Q: are we not MENA? A: we are the rolling middle east, north africa and other geopolitical hot spots thread 2016!

Another MSF bombing:

BREAKING: Airstrikes have hit an MSF-supported hospital in Dara’a, southern Syria, killing 3 people & wounding at least 6 including a nurse

holy shit

about the ceasefire that is

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/kerry-searches-for-common-ground-on-the-syrian-conflict/2016/02/11/1bc6482c-d042-11e5-90d3-34c2c42653ac_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-banner-main_ussyria-505pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

er "cessation of hostilities"

“I can’t stop Putin,” he said of Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Can you say no to Putin?” he said, referring to the United States and its allies.

looooooool

I know rite. Def seems like Assad/Russia are holding all the cards - achieved enough recent victories that negotiating a deal looks like an acceptable outcome. Humanitarian aid being opened up is definitely a plus though, come on.

No, for sure. But I don't get if this is just a glorified surrender of moderate rebel groups to Assad, or just a temporary humanitarian ceasefire and they'll start again afterward.

The goal is to ensure that charges of violations would be directed to the committee, rather than responded to in kind. Any fighting group that signed on to and complied with a cease-fire would be exempt from airstrikes. It presumes that the Islamic State and Jabhat al-Nusra, considered by all parties to be terrorist groups, would not participate. Opposition groups embedded with al-Nusra in the anti-Assad fight would have to decide whether to sever those links and separate themselves geographically from the militants.

it seems like a good idea but only makes sense if you think this is just FSA giving up, right?

kerry says despite assad gains near aleppo in recent weeks, that difference does not end the war, does not mean assad secure in long run - so temporary. it'll be interesting to see if this lasts.

Have we mentioned that Saudi Arabia committed to sending troops (to fight ISIS, of course!).

Seems proxy wasn't enough.

i've been thinking a lot recently about how there hadn't been revised numbers for syria casualties in quite a while - i kept only seeing ones from 2014. Syrian Center for Policy Research says the toll is now 470,000.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2016/02/john_kerry_s_syria_deal_may_only_lock_in_gains_for_bashar_al_assad_and_russia.html

Secretary of State John Kerry said at a press conference in Munich that the “cessation of hostilities,” which will begin in a week, does not apply to the fight against ISIS and the other main jihadist group, al-Nusra Front. But that is not quite what the document says. The document says that the pause in fighting—and the signatories’ support for “the agreement and implementation of a nationwide ceasefire”—does not apply to ISIS, al-Nusra Front, "or other groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United Nations Security Council.” (Italics added.)

Here’s the thing: The Security Council’s members are still divided on which groups in Syria to tag as “terrorist.” In line with Kerry’s remarks, the United States defines the term to include ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra. But Russia broadens its coverage to any group fighting on the ground in Syria, other than the Syrian army and its allies.

In other words, Russia (and Iran and Syria, among others) could properly read the document as allowing the fight to continue not only against ISIS and al-Nusra Front, but also against the Kurds, the various U.S.-supported rebels—any armed group that opposes the Syrian military or threatens Bashar al-Assad’s regime.

That is the same wording as the resolution against ISIS, Al-Nusra, etc the UN brought in after the Paris attacks. The ISSG designates the groups and the SC ratifies that designation. It looks like Kaplan thinks that means any group a member of the SC thinks is a terror organisation but it doesn't.

Egypt apparently feeling bold enough to extend state murder to Italians:

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/italy-mourns-premier-matteo-renzi-demands-truth-from-egypt-in-slaying-of-italian-student-giulio/

The car accident theory might have been more convincing had they not burned him with cigarettes and pulled his fingernails out first.

If this Iraqi dam collapses, half a million people could die

second MSF hospital bombed this week

When Russia bombs an MSF hospital, it's a war crime, but when the U.S. does, it's the fog of war.

otoh no one seems to care about russia bombing MSF hospitals repeatedly and there was a huge outcry when the US did it, and i haven't seen a lot of screaming about war crimes from the state dept so ya know

The UK, France and Turkey have all called it a war crime. Not massively surprising the state department is keeping quiet beyond condemning it "in the strongest possible terms". It isn't entirely clear whether it was Russia or Syria that did it though.

Anyway, big explosion in Ankara this evening.

Car bomb less than 1km from Parliament. Seems to have been mainly targeting a military vehicle. At least five dead and that is expected to rise.

Death toll now 18.

EXPERIENCE

Bombs dropped by fighter jets are pulverizing Yemen’s architectural history, possibly in violation of international humanitarian law.

A few years earlier, as secretary of state, Hillary Clinton made weapons transfer to the Saudi government a “top priority,” according to her closest military aide.

And now, newly released emails show that her aides kept her well-informed of the approval process for a 2011 sale worth $29.4 billion to Boeing of up to 84 advanced F-15SA fighters, along with upgrades to the Saudi’s pre-existing fleet of 70 F-15 aircraft, and munitions, spare parts, training, maintenance, and logistics.

The deal was finalized on Christmas Eve 2011. Afterwards, Jake Sullivan, then Clinton’s deputy chief of staff and now a senior policy adviser on her presidential campaign, sent her a celebratory e-mail string topped with the chipper message: “FYI – good news.”

The email string was part of a new batch of emails from Clinton’s private server, made public on Friday evening as the result of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.

One American official, whose name is redacted in the emails, said he had just received confirmation that Prince Salman, now the King of Saudi Arabia but at the time the senior Saudi liaison approving weapons deal, had “signed the F-15SA LOA today” and would send scanned documents the following day.

“Not a bad Christmas present,” he added.

https://theintercept.com/2016/02/22/saudi-christmas-present/

Brits selling to Saudi Arabia too, but not as much as the US is.

Britain sold more weapons to Saudi Arabia than to any other country. Saudi Arabia is also the biggest US arms market and buys more American arms than British, the report shows.

...

“A coalition of Arab states is putting mainly US- and European-sourced advanced arms into use in Yemen,” said Pieter Wezeman, senior researcher with Sipri’s arms and military expenditure programme. “Despite low oil prices, large deliveries of arms to the Middle East are scheduled to continue as part of contracts signed in the past five years.”

The report says Saudi Arabia is the world’s second largest weapons importer after India.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/22/saudi-arabia-surge-arms-imports-middle-east

Brits selling to Saudi Arabia too, but not as much as the US is.

If they had as many weapons to sell as the US they would be.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/world/middleeast/un-finds-deliberate-destruction-of-hospitals-in-syria.html

Horrible, and sadly, not surprising

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5AqeqAQ1ILI

this is incredible to me in the worst way http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/26/all-adult-males-in-one-iranian-village-executed-for-drug-offences-official-says

Iran remains a prolific executioner, second only to China.

China has fewer executions per capita.

Iran is widely suspected of using drugs convictions to punish people associated or thought to be associated with the Baloch insurgency so it's probably as least as likely that would have been the motivation behind executing large numbers of people from certain villages. It is also possible that it's hyperbole designed to reinforce the public perception of links between Baloch separatists and the smuggling of drugs from Afghanistan / Pakistan.

Iran apparently uses the same grounds with homosexuality convictions

Clinton and Libya

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/us/politics/hillary-clinton-libya.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/as-two-week-truce-in-syria-goes-into-effect-guns-fall-silent/2016/02/27/1adccaaa-dc16-11e5-8210-f0bd8de915f6_story.html

Its mostly worked for one day so far!

There were no planes in the skies of the much-bombed city of Aleppo for the first time in days, and residents there ventured into the streets with newfound confidence, said Ameen al-
Halabi, an activist living in a rebel-held neighborhood.

Iran election: Reformists win all 30 Tehran seats

That's the good news.

Meanwhile in Syria, after one day of the truce, Russian planes began bombing again.

Truce is in the eye of the bombardier.

Condemning an apparent airstrike in Yemen that reportedly killed at least 32 civilians in a market northeast of Sana'a on Saturday, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has called for a prompt and impartial investigation into the incident, which saw a death toll that was among the highest from a single bombing in recent months.

According to a statement issued by his spokesperson, the Secretary-General is concerned about the continuing intense airstrikes and ground fighting in Yemen despite his repeated calls for a cessation of hostilities.

To that end, he strongly condemned the apparent airstrike on 27 February that hit Khaleq market, in Nahem District in the Yemeni capita, Sana'a, killing at least 32 civilians and injuring at least 41 civilians. The death toll is among the highest from a single bombing since September 2015...

http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsId=53331#.VtSOevkrJhF

A rather critical take on US policy in Syria by Jeff Sachs:

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ending-syrian-civil-war-by-jeffrey-d-sachs-2016-02

Sachs asserts: It is sometimes claimed that the US did not act vigorously at this point. Obama’s political foes generally attack him for having taken too little action, not too much. But the US did in fact act to topple Assad, albeit mostly covertly and through allies, especially Saudi Arabia and Turkey (though neither country needed much prodding to intervene). The CIA and Saudi Arabia covertly coordinated their actions.

...The public should appreciate the dirty nature of the CIA-led fight. The US and its allies flooded Syria with Sunni jihadists, just as the US had flooded Afghanistan in the 1980s with Sunni jihadists (the Mujahideen) that later became Al Qaeda. Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the US have regularly backed some of the most violent jihadist groups in a cynical miscalculation that these proxies would do their dirty work and then somehow be pushed aside.

Was the CIA really that actively involved? I know what they have done over the years in the past, but they seem more bumbling these days

The Saudis also seemed more preoccupied with Yemen

that's Seymour Hersch's claim. i don't think it's well substantiated

The U.S. is apparently going to release the government estimates of the number of people killed in drone strikes since 2009, though it will exclude Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. They can add at least 150 today.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-35748986

Some of those 150 the other day were hit by manned aircraft

Mr Davis said the strike, by both drones and manned aircraft, took place on Saturday and targeted Raso Camp, a training facility about 120 miles (195km) north of the capital, Mogadishu.

wonder if the estimated number of civilians killed will still amount to "single digits", as brennan and feinstein have said?

xp: they seem more bumbling these days

The CIA have bumbled since the very beginning. My sense from reading Tim Weiner's Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2008) is that the inexperienced ideologues with limited language skills that occupy lower rungs of the covert ops division have always been the organization's Achilles heel. One reason there's a now national "division of labor" between the U.S., which does satellite reconnaissance, signals intelligence, and provides money, and regional proxies, which use U.S. resources to their own ends.

But don't the lower ring employees act at the direction of those on top?

so this is the big read of the day:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/04/the-obama-doctrine/471525/

only read a little bit but already interesting stuff so far:

The current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, who is the most dispositionally interventionist among Obama’s senior advisers, had argued early for arming Syria’s rebels. Power, who during this period served on the National Security Council staff, is the author of a celebrated book excoriating a succession of U.S. presidents for their failures to prevent genocide. The book, A Problem From Hell, published in 2002, drew Obama to Power while he was in the U.S. Senate, though the two were not an obvious ideological match. Power is a partisan of the doctrine known as “responsibility to protect,” which holds that sovereignty should not be considered inviolate when a country is slaughtering its own citizens. She lobbied him to endorse this doctrine in the speech he delivered when he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, but he declined. Obama generally does not believe a president should place American soldiers at great risk in order to prevent humanitarian disasters, unless those disasters pose a direct security threat to the United States.

Power sometimes argued with Obama in front of other National Security Council officials, to the point where he could no longer conceal his frustration. “Samantha, enough, I’ve already read your book,” he once snapped.

But what sealed Obama’s fatalistic view was the failure of his administration’s intervention in Libya, in 2011. That intervention was meant to prevent the country’s then-dictator, Muammar Qaddafi, from slaughtering the people of Benghazi, as he was threatening to do. Obama did not want to join the fight; he was counseled by Joe Biden and his first-term secretary of defense Robert Gates, among others, to steer clear. But a strong faction within the national-security team—Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Susan Rice, who was then the ambassador to the United Nations, along with Samantha Power, Ben Rhodes, and Antony Blinken, who was then Biden’s national-security adviser—lobbied hard to protect Benghazi, and prevailed. (Biden, who is acerbic about Clinton’s foreign-policy judgment, has said privately, “Hillary just wants to be Golda Meir.”) American bombs fell, the people of Benghazi were spared from what may or may not have been a massacre, and Qaddafi was captured and executed.

omg that golda line

This posted already?
http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/1.708132

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas turned down a U.S. peace initiative presented to him during a West Bank meeting with Vice President Joe Biden, a Palestinian newspaper reported on Thursday.

The report in the Jerusalem-based Al-Quds cited a “source familiar with the details” from Wednesday’s meeting in Ramallah, the seat of the PA.
The new American initiative to restart peace talks included designating East Jerusalem as the capital of the future Palestinian state, halting settlement construction in the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish nation-state and giving up the demand for a Palestinian right of return.

As our rabbi posted, "If this is not an acceptable point to begin negotiations then what is?"

well hello there
http://www.timesofisrael.com/arab-league-declares-hezbollah-a-terrorist-organization/