Despite Ankara’s declared commitment to fight Daesh, Turkey’s relations with the terrorist group are more complex. Documents recently released by the Cumhuriyet newspaper appear to show that Turkish officers on the border with Syria frequently communicated and worked with Daesh fighters.
The transcripts are said to be part of an ongoing investigation into several individuals and their ties to the terrorist group. They reportedly detail several phone conversations between unnamed Turkish officers and Mustafa Demir, a key Daesh operative in the border region.
“The transcripts and the documents in the investigation revealed that Demir received money… from smugglers at the border and cooperated with the officers as far as [border] crossings are concerned,” the Today’s Zaman newspaper quoted the daily as saying.
The documents also appear to indicate that Turkish officers met with Demir in the border region.
Demir is said to be linked to İlhami Balı, the 33-year-old Daesh leader, who is suspected of ordering the deadliest terrorist attack in Ankara’s history. The twin bombings last October left 102 people dead and more than 400 injured.
One of the transcripts translated into English by Today’s Zaman dates back to November 25, 2014. Demir asked an unnamed officer to arrange a meeting with a commander.
“Is it possible for you to arrange that I talk with the commander here, regarding the business here? What if we could establish a contact here as we helped you…” the Daesh fighter asked a Turkish officer. “Okay. If there are any needs [as far as your request is concerned], [tell them] to inform me here,” the officer responded.
In another conversation, a Turkish officer asked Demir to meet him and his comrades at a minefield. “We have stuff; come here from that side, the men are here… Come urgently; I’m in the mine [field] with a torch. Come running.”
“Okay, big brother, [I’m] coming,” Demir answered.The United States and other stakeholders have repeatedly urged Ankara to seal Turkey’s porous border with Syria, which Daesh, al-Nusra Front and other terrorist groups use to smuggle fighters, weapons and supplies in and out of Syria. The Turkish government has so far failed to deliver on the promise.
Access to unlimited supplies and recruits delivered to the Syrian battlefield through Turkey is largely seen as the key source of Daesh’s resilience and longevity. Ankara’s inability to secure the 60-mile border region has prompted many to question Erdogan’s true agenda with regard to the deadly Syrian conflict.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly asked the UK government to have hundreds of posters protesting Israeli occupation of Palestine removed from the Tube.
The Haaretz newspaper reported Tuesday that the Israeli prime minister himself had asked that the posters, which may have been posted in their hundreds, be removed.
The posters appeared on Sunday as part of a mass fly-posting effort to mark the annual Israeli Apartheid Week.
The posters on the London Underground trains hit out at a number of targets, including controversial UK private military firm G4S, which is involved in the running of Israeli prisons.
Transport for London (TfL) said that the posters would be taken down.
“It is flyposting and therefore an act of vandalism, which we take extremely seriously,” A TfL spokesman told the Evening Standard.
“Our staff and contractors are working to immediately remove any found on our network,” the spokesman added.
Some Jewish community groups said that the posters amounted to “smears” against Israel.
“These posters are awful smears that do nothing to contribute to peace and dialogue, placing significant strains on inter-community relations across London,” a London Jewish Forum spokesman told Haaretz.
“They are an act of vandalism, seeking to undermine the UK’s relationship with Israel and designed to foster discomfort. We welcome Transport for London’s commitment to quickly remove them.”
The posters were reported Monday as the Palestinian envoy to the UK Manuel Hassassian told the Independent newspaper that the decision to invite Israeli parliament speaker Yuli Edelstein to address an event held in the UK Parliament risked legitimizing Israeli expansionism, given Edelstein’s background.
“Mr Edelstein lives on an illegal Israeli settlement built on Palestinian land and he publicly opposes Palestinian statehood,” Hassassian said.
Edelstein is due to address the British Group Inter-Parliamentary Union in March.
Washington insiders were abuzz over a revelation that Bernie Sanders had once advocated abolishing the CIA. Blasting Sanders for his ancient argument, the Clinton campaign forgot to mention that many illustrious US leaders have shared the same intention.
While campaigning for the US Senate in 1974, a 33-year-old Sanders called the Central Intelligence Agency “a dangerous institution that has got to go,” describing it as a tool of US corporate interests accountable to no one “except right-wing lunatics who use it to prop up fascist dictatorships.”
This is according to a story in Politico, which called Sanders an “extreme leftist” and prominently featured a quote from one of Hillary Clinton campaign advisers – who also happens to be the former chief of staff to a CIA director.
“Abolishing the CIA in the 1970s would have unilaterally disarmed America during the height of the Cold War and at a time when terrorist networks across the Middle East were gaining strength,” the paper quoted Jeremy Bash, former chief of staff to Leon Panetta. Panetta was CIA director between 2009 and 2011 and Bill Clinton’s chief of staff in 1994-97. “If this is a window into Sanders’ thinking, it reinforces the conclusion that he’s not qualified to be commander in chief.”
Arguing that the CIA was a vital US weapon at the time does not match up with historical facts, however. The Agency was famously caught off-guard by the Cold War’s sudden and peaceful resolution – an end in which it played no part.
“We should not gloss over the enormity of this failure to forecast the magnitude of the Soviet crisis,” former CIA Director Stansfield Turner wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1991. “Yet I never heard a suggestion from the CIA, or the intelligence arms of the departments of Defense or State, that numerous Soviets recognized a growing, systemic economic problem.”
One of the CIA’s many dubious Cold War activities was to support Islamist rebels in Afghanistan, among them international volunteers that included a young Osama bin Laden.
Wanting to dismantle the CIA was hardly a radical notion in 1974, Jon Schwarz of the Interceptpointed out. After the agency’s fiasco with the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, President John F. Kennedy said he would like to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.” At the same time, the State Department proposed stripping the agency of its covert powers.
Following JFK’s assassination in 1963, former president Harry Truman wrote that he would “like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President… and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere.”
In his 1969 memoir, Present at the Creation, Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, wrote that he had the “gravest forebodings” about the CIA when it was established, and warned the president that “as set up neither he, the National Security Council, nor anyone else would be in a position to know what it was doing or to control it.”
While that may sound like ancient history, there is the matter of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the Democratic Senator from New York, who also called for abolition of the CIA and even sponsored a bill in 1995 to that effect. Hillary Clinton would be elected to Moynihan’s seat in 2000, and praised him upon his death in 2003 as a “man of passion and understanding about what really makes this country great,” Schwarz notes.
Mere months after Bernie Sanders made his “extremist” call for the elimination of the CIA, US lawmakers set up congressional committees to rein in runaway intelligence agencies. The Pike Committee on the House side and the Church Committee on the Senate side worked to tighten oversight on the CIA, NSA, and other parts of the US intelligence apparatus, which had, until then, been operating unchecked.
When asked by Wolf Blitzer in January if she was “the establishment,” Hillary Clinton replied: “I just don’t understand what that means. He’s been in Congress, he’s been elected to office a lot longer than I have.” Several weeks later, her Democratic primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders made the case in a debate that the issue was who had the support of more powerful elected officials, arguing that Clinton has the support of “more governors, mayors, members of the House.”
Clinton framed the notion of “the establishment” as consisting solely of political bodies of elected officials. Sanders simply argued that a better indicator of the establishment is one’s power and influence within political circles.
As part of the “two for the price of one” that Bill Clinton promised during his rise to the Presidency, Hillary is forced to hide from her role in the creation of the neoliberal New Democrats, the dominant faction of the party. During their joint reign in the White House, the Clintons steered the party far to the right with their draconian criminal justice measures, assault on welfare, liberalization of trade, and deregulation of banking. Their cronies continue to staff the highest ranks of the party and the Obama administration.
Clinton, in a desperate piece of deflection, resorted to playing the gender card: “Senator Sanders is the only person who I think would characterize me, a woman running to be the first woman president, as exemplifying the establishment.” This fatuous identity politics is meant to distract from her decades-long tenure at the top of the political system and collusion with those who exercise control over it. Of course, as Bernie points out, Hillary most represents and enjoys the support of the Democratic faction of the political establishment.
But framing the issue as simply a matter of party politics and the electoral system misses the point. Elected officials are merely the public face of the establishment. The broader establishment is the elite class that determines economic policy.
There is no building that says “Establishment” on the door, but there is a century-old institution made up of wealthy and influential representatives of business, Wall Street, corporate law, academia and government. It is a creation of the elite ruling class to ensure their control over shaping policy for their own benefit. Their decisions result in funneling money – and, hence, power – into the hands of a small percentage of capitalists who exercise control over the political process in a positive feedback loop.
In their book Imperial Brain Trust, Laurence Shoup and William Minter write that: “The Council on Foreign Relations is a key part of a network of people and institutions usually referred to by friendly observers as ‘the establishment.’ ” [1]
The Council was founded after World War I in response to growing domestic social tensions and labor unrest. Socialism was gaining in popularity among the American public in an economic environment marred by exploitative working conditions and skyrocketing inequality.
The Council’s mission was to carry out long-term planning for a national agenda. The agenda was meant to undermine a domestic-oriented program that would involve collective decision making to achieve self-sufficiency, and thereby reduce the country’s dependence on foreign resources, trade, and other governments.
Some of the many multinationals that subscribed to the CFR’s Corporation Service included General Motors, Exxon, Ford, Mobil, United States Steel, Texaco, First National City Bank and IBM. [2]
“The Council, dominated by corporate leaders, saw expansion of American trade, investment, and population as the solution to domestic problems. It thought in terms of preservation of the status quo at home, and this involved overseas expansion,” Shoup and Minter write. [3]
This imperialist agenda was achieved through manufacturing the consent of the masses (what they called “public enlightenment”), as well as developing foreign policies and ensuring government officials supported and executed these policies.
The Council has been remarkably successful in its mission. It has achieved a monopoly over foreign policy planning, and become thoroughly integrated with the government that carries out policy prescriptions. Entire administrations have drawn their foreign policy officials from the ranks of the Council. There is a steady two-way flow of personnel between the Council and government.
Both Bill and Chelsea are current members of the CFR. While Hillary herself is not a member, she is no doubt influenced by her immediate family’s ties to the Council. Additionally, her role as Secretary of State involved close collaboration with the Council, as she made clear in a 2009 speech at the Council’s office in Washington:
“I am delighted to be here in these new headquarters. I have been often to – I guess – the mothership in New York City. But it’s good to have an outpost of the Council right here down the street from the State Department. We get a lot of advice from the Council, so this will mean I won’t have as hard a go to be told what we should be doing, and how we should think about the future.” One of many people whose career was launched by his association with the Council was Henry Kissinger. In the late 1950s, he was appointed the director of a study group on nuclear weapons, in collaboration with several of the Council’s directors. The result was a book authored by Kissinger, Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy.
Kissinger went on to serve as possibly the most influential foreign policy official in history under Richard Nixon (and later Gerald Ford), as both Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. He helped carry out war crimes when he transmitted President Nixon’s order “anything that flies on anything that moves” to General Alexander Haig, directing a massive, secret bombing campaign of Cambodia hidden from Congress and the American public.
Kissinger’s tenure also saw him intimately involved with the military coup led by General Pinochet to overthrow and kill democratically-elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973; the invasion by Indonesia of East Timor in 1975 and the subsequent genocide against the native East Timorese; the South African invasion of Angola in 1975 and attempted installation of a puppet ruler amenable to the apartheid regime; and the Dirty War in Argentina in which leftist opposition members were killed an disappeared.
Rather than being subjected to prosecution, or even suffering a loss of prestige, Kissinger has seen his reputation rise in the decades following his genocidal actions, whose strategy was in line with the designs peddled by the Council.
Clinton wrote that “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” She noted that they share “a belief in the indispensability of continued American leadership in service of a just and liberal order.”
Clinton’s abstract and idealistic rhetoric exemplifies the bipartisan, imperialist agenda formulated and propagated by the Council on Foreign Relations. The humanitarianism is a guise for the pursuit of United States political and economic hegemony across the world. The people who belong to this elite club have internalized the imperialist worldview that the U.S. is an “indispensable nation” that upholds “a just and liberal” world order, and use this belief to rationalize their Machiavellian exertions of power abroad.
The establishment is not made up of any one party, gender, or government organization. It is made up of people who are involved, directly or peripherally, in formulating and carrying out the plans of a tiny elite class – plans that ignore the 99 percent of the Americans in whose names they act, and the billions of people whose lives their decisions impact. There is no one whose social relationships and professional career typifies this more than Hillary Rodham Clinton.
References
[1] Shoup, Laurence H. and William Minter. Imperial Brain Trust: The Council on Foreign Relations & United States Foreign Policy. Lincoln, NE: Authors Choice Press, 1977/2004. (pg. 9)
US President Barack Obama’s administration has failed to implement reforms regarding the controversial drone policy to make it more transparent, accountable and consistent with national security interests, according to a report by the US think tank Stimson Center published Tuesday.
“Little progress has been made during the past year and a half to enact reforms that establish a more sensible US drone policy consistent with America’s long-term security and economic interests. The lack of a clear drone policy risks leaving a legacy on drone use that is based on secrecy and a lack of accountability that undermines efforts to support the international rule of law,” the report reads.
In 2014, the Stimson Task Force, comprising senior military and intelligence officials, recommended public disclosure of targeted drone strikes, thorough review of past and present drone strikes and their effectiveness and detailed reports explaining the legal basis of the US lethal drone program, among other recommendations.
The proposals were later backed by UN experts, including the adviser to Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, Sarah Knuckey.
The US military has increasingly relied on drones to conduct operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Syria and Iraq. Critics have slammed the practice for resulting in a significant number of civilian deaths and the destruction of infrastructure unrelated to terrorists.
Data collected by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism shows that US drone strikes have killed up to 1,000 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen over the past 10 years.
A report on war crimes committed by Kiev’s army and militia in eastern Ukraine is now available in English. It’s compiled by Russia’s Investigative Committee and covers 54 criminal cases.
The report, entitled ‘The Tragedy of South-Eastern Ukraine: The White Book of Crimes’, was initially published last year in Russian and edited by Investigative Committee Chairman Aleksandr Bastrykin.
Some 2,500 volumes of evidence collected for the book include testimonies of over 100,000 witnesses.
“The book provides evidence of international and transnational crimes committed on the territory of Ukraine, collected by Russia’s Investigative Committee dealing with the relevant criminal proceedings, as well as records of international organizations on the matter and comments of scholars specializing in international law,” said committee spokesman Vladimir Markin.
Wednesday’s presentation of the book in English was aimed at attracting the attention of the international public to the problem of combating international crimes in Ukraine. Representatives of 14 foreign states, as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross and the International Organization for Migration were invited to take part.
“The presentation highlighted the discoveries made by the Investigative Committee during its probe into the war crimes and other offences against the peace and security of the people in Ukraine, including the attack on the Russian Embassy in Kiev,” Markin added.
During the presentation, the Committee exposed those involved in the alleged crimes, as well as the sources they based the report on. Among other issues, they raised the question of transferring the collected evidence to the international justice authorities, so that they could decide whether Kiev should be brought to justice.
Markin stressed that the electronic versions of both Russian and English editions of the publication will be available on the official website of the Investigative Committee in the nearest future.
The agency dealing with the war crimes in Donbass was created as part of Russia’s Investigative Committee in 2014. It works closely with all departments that operate in areas where the majority of refugees from the southeast of Ukraine arrive in Russia.
Kiev’s “special operation” in the east of Ukraine aimed at suppressing the protest movement in the Donbass Region has been in progress since the middle of April 2014.
The operation brought about numerous civilian casualties and the general destruction of local infrastructure: according to the UN figures for December 2015, more than 9,000 people died in the conflict and some 20 thousand more were injured. Over 1.3 million lost their homes, as stated in the previous UN report published in August.
A George Washington University professor has overtly suggested that Israel should “flatten Beirut” — Lebanon’s capital with around 1 million people — in order to allegedly destroy the missiles of Lebanon-based resistance group Hezbollah.
Professor Amitai Etzioni, the prominent American scholar who teaches international relations — and who has taught at a variety of prestigious US universities, including Columbia, Harvard and Berkeley, and who served as a senior advisor in President Jimmy Carter’s administration — made this proposal in an op-ed in Haaretz, the leading English-language Israeli newspaper.
The newspaper, also known as “The New York Times of Israel” represents the liberal wing of Israel’s increasingly far-right politics.
The author wrote a few op-eds that held blunt and aggressive titles; the latest of which originally used the headline, “Should Israel Flatten Beirut to Destroy Hezbollah’s Missiles?” but then was modified to “Should Israel Consider Using Devastating Weapons against Hezbollah Missiles?”
Etzioni cites Israel’s chief of staff, who claims that most of Hezbollah’s missiles are in private homes, an accusation that Israel alleges against all resistance groups in the region to justify Israel’s attacks on civilian areas. But this claim, according to sources, is to justify any Israeli attack on civilian areas, adding that “it has been proven numerous occasions that there were no weapons in the civilian areas Israel bombed in Gaza for instance.”
Etzioni suggests that there can be many Israeli casualties in case Israeli soldiers take part in raids on the alleged houses, explaining “I asked two American military officers what other options Israel has. They both pointed to Fuel-Air Explosives (FAE). These are bombs that disperse an aerosol cloud of fuel which is ignited by a detonator, producing massive explosions. The resulting rapidly expanding wave flattens all buildings within a considerable range.”
Etzioni concludes his piece implying Israel has no other option but to bomb the city of Beirut. “In this way, one hopes, that there be a greater understanding, if not outright acceptance, of the use of these powerful weapons, given that nothing else will do,” he pointed out.
Such claims are similar to the ones Israel used during its 2006 aggression on Lebanon, in which it justified killing large numbers of civilians and dropping over a million cluster bombs by dubiously claiming innocents were being used as human shields.
The article triggered the fury of several Lebanese authors and activists who know the truth is otherwise. “I’m just speechless. It sounds ISIS-like, just eradicating an entire community of people,” wrote Kareem Chehayeb, a Lebanese journalist and founder and editor of the website Beirut Syndrome.
Also, Belén Fernández published an article responding to Etzioini’s op-ed, titled “No, Israel Should Not Flatten Beirut.” In which she pointed out “that Israel has already flattened large sections of Lebanon, in Beirut and beyond.”
She recalls visiting a young man in a south Lebanon village near the Israeli border who “described the pain in 2006 of encountering detached heads and other body parts belonging to former neighbors, blasted apart by bombs or crushed in collapsed homes.”
Etzioni is considered to be one of the prominent American scholars; he was among the 100 most-cited American intellectuals. He has also served as the president of the American Sociological Association. Etzioni served in the Haganah — the army that formed Israel after violently expelling three-quarters of the indigenous Palestinian population — from 1946 to 1948, and then served in the Israeli military from 1948 to 1950.
Hezbollah, the Islamic Resistance group in Lebanon, on the contrary to the claims of Etzion, does not involve civilians and civilian areas in war. The resistance movement does not justify deliberate attacks on civilian areas in wars and does not overpass ethics of war.
Also today, the same group that has been inscribed on the US and Europe black list is the same group that has been protecting the Syrian civilians and fighting a pre-emptive war to prevent Lebanon from being trapped.
In 2014, an anonymous European intelligence officer had said in an interview with al-Akhbar newspaper that “Hezbollah is fighting a battle against terrorism on behalf of the world, so it must be supported, at least in this confrontation”.
“I can say today that the resistance fighters are defending Europe,” he added.
CIA-linked private “security” companies are fighting in Yemen for the US-backed Saudi military campaign. Al-Qaeda-affiliated mercenaries are also being deployed. Melding private firms with terror outfits should not surprise. It’s all part of illegal war making.
Western news media scarcely report on the conflict in Yemen, let alone the heavy deployment of Western mercenaries in the fighting there. In the occasional Western report on Al-Qaeda and related terror groups in Yemen, it is usually in the context of intermittent drone strikes carried out by the US, or with the narrative that these militants are “taking advantage” of the chaos “to expand” their presence in the Arabian Peninsula, as reported here by the Washington Post.
This bifurcated Western media view of Yemen belies a more accurate and meaningful perspective, which is that the US-backed Saudi bombing campaign is actually coordinated with an on-the-ground military force that comprises regular troops, private security firms and Al-Qaeda type mercenaries redeployed from Syria.
There can be little doubt in Syria – despite Western denials – that the so-called Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)) jihadists and related Al-Qaeda brigades in Jabhat al-Nusra, Jaish al-Fateh, Ahrar ash-Sham and so on, have been infiltrated, weaponized and deployed for the objective of regime-change by the US and its allies. If that is true for Syria, then it is also true for Yemen. Indeed, the covert connection becomes even more apparent in Yemen.
Last November, the New York Timesconfirmed what many Yemeni sources had long been saying. That the US-backed Saudi military coalition trying to defeat a popular uprising was relying on mercenaries supplied by private security firms tightly associated with the Pentagon and the CIA.
The mercenaries were recruited by companies linked to Erik Prince, the former US Special Forces commando-turned businessman, who set up Blackwater Worldwide. The latter and its re-branded incarnations, Xe Services and Academi, remain a top private security contractor for the Pentagon, despite employees being convicted for massacring civilians while on duty in Iraq in 2007. In 2010, for example, the Obama administration awarded the contractor more than $200 million in security and CIA work.
Erik Prince, who is based primarily in Virginia where he runs other military training centers, set up a mercenary hub in the United Arab Emirates five years ago with full support from the royal rulers of the oil-rich state. The UAE Company took the name Reflex Responses or R2. The NY Times reported that some 400 mercenaries were dispatched from the Emirates’ training camps to take up assignment in Yemen. Hundreds more are being trained up back in the UAE for the same deployment.
This is just one stream of several “soldiers of fortune” going into Yemen to fight against the uprising led by Houthi rebels, who are in alliance with remnants of the national army. That insurgency succeeded in kicking out the US and Saudi-backed president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi in early 2015. Hadi has been described as a foreign puppet, who presided over a corrupt regime of cronyism and vicious repression.
Since last March, the Saudis and other Persian Gulf Arab states have been bombing Yemen on a daily basis in order to overthrow the Houthi-led rebellion and reinstall the exiled Hadi.
Washington and Britain have supplied warplanes and missiles, as well as logistics, in the Saudi-led campaign, which has resulted in thousands of civilian deaths. The involvement of Blackwater-type mercenaries – closely associated with the Pentagon – can also be seen as another form of American contribution to the Saudi-led campaign.
The mercenaries sent from the UAE to Yemen are fighting alongside other mercenaries that the Saudis have reportedly enlisted from Sudan, Eritrea and Morocco. Most are former soldiers, who are paid up to $1,000 a week while serving in Yemen. Many of the Blackwater-connected fighters from the UAE are recruited from Latin America: El Salvador, Panama and primarily Colombia, which is considered to have good experience in counter-insurgency combat.
Also among the mercenaries are American, British, French and Australian nationals. They are reportedly deployed in formations along with regular troops from Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain and the UAE.
In recent months, the Houthi rebels (also known as Ansarullah) and their allies from the Yemeni army – who formed a united front called the Popular Committees – have inflicted heavy casualties on the US-Saudi coalition. Hundreds of troops have been reportedly killed in gun battles in the Yemeni provinces of Marib, in the east, and Taiz, to the west. The rebels’ use of Tochka ballistic missiles has had particularly devastating results.
So much so that it is reported that the Blackwater-affiliated mercenaries have “abandoned the Taiz front” after suffering heavy casualties over the last two months. “Most of the Blackwater operatives killed in Yemen were believed to be from Colombia and Argentina; however, there were also casualties from the United States, Australia and France,” Masdar News reports.
Into this murky mix are added extremist Sunni militants who have been dispatched to Yemen from Syria. They can be said to be closely related, if not fully integrated, with Al-Qaeda or IS in that they profess allegiance to a “caliphate” based on a fundamentalist Wahhabi, or Takfiri, ideology.
These militants began arriving in Yemen in large numbers within weeks of Russia’s military intervention in Syria beginning at the end of September, according to Yemeni Army spokesman Brigadier General Sharaf Luqman. Russian air power immediately began inflicting severe losses on the extremists there. Senior Yemeni military sources said that hundreds of IS-affiliated fighters were flown into Yemen’s southern port city of Aden onboard commercial aircraft belonging to Turkey, Qatar and the UAE.
Soon after the militants arrived, Aden residents said the city had descended into a reign of terror. The integrated relationship with the US-Saudi coalition can be deduced from the fact that Aden has served as a key forwarding military base for the coalition. Indeed, it was claimed by Yemen military sources that the newly arrived Takfiri militants were thence dispatched to the front lines in Taiz and Marib, where the Pentagon-affiliated mercenaries and Saudi troops were also assigned.
It is true that the Pentagon at times wages war on Al-Qaeda-related terrorists. The US airstrike in Libya on Friday, which killed some 40 IS operatives at an alleged training camp, is being trumpeted by Washington as a major blow against terrorism. And in Yemen since 2011, the CIA and Pentagon have killed many Al-Qaeda cadres in drone strikes, with the group’s leader being reportedly assassinated last June in a US operation.
Nevertheless, as the broader US-Saudi campaign in Yemen illustrates, the outsourcing of military services to private mercenaries in conjunction with terrorist militia is evidently an arm of covert force for Washington.
This is consistent with how the same groups have been deployed in Syria for the purpose of regime change there.
The blurring of lines between regular military, private security contractors with plush offices in Virginia and Abu Dhabi, and out-and-out terror groups is also appropriate. Given the nature of the illegal wars being waged, it all boils down to state-sponsored terrorism in the end.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master’s graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
Anyone who worries about Turkish President Erdogan’s uncertain grip on reality will have had those worries confirmed by comments he has recently made about Turkey’s role in the 2003 Iraq invasion.
If there is one thing most people around the world agree about it is that George W. Bush’s war against Iraq was a disaster.
Leaders and countries that involved themselves in the war today regret doing so. In Britain former Prime Minister Tony Blair has seen his reputation destroyed because of his role in the war.
By contrast US allies who held aloof from the war thank their lucky stars they did so, whilst in the US Obama’s successful run for the Presidency was in part at least because of his opposition to the war.
One world leader begs to differ: Step forward Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
He says he regrets the Turkish parliament’s vote in 2002 in the run-up to the 2003 war to block the US military’s invasion of Iraq through Turkey.
Turkey has the right to carry out military operations not only in Syria, but in any other country, which is hosting terror groups that threaten the Turkish state, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.
“Turkey has every right to conduct operations in Syria and the places where terror organizations are nested with regards to the struggle against the threats that Turkey faces,” Erdogan was cited as saying by the Hurriyet newspaper Sunday.
Ankara’s stance has “absolutely nothing to do with the sovereignty rights of the states that can’t take control of their territorial integrity,” the president insisted.
“On the contrary, this has to do with the will Turkey shows to protect its sovereignty rights,” he added.
The Turkish president used an unexpected platform to make his hawkish remarks as he visited an event celebrating the inclusion of Turkey’s southeastern province of Gaziantep on the list of UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network in the gastronomy category.
Erdogan warned that his government will treat “attitudes to prevent our country’s right [to self-defense] directly as an initiative against Turkey’s entity – no matter where it comes from.”
“No one can restrict Turkey’s right to self-defense in the face of terror acts that have targeted Turkey; they cannot prevent [Turkey] from using it,” he added.
The Turkish forces have been shelling Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG) forces, which Ankara views as a terrorist organization, as well as government troops on Syrian territory since mid-February.
The bombings of YPG targets, the military wing of the Democratic Union Party (PYD), continue despite Turkey’s ally, the US, considering the Kurdish fighters an important partner in fighting Islamic State (IS, Daesh, formerly ISIS/ISIL) .
There were also reports of dozens of Turkish military vehicles crossing into Kurdish northern Syria, with servicemen digging tranches in the area.
In December, Ankara also deployed 150 soldiers backed by artillery and around 25 tanks to northern Iraq, without consent from the government in Baghdad.
“Turkey will use its right to expand its rules of engagement beyond [responding to] actual attacks against it and to encompass all terror threats, including PYD and Daesh, in particular,” Erdogan said Sunday as cited by Anadolu news agency.
28 people, mainly Turkish military, were killed and 61 other injured in a suicide bombing Ankara on Wednesday.
Despite the Kurdistan Freedom Hawks (TAK) militants group claiming responsibility for the attack, Turkey claims that YPG was also involved.
In an attempt to protect itself, Turkey will treat anyone, who opposes it as a “terrorist and treat them accordingly,” the President said.
“I especially want this to be known this way,” he added.
Erdogan also slammed the countries, who criticized Ankara for their incursion into Iraq and Syria, calling them “disingenuous” due to “preaching only patience and resoluteness” to Turkey, but acting in a completely different manner when attacked themselves.
The Libyan interim government has condemned the US airstrike on a suspected Islamic State training camp in Sabratha in which two abducted Serbian embassy staff were killed, calling the unsanctioned bombardment a grave violation of its sovereignty.
Libya’s interim government issued a statement saying that it “strongly condemns the airstrikes carried out by the US Air Force at certain positions in the town of Sabratha on Friday morning, February 19, 2016, without any coordination or consultation with the interim Libyan government.”
“Any interference, similar to the one that has taken place, will be considered an open and flagrant violation of the sovereignty of the Libyan state and international law,” the statement said.
The interim government said that it values the foreign assistance it receives in the war on terror, but added that “any military or political interference into Libyan affairs should be performed in a legal way through parliament and the newly formed government.”
In the statement, the government also said it “places the responsibility for the worsening of the domestic economic and social situation, as well as the security situation that contributed to the spread of these organizations (Islamic State) in our country, on the international community.”
The Friday airstrike carried out by the US in western Libya reportedly killed more than 40 people and was hailed as a major success by the Pentagon.
However, two Serbian hostages – embassy communications chief Sladjana Stankovic and her driver Jovica Stepic – also died in the bombardment, which came just as ransom negotiations had gotten underway with the kidnappers.
Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic said that Belgrade “demanded explanations from the US about whether they knew that foreigners were present at the site. They said they didn’t.”
Stankovic and Stepic were abducted in the northwestern coastal city of Sabratha on November 8, 2015, when their car was hijacked by gunmen after becoming separated from a convoy carrying Serbia’s ambassador to Libya.
The circumstances of the two Serbs’ alleged deaths are reminiscent of those of Italian Giovanni Lo Porto and American Warren Weinstein, who were killed by an alleged US drone strike on a Taliban compound in January, 2015.
By Stephen Sniegoski | My Catbird Seat | June 12, 2010
The claim that Israel serves as a valuable ally for the United States is made by both pro-Zionists and much of the anti-war and anti-Zionist Left that is influenced by Noam Chomsky. As a result of the Gaza flotilla massacre, which has caused a world-wide uproar against Israel, the value of Israel to the United States is being publicly questioned in more mainstream foreign policy forums. … continue
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