missionaries. That Tierney was wrong on this single point is now used to claim that all his and other writers’ criticisms of Chagnon have been discredited. They haven’t. In any case, were a single error deemed to negate a whole thesis, then pretty much all science, as well as journalism, the law and a lot else, falls apart.

Anyway, let’s set Tierney aside. For decades, Napoleon Chagnon’s findings have been rejected by almost all of the many other anthropologists who have worked with the Yanomami, and in most countries his work simply isn’t taught. He had rather faded from anthropology in the United States too, until his recent resurgence as the darling of establishment attitudes.

According to Chagnon, brutality is a key driver of human evolution. How did he come upon such a disturbing “discovery”? Basically, he counted how many Yanomami men boasted that they were unokai and he told us this means they’ve killed people. He then crunched the numbers to show that unokai are similarly successful in love as they are in war, and that by fathering more children than non-killers, they ensure the next generation is as murderous as they are.

As with any sweeping conclusion in human sciences, there are numerous known unknowns. For example, did Yanomami raiding in the 1960s increase through growing pressure from settler or missionary incursions? (After all, Chagnon used the extremist New Tribes Mission to get into the Yanomami.) Did the influx of outside trade goods, including guns, play a role? Such impacts are difficult to analyze, though some believe they were clearly significant.

But the most significant fact, the extraordinary single error that, in this case, does destroy Chagnon’s thesis in one swoop, is something Chagnon doesn’t tell us – unokai does not just mean “killer.” It’s also the status claimed by everyone who’s ever shot an arrow into a dead body during an inter-village raid (most raids stop after one killing). It describes many other individuals as well, including men who’ve killed an animal thought to be a kind of shamanic embodiment of a human, as well as stay-at-homes who try and cast lethal spells. It even includes those who’ve participated in a ritual during their future wife’s puberty (she also becomes unokai). In other words, many unokai haven’t killed anyone. With this simple fact, every one of Chagnon’s conclusions about “killers” falls apart.

But supposing he was right after all, what would his figures show? What percentage of the population are we talking about? Here the brew gets fishier: Chagnon plays fast and loose with his own data. His autobiography, “Noble Savages,” says that “killers” number “approximately 45 percent of all the living adult males.” Yet even according to his own (shaky) data, that is simply not true: Chagnon’s own figures do not show that 45 percent of men are unokai. He has grossly inflated his percentage by ignoring everyone younger than 25, an age group with far fewer claiming unokai status. Were they included, his percentage would plummet.

Chagnon has been asked about this manipulation for years. When he bothers to reply, he claims he’ll publish new supporting data. We’re still waiting.

So there you have it: That’s the poster boy of the “scientific proof” behind the myth of the brutal savage. The fact that Chagnon’s thesis has been repeatedly demolished in scholarly publications for decades is simply ignored by those who want him to be right. For them to dismiss the many Chagnon critics, to pretend that science is on their side, and to chorus sneeringly “noble savages” whenever Chagnon is criticized, is just facile propaganda.

By the way, if you want to know how many unokai (supposed “killers”) Chagnon managed to winkle out during a quarter century of fieldwork with one of Amazonia’s largest tribes – numbering several thousand – the answer is just 137 men. They could all comfortably fit into a single car on the New York subway. How many of those were actually killers? We’ll never know.

That’s the size of the sample group supposedly proving that tribal peoples live in a state of chronic warfare and, by throwing in more red herrings, that our ancestors did so too. The latter assertion is widely promulgated. It goes like this: The Yanomami are a small-scale tribal (non-state) hunting society, our ancestors were the same, so the Yanomami can teach us about our ancestors because they live in a similar way. And yet the theory fails on several points: For example, no one knows the degree to which our distant ancestors scavenged for meat, rather than actively hunted it. That’s quite a different approach to life, and the Yanomami wouldn’t dream of doing it. In any case, a moment’s informed reflection tells you that no one who inhabited the ice age plains of Eurasia, for example, lived remotely like the tropical rainforest Yanomami of Chagnon’s 1960s.

The real story is more obvious, prosaic and simpler than the Chagnon-created “fierce people” and their supposed “chronic” warfare. The truth is that there are some tribal peoples who have a belligerent reputation, others known for avoiding violence as much as possible, and lots in between. That’s nothing to do with any grasping at mythic noble savages, it’s what anthropologists have actually found.

Despite the growing mythology, the archeological record reveals very little evidence of past violence either (until the growth of big settlements, starting around 10,000 years ago). Researchers Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli studied descriptions of 2,930 earlier skeletons from 900 different sites worldwide.[1] Apart from a single massacre site of two dozen people in the Sudan, they found “but a tiny number of cases of violence in skeletal remains,” and noted how just four sites in Europe “are mentioned over and over by multiple authors” striving to demonstrate the opposite of what the evidence actually reveals. The archeological record before 10,000 years ago, they conclude, in fact “shows that warfare was the rare exception.”

Much of the other “proof” for the brutal savage advanced by Steven Pinker, Jared Diamond, and other champions of Chagnon, is rife with the selection and manipulation of facts to fit a desired conclusion.

To call this “science” is both laughable and dangerous. These men are desperate to persuade us that they’ve got “proof” for their opinions, which isn’t surprising as they’re nothing more – opinions based on a narrow and essentially self-serving political point of view. They have proved nothing, except to those who want to believe them.

Does it matter? Yes, very much. How we think of tribal peoples dictates how we treat them. Proponents of Chagnon seek to reestablish the myth of the brutal savage which once underpinned colonialism and its land theft. It’s an essentially racist fiction which belongs in the 19th century and, like a flat earth, should have been discarded generations ago. It’s the myth at the heart of the destruction of tribal peoples and it must be challenged.

It’s not just deadly for tribal peoples: It’s dangerous for all of us. False claims that killing is a proven key factor in our evolution are used to justify, even ennoble, the savagery inherent in today’s world. The brutal savage may be a largely invented creature among tribal peoples, but he is certainly dangerously and visibly real much closer to home.

Notes.

[1] See also, http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/10-000-year-old-massacre-does-not-bolster-claim-that-war-is-innate/

April 9, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

‘UK firm helps Israel kill Palestinians’

Protesters slam UK firm over profiting from Israeli war crimes

Press TV – April 9, 2016

Scores of pro-Palestinian activists in the UK have demonstrated outside the headquarters of an arms manufacturing company, accusing it of benefiting from Israel’s deadly crackdown against Palestinians.

The protesters gathered in front of the UK headquarters of aerospace manufacturer Thales, in Crawley, on Friday and expressed their anger against the company’s partnership with Israel’s Elbit Systems to develop a surveillance drone, nicknamed Watchkeeper, used by the regime against Palestinians.

The rally was held by the Sussex Stop Arming Israel campaign and was supported by other human rights groups, including the Inminds. The main messages of the protest were “Stop Arming Israel” and “Thales profits from Israeli war crimes.”

“Thales UK has a billion pound contract with Israel’s largest arms company Elbit Systems to develop a fleet of drones. Human Rights Watch has documented [the drones] as being used by Israel to deliberately target Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” said Inminds chair Abbas Ali.

“It’s sickening that Elbit markets this killer drone as being extensively ‘field tested’ in ‘real life’ situations — using the slaughter of Gaza’s people as a marketing ploy to gain a competitive advantage,” he added.

The Watchkeeper drone, which is produced through a joint venture dubbed UAV Tactical Systems, is modeled on Elbit’s Hermes 450, a UAV that has been used in action by the Israeli military. According to the Sussex group, the drone is developed under a contract awarded by the UK’s Ministry of Defense.

Thales UK is a subsidiary of the French company Thales, and is currently considered as the UK’s second largest military company.

Tel Aviv is under fire by rights groups for its indiscriminate attacks against Palestinian civilians. In one instance of Israel’s brutality, at least 2,140 Palestinians, including 557 children, lost their lives during the regime’s offensive against the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2014.

The aggression also left 11,100 Palestinians wounded, including 3,374 children and 2,088 women, and displaced over 170,000 others.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Solidarity and Activism, War Crimes | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Al-Aqsa imam arrested by Israeli occupation forces after Friday prayers; 6 Jerusalemites arrested in Silwan

salim-3

samidoun – Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network | April 8, 2016

Israeli occupation forces arrested imam Sheikh Mohammed Salim as he left the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on Friday, 8 April, accusing him of “incitement” in his speech delivered today at Friday prayers before 70,000 worshipers.

Feras al-Dabas, press spokesperson of the Islamic Waqf, was quoted in Al-Resalah as saying that despite the intervention of the director of the Waqf, Sheik Azzam al-Khatib, the occupation forces insisted on arresting Salim and had taken him to a detention center, without revealing his whereabouts.

This came as occupation forces arrested six Palestinian Jerusalemites from Silwan, confiscating a protest tent, in an attempt to stop a public Friday prayer in protest of ongoing Israeli occupation policies of repression against the people of Silwan, in particular a decision to demolish 50 homes in Silwan under the pretext of the construction of a garden. Occupation forces arrested Jalal Abbasi, Firas Abbasi, Musa Abbasi, Mohammed Abu Tayeh and Khaled Abu Tayeh and detained two vehicles, which were warned against delivering any plastic chairs to the protest tent.

silwan2

Jawad Siyam, Director of the Wadi Hilweh Information Center was briefly arrested after attempting to stop the arrest of the five Palestinian youths, and later released. Despite the arrests and the confiscation of the protest tent, the public prayer in rejection of arrests, home demolitions and land confiscation went forward.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | , , , , | Leave a comment

Israeli forces carry out predawn raids, detain 2 students

Ma’an – April 8, 2016

salhab-shalaldehBETHLEHEM – Israeli forces detained six Palestinians including two university students from the occupied West Bank during predawn detention raids Friday, locals and Israel’s army said.

Locals told Ma’an that two members of Palestine Polytechnic University’s student council were detained in the raids, identified as Ibrahim Salhab from Doha and Salsabil Shalaldeh from Sair, both villages located near Bethlehem.

Locals added that Salsabil is the daughter of prisoner Sheikh Zawadi Shalaldeh who is currently held in Israeli prison.

Israeli forces also raided the town of Silwad in the Ramallah district and delivered an interrogation summons to former prisoner Malik Hamed.

Clashes erupted when Israeli military forces raided al-Duheisha refugee camp also near Bethlehem, with no initial injuries reported.

An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an that four Palestinians were detained from al-Arrub refugee camp, one of whom was a suspected Hamas operative.

One suspected Hamas operative was also detained from Qalqilya, the spokesperson said, adding that the Palestinian detained from Sair was suspected for “illegal activities.”

Around 7,000 Palestinians are currently held in Israeli prisons, according to prisoners’ rights group Addameer.

The majority were detained in predawn detention raids carried out by the Israeli military, including in areas under full Palestinian jurisdiction according to the Oslo Accords.

Such raids often lead to clashes between locals and Israeli military forces entering their communities, regularly resulting in injury and sometimes death of Palestinian residents.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 2 Comments

Israeli forces detain 4 Palestinian fishermen off Gazan coast

Ma’an – April 8, 2016

GAZA CITY – Israeli naval forces on Thursday detained four Palestinian fishermen off the coast of Rafah City in the southern Gaza Strip and seized their fishing boats.

Fishermen told Ma’an that Israeli forces opened fire on the fishing boats before detaining them, although no injuries were reported. They said the incident took place within the designated nine nautical mile fishing zone.

An official with the Agricultural Work Union, Zakariya Bakr, identified the detainees as brothers Iyad and Ahmad Omar al-Bardawil and brothers Bilal and Muhammad Jihad Musleh. He said two fishing boats were confiscated.

An Israeli army spokesperson told Ma’an they were looking into the reports.

On Thursday, another two Palestinian fishermen were detained off the coast of Khan Younis after they allegedly passed beyond the designated fishing zone.

As part of Israel’s near-decade long blockade of the coastal enclave since 2007, Palestinian fishermen have been required to work within a limited “designated fishing zone” off the coast, which was extended to nine nautical miles last week.

Israeli forces regularly detain Palestinian fisherman off the coast of Gaza working within the fishing zone, generally for alleged security reasons. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Israeli forces detained 71 fishermen and confiscated 22 fishing boats throughout 2015.

The center said that Israeli naval forces also opened fire on Palestinian fishermen at least 139 times over the course of the year, wounding 24 and damaging 16 fishing boats.

“These attacks occurred in a time where the fishers did not pose any threat to the Israeli naval troops, as they were doing their job to secure a living,” the center said.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , , | Leave a comment

DCI: “Israeli Soldiers Abuse Children During Home Invasions, Arrests”

By Saed Bannoura | IMEMC | April 7, 2016

dci-1Defense for Child International – Palestine Branch has reported that Israeli soldiers are systematically abusing Palestinian children, especially during invasions of their homes and while abducting them.

DCI said it documented many cases of abuse targeting Palestinian children after the soldiers stormed their families’ homes without any cause or justification, for both the invasions and the excessive use of force.

One of the cases is that of Ahmad Tamimi, 16, from Betunia town west of Ramallah, who was repeatedly beaten and assaulted by the soldiers after they invaded his family’s home to kidnap his uncle.

In a sworn affidavit, Tamimi told DCI that, on March 17, he was awakened by the very loud noise, shortly after midnight, to find eight Israeli soldiers surrounding his bed, in his own bedroom.

“For the first few seconds, I thought I was dreaming, but reality started sinking in when a soldier stared violently pulling me out of my bed, to drop me on the ground,” Tamimi said, “The soldiers then started kicking and beating me, and hitting me with their weapons while shouting in Hebrew. I started screaming and calling for my dad, while also trying to fend for myself, using my arms in an attempt to block their kicks and punches.”

“They tied my arms behind my back using plastic cuffs, and ordered to me to stand up and walk with them,” the child added, “I said I was unable to do so, and that is when one of the soldiers pulled me from my hair to force me to stand, then two soldiers grabbed me and forced me out of the room.”

The child also stated that one of the soldiers hit him with his rifle on his left cheek; he started feeling dizzy when the soldiers dragged him through the bedroom’s door, and started suffering severe pain.

After invading the home, the soldiers held the entire family in one room, and later moved Ahmad to the same room while handcuffed and his legs shackled, then they left the property after abducting his uncle, 30 years of age.

The family then untied their child and directly headed to the Palestine Medical Center in Ramallah; after examination, the doctors found various cuts and bruises to his head, forehead, left shoulder and right arm.

Since that incident took place, Tamimi has been afraid to sleep in his room alone, and constantly feels that the soldiers will surround and attack him again. He is always thinking about what they did to him, and is terrified of leaving home after dark.

On March 3, at least fifteen Israeli soldiers invaded, approximately at 3 at dawn, a home in the northern West Bank city of Jenin after smashing the front door.

The soldiers the grabbed Ahmad ‘Arqawi, 17, and his brother, 21, and started repeatedly pushing their striking against the walls.

“A soldier asked me about my name, I said Ahmad,” he said, “The soldier then slammed my head against the wall. I was in severe pain, and the soldiers forced my eight family members in the bathroom.”

“The soldiers dragged me out of my bedroom, tied my hand behind my back using plastic cuffs, and I could hear sounds of furniture being broken and destroyed by other soldiers searching our home,” he added, “Then three soldiers started kicking and punching me, and hitting me with their rifles, mainly on my head, chest and back. I started feeling dizzy, but they continued to shout and scream at me in Hebrew.”

One of the soldiers also pushed Ahmad’s head against every mirror in the bedroom, causing various cuts, especially on the right side of his head in addition to severe pain.

“They dragged me out of my bedroom to the living room, there; I saw many masked soldiers, and one of them forced me against the wall while strangling me,” the child added, “Another soldier brought a cup filled with water, and started pouring it in my mouth while the second soldier continued to strangle me while punching me with his other hand.”

The soldiers later dragged the child to the bathroom, where his family was held, and told him “look how your family members are screaming and crying, look at what we did to your family and your home – we wrecked it!”

They then forced him into the bathroom, with his family, and kidnapped his brother while repeatedly kicking, punching and beating him.

After the soldiers left the family home, and withdrew, the family called for an ambulance that took Ahmad to the Jenin governmental hospital, where he was treated for serious cuts and bruises in various parts of his body, including his head, face, shoulders and back.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Subjugation - Torture | , , , | 1 Comment

Al-Qaeda gaining power & money from Saudi-led intervention in Yemen – report

RT | April 8, 2016

Al-Qaeda has made major financial gains as a result of the war in Yemen, running its own mini-state and pocketing $100 million in looted bank deposits and revenue from running the country’s largest port, a Reuters investigation has revealed.

The group’s deep pockets and increased power are down to the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, which has reportedly helped it become stronger than at any time since its emergence almost 20 years ago.

Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has a major presence in Mukalla, a city of 500,000 people, where it runs the third largest port in Yemen. As part of its port “management,” the group operates speedboats manned by armed fighters who impose fees on ship traffic.

Yemeni government officials and local traders estimate that the group earns up to US$2 million every day in taxes on goods and fuel coming into the port. In addition, it is believed the group has managed to extort $1.4 million from the national oil company.

The group also looted Mukalla’s central bank branch, gaining an estimated $100 million, according to two senior Yemeni security officials.

The economic empire of Mukalla was described to Reuters in detail by more than a dozen diplomats, Yemeni security officials, tribal leaders, and residents.

AQAP has abolished taxes for local residents in Mukalla, and group members have integrated themselves with southern Yemenis who have felt marginalized by their northern counterparts for years. The group has also made propaganda videos in which they have boasted about paving local roads and stocking hospitals.

In doing so, the group has managed to win over many locals.

“I prefer that Al-Qaeda stay here, not for Al Mukalla to be liberated,” said one 47-year-old resident. “The situation is stable, more than any ‘free’ part of Yemen. The alternative to Al-Qaeda is much worse.”

AQAP has managed to expand its territory by using many of the tactics used by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL). It boasts 1,000 fighters in Mukalla alone, and controls 600km (373 miles) of coastline. The group also claimed responsibility for the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attack, which left 12 people dead at the satirical magazine’s Paris office.

‘Easier to expand’

According to a senior Yemeni government official, AQAP’s expansion is due to the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen, which is supported by the US.

The coalition, which has been bombing Houthi rebels since March 2015, sides with the exiled President Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, while the Houthis are aligned with former President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who resigned in 2012 following a popular uprising against his rule.

The official told Reuters that the war has “provided a suitable environment for the… expansion of Al-Qaeda.”

He said the withdrawal of government army units from their bases in the south allowed AQAP to acquire “very large quantities of sophisticated and advanced weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles and armed vehicles.”

In addition, the coalition’s pre-occupation with fighting the Houthis “made it easier for Al-Qaeda elements to expand in more than one area,” the official said. “And this is why Al-Qaeda has today become stronger and more dangerous.”

But despite claims that the intervention has made it easier for AQAP to expand, a recent statement from the Saudi embassy in Washington stated that the campaign had “denied terrorists a safe haven in Yemen.”

Still, AQAP continues to grow and prosper amid a civil war which has so far led to the deaths of 6,000 people. Among the death toll are 3,218 civilians, according to the UN Human Rights Office. An additional 5,778 civilians have been injured in the violence.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Economics, War Crimes | , , | 1 Comment

Terror Bombing in Brussels and Paris: Europe’s Islamist Legionnaires Come Home to Fight

By James Petras :: 04.08.2016

Introduction: The terror bombings in Paris and Brussels have raised a cacophony of voices, ranging from state officials, Prime Ministers and Presidents, to academics, journalists and media consultants. Tons of ink and print have focused on the psychology, networks and operations of the alleged perpetrators – radicalized young Muslim citizens of the EU.

Few have examined the long-term, large-scale policies of the EU, US and NATO, which have been associated with the development and growth of the worldwide terror networks. This essay will discuss the historical links between Islamist terrorists and the US-Saudi Arabian-Pakistani intervention in Afghanistan, as well as the consequences of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. In Iraq, the US implemented a deliberate policy of destroying all secular state structures and promoting the Balkanization of the country via ethnic-religious and tribal wars – a policy it has followed in subsequent areas of intervention.

The last section will focus on the US-EU-Gulf Petrol-Monarchy proxy invasions and ‘regime change’ bombings of the secular republics of Libya and Syria with the further cultivation and growth of international Islamist terrorism.

Historical Origins of International Islamist Terrorism: Afghanistan

In 1979, President James Carter and his National Security Chief, Zbigniew Brzezinski, launched Operation Cyclone, a major Islamist uprising against the Soviet- aligned secular Afghan regime. The US coordinated its campaign with the rabidly anti-Soviet monarchy in Saudi Arabia, which provided the funding and mercenaries for ‘international jihad’ against secular governance. This brutal campaign ‘officially’ lasted 10 years until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. It produced millions of casualties and decades of ‘blow-back’ when the CIA-Pakistani-Saudi trained Arab mercenaries (the ‘Afghan-Arabs’) returned to their home countries and elsewhere. The US intelligence agencies, Special Forces Commands and military directorates (especially Pakistan’s ISI intelligence service) trained and armed terrorists with US-Saudi funding. The American covert financial contribution mushroomed over the years rising to over $670 million dollars a year by 1987. Tens of thousands of Islamist mercenaries and adventurers were recruited from the Middle East, North Africa, the Gulf States, the Soviet Union (Chechens), Yugoslavia (Bosnians and Kosovars), China (Uigurs) and Western Europe.

With the defeat of the secular regime of President Najibullah in 1992, the Islamists and tribal factions then fought among themselves, converting Afghanistan into the world’s best-equipped training ground for International Islamist terrorists. Eventually, the Pashtun-based Taliban faction (with Pakistani arms and support) prevailed and established an extreme Islamist regime. The Taliban, despite its rhetoric, settled down to consolidating their brand of ‘Islamism in one country’, (1995-2001), a largely nationalist project. In its quest for respectability, it successfully destroyed the opium poppy fields, earning the praise of US President GW Bush in spring 2001. It also hosted a variety of Saudi princes and warlords, eventually including the jihadi-internationalist Osama bin Laden, who had been driven from North Africa.

Following the terrorist attack on the US in September 2001, the US and NATO invaded Afghanistan on October 2001 and overthrew the nation-centered Islamist Taliban regime. The subsequent chaos and guerrilla war opened up a huge new inflow and outflow of thousands of international extremists who came to Afghanistan, trained, fought and then departed, fully prepared to practice their terrorist skills in their countries of origin in Europe, North Africa and the Middle East.

The US interventions and invasion of Afghanistan provide some of the context for the subsequent bombings in Europe and the US. The Islamist ‘returnees’ to Europe and elsewhere had received funds from Saudi Arabia and training from the CIA and Pakistani intelligence. They began their work among a very ‘available’ constituency of potential recruits in the marginalized Muslim youth of the ghettos and prisons of Europe.

The Middle Period: the US-Zionist Invasion and Destruction of Iraq

The turning point in the growth and internationalization of Islamist terrorism was the US invasion, occupation and systematic reign of terror in Iraq. Largely under the guidance of key US Zionist policymakers (and Israeli advisers) in the Pentagon, State Department and the White House, the US dismantled the entire secular Iraqi army and police forces. They also purged the administrative, civil, educational, medical and scientific institutions of nationalistic secular professionals, opening the field to warring Islamist tribal factions. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed and millions fled in a regime of ethnic cleansing – which Washington touted as a model for the rest of the Middle East. However, thousands of experienced, but jobless Iraqi military officers, who had survived the US-orchestrated purges, regrouped and eventually joined with tens of thousands of nationalist and internationalist Islamist extremists to form ISIS. Their motives were arguable less ethno-religious and more related to revenge for their displacement and the destruction of their own society.

The deliberate US (Zionist)-EU-Saudi strategy to divide and conquer Iraq initially involved working closely with Sunni feudal tribal leaders and other extremists to counter the rising power of pro-Iranian Shia. They promoted a policy of fragmenting the country with the Kurds dominating in the North, the Sunnis in the center and the Shia in the south (the so-called Joseph Biden-Leslie Gelb Plan of national dismemberment and ethnic cleansing). The rationale was to create a weak central authority completely under US-EU tutelage and a loose group of fragmented subsistence fiefdoms in what had been the most advanced secular Arab republic.

Despite pouring billions of dollars in arms from the US to create a puppet-colonial Iraqi ‘national army’, the Saudis and Israelis pursued their own policy of financing sectors of the Kurds and violent Sunni opposition – with the latter forming the original mass base of ISIS.

As the US-client Shia regime in Baghdad focused on stealing billions while killing or exiling hundreds of thousands of educated Sunnis, Christians and other secular Iraqis from the capital, the morale of its US-puppet troops plummeted. With the entire experienced and nationalist Iraqi officer core purged (slaughtered or driven into hiding), the new puppet officers were cowardly, corrupt and incompetent – as openly acknowledged by their US ‘advisers’. ISIS, meanwhile had acquired hundreds of thousands of US weapons and was financed by the Shia-hating Saudi Royal Family and other Gulf Monarchs. Armed Sunnis soon launched major, lightning-quick offensives under the leadership of ex-Baathist army officers, supported by thousands of terrorists, suicide bombers and foreign mercenaries. US and European ‘military experts’ expressed ’shock’ at their effectiveness.

ISIS routed the Baghdad-controlled army, their US advisers and Kurdish allies from northern Iraq, capturing major cities, including Mosul, thousands of productive oil wells and drove their forces to within a few dozen kilometers of Baghdad. Territorial conquest and military successes attracted thousands more Islamist volunteers from the Middle East, Europe, Afghanistan and even North America. ISIS provided the military training; Saudi Arabia paid their salaries; Turkey purchased their captured oil and antiquities and opened its borders to the transfer of jihadi troops and weapons. Israel, for its part, purchased captured ISIS petrol at a discount from corrupt Turkish traders. Each regional player had its snout in the bloody trough that had once been Iraq!

ISIS successes in Iraq, led it to expand its operations and ambitions across the border into Syria. This occurred just as the US and EU were bombing and destroying the secular government of Colonel Gadhafi in Libya, in another ‘wildly successful’ planned campaign of ‘regime change’ (According to US Secretary of State Clinton as she gleefully watched the captive wounded Gadhafi ’snuff film’ by unspeakable torture – ‘WE came and HE died’.).

The chaos that ensued in Libya led to an exponential growth of extremist Islamist groups with tons of weapons of ‘liberated’ Libyan weapons! Islamist terrorists in Libya gained territory, took over oil wells and attracted ‘volunteers’ from the marginalized youth of neighboring Tunisia, Egypt, Mali and as far away as Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. Flush with more guns, money and training. Many graduates went on to Syria and Iraq.

The Contemporary Period: EU-US-Turkey-Saudi-Israeli Sponsored War in Syria

In 2011, as ISIS rolled across the Iraqi border into Syria and terrorist Islamist bands seized cities in Libya, the US-EU-Turkish-Saudi and Israeli regimes financed and armed Islamist (and the mythical ‘moderate’) forces in Syria to overthrow the nationalist-secular Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad.

Thousands of Islamist extremist volunteers heeded the call (and the fat paychecks) of the Saudi regime and its Salafist propagandists. These constituted the Saudi Royal Family’s own ‘Foreign Legion’. They were trained and armed and shipped into Syria by Turkish intelligence. The US armed and trained hundreds of its own so-called ‘moderate rebels’ whose fighters quickly defected to ISIS and other terrorist groups turning over tons of US arms, while the ‘moderate rebel leaders’ gave press conferences from London and Washington. ISIS seized swaths of Syrian territory, sweeping westward toward the Russian naval and air bases on the coast and upward from the south, encircling Damascus. Millions were uprooted and minority populations were enslaved or slaughtered.

The news of ISIS territorial gains with their plundered oil wealth from sales to Turkey and the flow of arms from Saudi Arabia, the EU and the US attracted over 30,000 ‘volunteer’ mercenaries from North America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia.

These new terrorists received military training, including bomb making and logistical planning in Syria. Many were citizens of the EU, Islamist extremists, numbering over five thousand. These young fighters trained and fought in Syria and then returned to France, Belgium, Germany and the rest of the EU. They had gone to Syria with the tacit support and/or tolerance of their own European governments who had used them, rather than NATO troops, in the US-EU campaign of ‘regime change’ against Damascus.

The European governments were sure they had ‘their’ Muslim recruits under control as they joined the US in a reckless policy of overthrowing independent secular governments in the Middle East and North Africa. They happily encouraged their marginalized young Muslim citizens to flock to Syria and fight. They hoped they would remain in Syria (fighting on the ground or buried under the ground). Officially, EU leaders claimed to support ‘moderate rebels’ (the bland term Western media used to sanitize Islamist terrorists) fighting the Assad ‘dictatorship’. European regimes were not prepared to detain the battle hardened ‘returnees’, who had been trained in Iraq and Syria. These young European Muslims (children of immigrants or converts to Islam) had been heavily indoctrinated and incorporated into international terrorist networks. They easily melted back into their marginalized European urban ghettos – beyond the control of Europe’s bloated intelligence services.

In practice, the EU regimes saw the thousands of Europe’s Muslim youth flocking to Syria as an ‘EU Foreign Legion’, a glorified wastebasket for unemployed young thugs and ex-prisoners, who would advance NATO’s imperial goals while solving the domestic social problem of the marginalized children of North African migrants. Europe’s Muslim youth were viewed as convenient cannon fodder by NATO planners and the governments of France, Belgium and the UK. For public relations, it was better for these young men and women to die overthrowing the secular government in Syria than to send in European soldiers (white Christians) whose deaths would have domestic political repercussions.

The EU underestimated the depth of antagonism these ‘volunteers’ felt about US-EU intervention in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as their anger at Europe’s continued support for Israeli land grabs in Palestine. In its racist arrogance, EU leaders underestimated the capacity of ISIS to indoctrinate, train and organize these marginalized kids from Europe’s slums into effective international cells able to carry the war back to Europe.

CTxVkmVUsAI9fqGThe EU smugly overlooked the active roles of Turkey and Saudi Arabia who had their own independent, regional ambitions. Ankara and Riyadh trained and financed the ‘volunteers’, and facilitated their flow into Syria from camps in Turkey and Jordan. The wounded were treated in Turkey and sometimes even in Israel. Thousands, many EU citizens, would flow back into Europe or to their countries of origin in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Russia.

The EU had slavishly and blindly followed Washington’s lead in all its Middle East wars. Now it is now paying a big price: Thousands of trained terrorists have returned; bombings and attacks on European civilians and civil structures have occurred, while the European government leaders trip over each other in a mad rush to dismantle civil and constitutional citizen rights and impose wide ranging police state measures (States of Emergency).

These new Saudi-funded terrorist recruits (Riyadh’s Legionnaires) are active in all the countries where the US and EU have launched proxy wars: Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan . . . Turkey funds ISIS terrorists in Syria, Iraq and Kurdish territories to advance its own expansionist ambitions – oblivious to the clucking disapproval of EU leaders. Now Turkey receives over 6 billion Euro’s from the EU in what amounts to blackmail: In return, Turkey will ‘contain’ the flood of regional refugees in barely disguised concentration camps out of European sight.

Conclusion

Ever since the US-EU policymakers decided to implement a war against Arab and West Asian secular nationalism in the Middle-East, Afghanistan, Iran and North Africa through serial ‘regime change’ campaigns they have relied on Islamist Salafist mercenaries and volunteers to do most of the killing on the ground, while the West operates from the air. Washington and its NATO allies operated on the assumption that they could use and then discard their recruits, mostly from marginalized urban youth and criminal gangs, once they had served imperial military purposes. A few with requisite talent and ruthlessness could be turned into puppet ‘leaders’ to unleash on the Russians and other ‘obstacles’ in future engagements.

The EU-US totally misunderstood the volunteers’ high level of independence, their organizational autonomy and their own understanding of the tactical nature of their alliance with Western imperialism. Islamist extremist leaders, like their Western counterparts, believe there are no permanent alliances – only permanent interests.

The EU and US have pursued a policy of overthrowing independent Muslim and secular Arab nations and returning them to the status of pre-independence semi-colonies. The rollback policy against secular nationalism (with its deep roots in the Dulles era) has extended from North Africa, through the Middle East to Southwest Asia. For its part, ISIS and its allies envision a return to a pre-colonial Islamic caliphate over the same lands and people to counter Western imperialism. Millions are caught in the middle.

ISIS views the Westernized secular elites in the Muslim countries as a fifth column for the spread of empire, while it has re-socialized and trained young Islamists from the EU to serve as networks of terrorists ‘behind enemy lines’ sowing mayhem in the West.

The political repercussions of this internationalized war are profound. Millions of civilians in the war zones have been and will be killed, uprooted and converted into desperate refugees flooding the EU. Police-state emergency rule, arbitrary searches, arrests and interrogations have become the norm in the highly militarized European airports, train and metro stations, as well as markets and cultural centers. The EU has increasingly undergone an ‘Israelization’ of its society, with its population polarized and resembling Israel- Palestinian . . . its Muslim community marginalized and confined into little Gaza’s.

In this charged atmosphere, Israeli high tech security companies and advisers flourish, mergers and acquisitions of police state technology multiply. Israeli Prime Minister Benny Netanyahu embraces the French Prime Minister Hollande in the club of electoral authoritarians.

Meanwhile the refugees and their children flow to and fro, the bombs come and go. We line up to place flowers on our latest dead and then pay our taxes for more wars in the Middle East. More young ‘volunteers’ will become cheap fodder to fight in our wars; some will return and plant more bombs, so we can mourn some more at patriotic vigils -protected by armed battalions…

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

US drone strikes kill 17 Afghan civilians: Paper

Press TV – April 8, 2016

US airstrikes in Afghan province of Paktika have killed at least 17 civilians, local officials and elders say, rejecting official American and Afghan claims that only militants had been killed.

They were killed during three drone strikes carried out by the US in the area of Nematabad on Wednesday, former Afghan senator Hajji Muhammad Hasan said, quoted by The New York Times.

The first raid struck a vehicle carrying a local elder, Hajji Rozuddin, who was on his way to mediate a land dispute in a tribe with four bodyguards and seven other people, the report said.

“Hajji Rozuddin was strongly anti-Taliban,” said Hasan. “He carried bodyguards because the Taliban were trying to kill him.”

“The car was completely destroyed, and there was little of the bodies left,” he said.

Soon after the attack, another strike killed two people who had come to help recover the bodies from the truck after the first attack, said Hasan.

A third attack also killed three other civilians on top of a small hill. They were trying “to see what had happened and why the previous two men had not returned already,” he explained.

Governor Shaista Khan Akhtarzada also confirmed that an investigation team had determined that “the people killed were civilians.”

The US military had said on Thursday that two Wednesday airstrikes in Paktika killed 14 militants.

“There was no evidence to indicate that there were any civilian casualties at all,” Charles Cleveland, a spokesman for the United States military in Afghanistan, said.

Cleveland claimed that most of the “just under a hundred” US strikes in Afghanistan from January 1 to March 31 were focused on Daesh militants in eastern Nangarhar Province.

Officials and residents said that such airstrikes have been relatively rare in Paktika in recent months, even as the United States has intensified its air operations elsewhere in the country.

In January, US President Barack Obama authorized American forces to target Daesh terrorists emerging in Nangarhar.

Although Taliban leaders have warned Daesh against “waging a parallel insurgency in Afghanistan,” the Takfiri group has been trying to expand its outreach there and is reported to have between 1,000 to 3,000 terrorists on its payroll.

Afghanistan is gripped by insecurity 14 years after the United States and its allies attacked the country as part of Washington’s so-called war on terror.

April 8, 2016 Posted by | Progressive Hypocrite, War Crimes | , | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries     Next Entries »