AMU Intelligence

Global Security Brief: 5-15-08

A daily, open source, around the world tour of international security-related news.
By Professor Joseph B. Varner

Global War on Terror
A U.N. rights official has alleged that foreign intelligence agents have taken part in secret raids in Afghanistan that have killed civilians. U.N. special rapporteur Philip Alston told reporters Thursday he is aware of at least three such recent raids in the country’s south and east. He said no one was taking responsibility for the killings. He said one raid in January that killed two Afghan brothers was conducted by Afghans and personnel from a U.S. Special Forces base in Kandahar. (Source: Globe and Mail)


Canada and its allies in Afghanistan face increased threats from Taliban extremists because of deals they have struck with Pakistan that could be giving the extremists havens across the border, NATO said yesterday. NATO spokesman James Appathurai said attacks in eastern Afghanistan, which borders Pakistan, rose 50 per cent in April. (Source: Canada.com)


On Wednesday, the morning after serial blasts tore through the pink-walled center of this western Indian city in one of the first terror attacks in many months, the authorities imposed a daylong curfew, the police and civic leaders shooed people off of the streets to stave off any prospect of Hindu-Muslim tension, and foreign tourists were restricted to their hotel rooms. There were no further leads on who may have been responsible for the Tuesday evening bombings, eight explosions in all, said A.S. Gill, the director general of police for Rajasthan State, of which Jaipur is the capital. “The intention obviously was to create communal disturbances,” he said, adding that nothing of the sort had yet materialized. “It’s totally peaceful.” The police were interrogating several people. The explosives had been attached to bicycles, the mangled ruins of which were found at the site. The official death toll climbed to 63 by Wednesday afternoon, according to the office of the Rajasthan State chief minister, Vasundhara Raje, with more than 100 others injured.

The bombs targeted the dense warrens of the 18th century walled city. One went off in front of a temple to the Hindu god Hanuman, which is particularly crowded with worshipers on Tuesdays. Others exploded within minutes of each other at busy intersections and in markets thronged with shoppers, including the popular Johri Bazaar, which is lined with jewelers. The dead and wounded included Hindus and Muslims. The last major bombing in India was in August, when a pair of bombs went off in an outdoor auditorium and restaurant in the southern city of Hyderabad, killing more than 40. Two years ago, serial blasts along the commuter train line in Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital, killed nearly 200.

Similar terrorist attacks aimed at religious sites in recent years have not succeeded in setting off sectarian violence. The Hindu holy city of Varanasi was struck by a pair of bombings in March 2006, killing 14. More than two dozen people were killed in September 2006 in a series of explosions in and near the largest mosque in Malegaon, and a blast killed two worshipers in one of the holiest Muslim shrines in Ajmer, also in Rajasthan, last September. (Source: IHT)


Jordan’s state security court on Wednesday sentenced three Jordanians to 15 years in jail for plotting an attack against U.S. President Bush when he visited the kingdom in 2006. (Source: AFP)


A French judge on Wednesday convicted seven men on terrorism charges for recruiting young French Muslims to fight against U.S. forces in Iraq. Prosecutors alleged that the seven, five Frenchmen, a Moroccan and an Algerian, helped send about a dozen French fighters to training camps linked to the insurgent group Al Qaeda in Iraq. The investigation of an alleged recruiting ring started four years ago after a young Frenchman was found dead in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. The discovery fueled nationwide concern that France’s poor immigrant communities could become fertile recruiting grounds for disenfranchised Muslim youths who might then turn to suicide attacks against European targets. (Source: Washington Post)


A long-delayed trial of CIA operatives and former top Italian intelligence officials moved forward here on Wednesday, as a judge ruled that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi could be called to testify about the abduction of a radical Muslim cleric here in 2003. Testimony also began Wednesday. The cleric’s wife, Ghali Nabila, said her husband, Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr, known as Abu Omar, was taken from Italy and transferred to a prison in Egypt, where, she said, he was repeatedly tortured. While acknowledging a program of “extraordinary rendition,” or abducting terrorism suspects outside the United States, the Bush administration claims that no one is sent to nations that torture. (Source: IHT)


The wife of an Egyptian cleric taken from a Milan street, allegedly as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, wept Wednesday as she described her husband’s alleged torture in an Egyptian jail. Heavily veiled and speaking through a translator, Ghali Nabila testified in the trial of 26 Americans charged in Italy with kidnapping in the disappearance of Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr in February 2003. (Source: Seattle Times)


The chief judge of the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, war court has set June 5 for the first court appearances of reputed September 11 2001, mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four suspected conspirators. The judge, Marine Colonel Ralph Kohlmann, notified military defense attorneys by e-mail Wednesday that he would preside over the case. He scheduled arraignment of the five men at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. (Source: Seattle Times)


Iraq
A youthful suicide bomber killed at least 23 people Wednesday in an attack against relatives of Colonel Faisal Ismail al-Zobaie, a U.S.-backed police chief and former insurgent who has turned against his onetime comrades. Zobaie, the police chief of Fallujah in Anbar province, said a bomber of about 12 years of age attacked the funeral of Zobaie’s uncle. He said insurgents had seized his uncle, a school principal, on Tuesday, demanding to know whether the police chief was his nephew. Iraqi officials said 25 people were wounded in the bombing in addition to a death toll of at least 23. The U.S. military said in a statement that “preliminary reports indicate” 14 people were killed and eight were wounded.
Another bombing Wednesday was carried out by a teenage girl who targeted Iraqi soldiers south of Baghdad, according to the U.S. military. At least one Iraqi soldier was killed and seven were wounded. (Source: Washington Post)


United States
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said yesterday that the United States should construct a combination of incentives and pressure to engage Iran, and may have missed earlier opportunities to begin a useful dialogue with Tehran. (Source: Washington Post)


An Army board headed by General David H. Petraeus has selected several combat-tested counterinsurgency experts for promotion to the rank of brigadier general, sifting through more than 1,000 colonels to identify a handful of innovative leaders who will shape the future Army, according to current and former senior Army officers. The choices suggest that the unusual decision to put the top U.S. officer in Iraq in charge of the promotions board has generated new thinking on the qualities of a successful Army officer, and also deepened Petraeus’s imprint on the Army. Petraeus, who spent nearly four of the past five years in Iraq and has seen many of the colonels in action there, faces confirmation hearings next week to take charge of Central Command, which oversees U.S. forces in the Middle East and Central Asia. (Source: Washington Post)


The United States has detained approximately 2,500 people younger than 18 as illegal enemy combatants in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay since 2002, according to a report filed by the Bush administration with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. (Source: Washington Post)


The House Armed Services Committee approved a bill early Thursday that authorizes $601.4 billion in defense spending for next year, including a 3.9 percent pay raise for troops. The pay increase and other service benefits included in the bill, such as a prohibition on increased health care fees, is more than President Bush wants. But it is in synch with a broader election-year effort by lawmakers to boost benefits for service members and veterans. (Source: AP)


Africa
Mob violence against Zimbabweans and other foreigners this week has killed at least two people and injured about 60 in an impoverished Johannesburg neighborhood, authorities said Wednesday. The nightly attacks first began Sunday night and officials appealed for an end to the violence. On Wednesday, African National Congress leaders including Winnie Madikizela-Mandela visited Alexandra, the crowded township where the attacks occurred, to urge more compassion for foreigners. (Source: AP)


Americas
Canada’s military strategy for the next 20 years exists in a document that, for now, is being withheld from the public and is for the eyes of federal cabinet only. The revelation yesterday contradicts the official government line that was put forth Monday when Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mr. MacKay, announced the “Canada First Defence Strategy,” with great fanfare. At the time, Mr. MacKay’s spokesmen said Canadians would have to rely on the speeches of the Prime Minister and Defence Minister, not a written document that laid out the plans. (Source: Ottawa Citizen)


Asia
The Chinese government accelerated its massive rescue-and-recovery operation Wednesday, dispatching hundreds of busloads of civilian rescue teams, paramilitary police and youthful volunteers toward earthquake-ravaged regions in a vivid demonstration of the Communist Party’s power to mobilize. Lines of buses and cars, many with red banners carrying political slogans, filled highways leading north from the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu, near the epicenter of Monday’s quake. They were joined by trucks carrying cranes, front-end loaders and tarps. Li Chengyun, the vice governor of Sichuan, estimated that 26,000 people were still buried under collapsed buildings and that an additional 14,000 were missing, according to the official New China News Agency.

As rescue teams reached more isolated towns and villages, it became clear the death toll could eventually reach 50,000. On Wednesday, the number of con–firmed dead rose to nearly 15,000, according to a government estimate. The people of Fuxin, a farming village on the edge of Mianzhu city, 40 miles north of Chengdu, said they lost 300 children when the Fuxin No. 2 Primary School pancaked right after the tremor. There were also concerns about disasters that could compound the crisis. A dam near the city of Dujiangyan had started to crack, forcing the deployment of 2,000 soldiers to forestall flooding. (Source: Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/14/AR2008051400784.html
Burmese military authorities have agreed to let 160 aid workers from four Asian countries assist its struggling cyclone relief effort, aid officials said Wednesday, the government’s first acknowledgment that it needs foreign expertise. Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health confirmed that it is sending 30 doctors, along with medical supplies, on Wednesday to work in Burma for two weeks. U.N. officials said India, China and Bangladesh have also been asked to send experienced disaster relief teams.

The news came as five more U.S. military C-130 transport planes, carrying such desperately needed supplies as water, mosquito nets, plastic sheets, blankets and hygiene kits, flew into Burma’s largest city, Rangoon, in an acceleration of U.S. assistance following Tropical Cyclone Nargis. The United Nations noted other “progress” as it tried to get aid to the worst-hit areas in the Irrawaddy Delta. Long-awaited visas for some U.N. disaster relief and logistics experts have come through. (Source: Washington Post)


Europe
The Spanish government accused Basque militants of detonating a powerful truck bomb outside a barracks housing police officers and their families in northern Spain on Wednesday that tore through the building and killed a policeman. The explosion on the outskirts of Legutiano, a small town near Vitoria, the Basque capital, struck the barracks without warning in the middle of the night, as about 30 members of the Spanish Civil Guard and their families slept. (Source: IHT)


Whenever the United States sends missile defense negotiators to the Czech Republic and Poland, where the Bush administration intends to deploy parts of its anti-ballistic shield, they encounter surprisingly different attitudes. In the Czech Republic, where negotiations are all but complete, the administration deals with a government that believes that the threat the shield is designed to counter comes from Iran and other “rogue” regimes. In Poland, traditionally one of the closest U.S. allies in this part of Europe, Donald Tusk’s center-right Civic Platform coalition has taken a dramatically different stance. It believes the threat comes from Russia, not the Middle East. (Source: IHT)


The Kremlin rolled out the red carpet Wednesday for Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier of Germany, the first foreign official to hold talks with President Dmitri Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin since they took up their new positions last week. Steinmeier had hoped to bring to Moscow an agreement from the European Union that would launch negotiations on a long-delayed EU-Russia trade and cooperation accord. But EU countries failed Tuesday to agree on how to begin despite an earlier agreement reached in Lithuania on Sunday that should have allowed the talks to move forward. Germany, Greece, Spain, Italy and Luxembourg had sought a more flexible negotiating mandate that would allow softer language toward Russia. (Source: IHT)


Middle East
IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi has recently changed his stance on the issue of a cease-fire and, according to top officials, now believes that Israel and Hamas are on a collision course. Ashkenazi had been reluctant to endorse a broad ground offensive, but the deadly attacks from Gaza in the past week have made him inclined to recommend a ground operation deep inside the territory. (Source: Jerusalem Post)


As President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert were meeting in Jerusalem on Wednesday, a Palestinian Grad rocket crashed into a busy shopping mall in central Ashkelon, wounding 15 people and burying several shoppers under piles of rubble. In addition to those badly wounded, 11 more suffered from moderate wounds and 62 people were treated for shock. (Source: Ynet News)


Three days ago, Hamas started to target Ashkelon in order to welcome President Bush with an impressive rocket attack. Rocket cells test-fired several rockets that missed, but every strike was more accurate than the previous one. On Wednesday, they fired one of the 200 Grad (Katyusha) rockets they possess with lethal precision. As opposed to the Kassam, whose warhead contains 16 pounds of explosives, the Iranian Grad’s warhead contains 44 pounds of explosives, which enabled it to penetrate the mall’s thick walls and cement ceiling. The attack on Ashkelon was also Hamas’ response to the terms presented by Israel Monday for a cease-fire. Hamas is unwilling to tie the release of captured IDF soldier Gilad Shalit to the cease-fire agreement and is unwilling to end arms smuggling and building up its military strength. If Israel is unwilling to accept Hamas’ terms, Hamas says, it will see Grad attacks on Ashkelon and we’ll see who breaks first. Hamas estimates that as long as President Bush and other leaders are in Israel, the Israeli government would not respond with a fierce military operation. (Source: Ynet News)


Military Intelligence chief Amos Yadlin said in an interview that “every community within a 40-kilometer range [of Gaza] may come within range of the Hamas rockets: Ashdod, Kiryat Gat, even Beersheba.” (Source: Ha’aretz)


Lebanon’s government cancelled measures on Wednesday that angered the Iranian-backed Hezbollah movement and triggered the worst internal conflict since the country’s Civil War (1975-90). The U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora said in a statement after a meeting that it was taking the step in line with a request by the Lebanese army to preserve civil peace and promote an Arab League mediation effort to end Lebanon’s 18-month-old political crisis. (Source: Reuters)


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Joe Varner is Assistant Professor and Program Manager for Homeland Security at American Military University.

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