A daily, open source, around the world tour of international security-related news.
By Professor Joseph B. Varner
Global War on Terror
U.S. military officials may be voicing concern about Afghanistan, but Canada’s former top officer in NATO says he has only seen a continually improving situation in the Asian country. In the past month, U.S. military reports and statements have indicated the war is worsening. A Pentagon report to Congress several weeks ago outlined how a revitalized insurgency is expected to maintain or increase its level of attacks. “The Taliban regrouped after its fall from power and have coalesced into a resilient insurgency,” the report said.
U.S. commander Major-General Jeffrey Schloesser has also said attacks by insurgents in eastern Afghanistan had increased by 40 percent so far this year, compared with the same period last year. Afghanistan has seen a series of high-profile attacks, including the prison break in Kandahar that freed hundreds of insurgents and a recent bombing in Kabul that claimed 40 lives. But Canadian General Ray Henault says figures compiled by NATO show that the insurgency is being dealt with. “We’re seeing that it’s being contained,” said General Henault, who at the end of June left his position as NATO’s military chief. He had been in the position for three years and previously had been Canada’s chief of the defence staff. “What we’re doing is starting to have an effect,” he said. (Source: The Citizen-CAN)
An investigation is under way into an incident of friendly fire in which nine British soldiers in Afghanistan were injured, British military officials said. Three soldiers were seriously injured when the British Apache gunboat fired on a location thought to be held by insurgents, The Guardian reported Friday. Six others soldiers were treated and returned to their unit. Two of the seriously injured soldiers were hospitalized at Camp Bastion, the main British base in Afghanistan, and the third was evacuated to a hospital in Birmingham, England, The Independent reported. British army officials said the incident occurred Thursday when the patrol called in air support during a skirmish in Helmand province. (Source: UPI)
The U.N. chief has agreed to Pakistan’s request to establish an independent commission that will investigate the killing of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s office confirmed the agreement moments after it was announced by Pakistan’s top diplomat. “The objectives are for the commission to identify the culprits, perpetrators, organizers and financiers of the assassination,” Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told reporters Thursday, just after a brief, private meeting with Ban. Determining who was behind Bhutto’s killing could help stabilize a nation that is a key U.S. ally in the fight against terrorism, but has been struggling against an influx of insurgents joining with Al Qaeda and other militant groups in Pakistan’s remote tribal and mountainous areas. The previous government blamed the Taliban in Pakistan for the attack against Bhutto, but suspicions surrounding her death have been cast far and wide, a further reason for the government’s pressing to clear up the matter. Qureshi assured reporters that Ban would appoint “well-respected, eminent people” to the independent commission. (Source: AP)
Initial indications are that Al Qaeda organized a strike on the U.S. consulate in Istanbul, Turkish security officials said. Six people were killed in what officials said appeared to be an Al Qaeda strike on the U.S. consulate in Istanbul. They said at least four bearded assailants drove to the consulate compound on Wednesday and opened fire toward Turkish security guards. (Source: World Tribune)
Pirate attacks worldwide surged 19 percent in the past three months compared to the January-March period, largely due to increased incidents in Somalia and Nigeria, an international maritime agency said Friday. There were 62 attacks on ships between April and June, up from 52 in the previous quarter, the International Maritime Bureau said in a report released by its piracy reporting center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “The frequency and level of violence directed at seafarers is cause for alarm. The abduction of crew and the increasing use of automatic weapons remain unacceptable,” it said. The second quarter figure was lower than 85 attacks reported in the same period last year, but the agency said many attacks may have gone unreported because seafarers feared for their safety. For the first half of 2008, pirate attacks worldwide fell to 114, from 126 a year earlier, it said. Africa remains the world’s top piracy hotspot, with 24 reported attacks in Somalia and 18 in Nigeria so far this year, it said. Indonesia ranked third on the global list with 13 reports, mostly of low-level theft. Pirates boarded 71 vessels worldwide this year and hijacked 12. In all, 190 crew members were taken hostage, seven killed and another seven are missing and presumed dead, it said.
The violence was pronounced in Somalia, where pirates are often armed with rocket-propelled grenade launchers and automatic weapons. Attacks continued to be suppressed in the Straits of Malacca, thanks to anti-piracy cooperation between Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore which shared the key shipping route, it said. Just two attacks have been reported this year in the waterway, the same as in 2007, it said. Other countries recording attacks this year included Tanzania, Bangladesh and India with seven each and Malaysia with six. (Source: AP)
Iraq
The U.S. military says it has detained nine people suspected of involvement in the Al Qaeda in Iraq group. The military says the suspects were detained in raids Friday in Baghdad and the cities of Beiji and Mosul, which lie north of the capital. One of the detainees is the alleged head of a bombing cell of the Sunni extremist group. Four of the suspected militants were arrested during an operation Friday that targeted a man who acts as a liaison between senior leaders of Al Qaeda in Iraq. (Source: AP)
Britain’s Defense Ministry agreed on Thursday to pay compensation to the family of an Iraqi hotel receptionist who died in the custody of British troops in Basra in September 2003, and to nine other Iraqis detained with him who the ministry said suffered “substantive breaches” of their human rights. Lawyers for the Iraqis said the government agreed to pay nearly $6 million. The Defense Ministry’s statement did not provide an amount. The announcement came after two days of negotiations in London between British government lawyers and a legal team representing the father of Baha Mousa, the 26-year-old receptionist who died of injuries suffered while being questioned by British troops who stormed the Haitham hotel in Basra looking for insurgents. The troops found weapons and what they said was bomb-making equipment and took Mousa and the other men away for questioning. An autopsy found 93 separate wounds on Mousa’s body, including fractured ribs and a broken nose. A serving British general appointed to investigate the Mousa case and other accusations of abuse of prisoners in Iraq reported in January that the soldiers involved in the Mousa detention had not been told that interrogation techniques set out in old army manuals, wall standing, hooding, subjection to noise, and deprivation of sleep, food and drink, were prohibited in 1972 by Edward Heath, then the prime minister. (Source: IHT)
Turkey’s prime minister visited Baghdad on Thursday, only the second foreign head of a neighboring state to visit Iraq since the American invasion. The visit of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan came during a flurry of announcements from Arab countries, including Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, pledging to refresh relations with Iraq by appointing ambassadors, after withdrawing them during the violence of past years. Erdogan’s visit, the first by a Turkish leader in 18 years, followed that of Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, in March. King Abdullah of Jordan was expected to travel here this week, but the trip was postponed. Iraq’s relations with Turkey, a NATO member, grew tense last fall, when the Turkish military began a bombing campaign in northern Iraq to strike at Kurdish rebels who hide in the mountains there. Officials in Baghdad condemned the rebel group, known as the Kurdistan Workers Party, but could do little to stop it because it was operating out of the Kurdish north, largely independent from the central government. (Source: IHT)
United States
Gregg Bergersen was a navy veteran who liked to gamble on occasion but spent far more time worrying about how to earn some serious money after he left his career as an analyst at the Defense Department. At 51 and supporting a wife and a child in the Virginia suburbs, he wondered how he could get himself cast in that distinctly Washington role that many Pentagon types dream of: a rewarding post-retirement perch at one of the hundreds of military-related companies that surround the capital and flourish with lucrative government contracts and contacts. Bergersen believed he had found what he was seeking when he was introduced to Tai Shen Kuo, a native of Taiwan, who had lived in New Orleans for more than 30 years. Kuo, an entrepreneur who imported furniture from China, was active enough in civic affairs to have been named to a state advisory board on international trade. He told Bergersen that he was developing a military consulting company.
Now, Bergersen and Kuo, along with a third accomplice, are awaiting sentencing in a U.S. court for their involvement in one of many cases brought in the past year involving the illegal transfer of information to China. The cases have intensified the evaluation in intelligence and law enforcement circles of the breadth of the threat from Beijing. Many have been similar to the one involving Bergersen, in that prosecutors describe them as carefully planned intelligence operations run by the Chinese government and intended to steal national security secrets. Other cases, however, are less clear in their nature; some seem to be closer to violations of commercial export laws, with the transferred information designed to provide Chinese companies with a technological benefit. (Source: IHT)
Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001. The book says that the International Committee for the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the CIA last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Al Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. The book says Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box “so small he said he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position” and was one of several prisoners to be “slammed against the walls,” according to the Red Cross report.
The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded, a practice in which water is poured on the nose and mouth to create the sensation of suffocation and drowning. The book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” by Jane Mayer, who writes about counterterrorism for The New Yorker, offers new details of the agency’s secret detention program, as well as the bitter debates in the administration over interrogation methods and other tactics in the campaign against Al Qaeda. The book is scheduled for publication next week by Doubleday. (Source: IHT)
Africa
When Luis Moreno-Ocampo, prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, reported to the United Nations Security Council last month, he painted a dire tableau of death, rape and dispossession in Darfur, saying the entire state apparatus was involved in a five-year campaign of terror there. His target, it seemed, was Sudan’s president. Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, may soon face war crimes charges. On Thursday, the prosecutor’s office said it had prepared its second case involving war crimes in Darfur, a region of Sudan.
Now analysts, diplomats, aid workers and United Nations officials are bracing for the increasing likelihood that Mr. Moreno-Ocampo will ask the judges for an arrest warrant for the president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir. The indictment of a sitting head of state in a war-torn country would not be unprecedented: Slobodan Milosevic of Serbia and Charles Taylor of Liberia were both charged by international war crimes courts while in office. But the complexity and fragility of Sudan’s multiple conflicts have led many diplomats, analysts and aid workers to worry that the Sudanese government could lash out at the prosecutor’s move by expelling Western diplomats and relief workers who provide aid to millions of people displaced by the fighting, provoking a vast crisis and shutting the door to vital diplomatic efforts to bring lasting peace. (Source: IHT)
Zimbabwe’s governing party began preliminary discussions with the opposition on Thursday in an effort to settle a political crisis in which both sides have staked a claim to the nation’s presidency. But in a statement late in the day, Morgan Tsvangirai, the opposition leader, said the talks, in Pretoria, South Africa, could not lead to genuine negotiations until state-sponsored violence stopped and 1,500 of his supporters were freed from prison. He denounced efforts by President Robert Mugabe’s government to portray the meeting as a negotiation imminently leading to a settlement, saying the governing party, ZANU-PF, was “being disingenuous and exploiting the plight of the Zimbabwean people for political gain.” Tsvangirai was in an awkward position.
For the past two days, his party, the Movement for Democratic Change, has issued categorical statements that it will not take part in any kind of talks until its conditions are met. The government’s announcement that talks were in the works was a “figment of the dictator’s imagination,” read one opposition statement. But Thursday, Tsvangirai nevertheless sent emissaries to Pretoria. Both sides have mentioned the need for some sort of unity government, though ZANU-PF demands that President Mugabe remain on top while the opposition insists on Tsvangirai. Tsvangirai outpolled Mugabe in a March election, but withdrew from a June 27 runoff, citing the continuing violence and leaving Mugabe the sole candidate. (Source: IHT)
The World Health Organisation (WHO) urged Ugandans and tourists on Friday to avoid entering caves with bats in the East African country after a Dutch woman died of Marburg haemorrhagic fever. The unidentified 40-year-old woman died overnight in Leiden University Medical Centre, Dutch authorities said. Health experts fear bats in caves and mines in western Uganda are a reservoir for the Marburg virus, a cousin of Ebola. Marburg haemorrhagic fever is a severe and highly fatal disease whose victims often bleed from multiple sites. People who were in close contact with the victim, who visited two caves during a three-week trip to Uganda that ended on June 28, have been monitored daily but none have shown any symptoms, WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl said. “It is an isolated case of imported Marburg. People should not think about amending their travel plans to Uganda but should not go into caves with bats,” he said. (Source: Reuters)
Americas
Gunmen killed nine people at an auto repair shop in the gang-plagued city of Culiacan, while a police investigator was found shot to death near the city’s police headquarters, prosecutors said Thursday. Culiacan is the capital of northern Sinaloa state, home to the powerful Sinaloa drug cartel and site of an ongoing wave of drug-related violence. Six bullet-ridden bodies were found Thursday inside the auto body shop, and three more bodies were found on the street just outside the business, the state prosecutor’s office said in a statement. None of the nine bodies have been identified and no arrests have been announced. A police investigator was found shot to death in his truck near Culiacan’s police headquarters. It was unclear if the same gunmen were involved in his death. On Wednesday, ten police officers in the town of Agua Prieta, across the border from Douglas, Arizona, resigned after a fellow patrolman was gunned down. Mayor Antonio Cuadras said Thursday that authorities tried to get the police to stay by offering them better weapons and bulletproof vests. (Source: AP)
The stunning rescue of Ingrid Betancourt and three U.S. military contractors owed its success not just to artful deception, but also to a five-year U.S.-Colombian operation that choked their captors’ ability to communicate. Known as “Alliance,” it began with a satellite phone call in 2003, just weeks after the Americans’ surveillance plane crashed in the southern Colombian jungle, according to U.S. and Colombian investigators and court documents. The call came from Nancy Conde, the regional finance and supply chief for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, whose boyfriend would become the American hostages’ jailer. She was calling confederates in Miami to see if they could supply the rebels with some satellite phones. What Conde didn’t know was that state security agents were listening. U.S. law officers arrested the Miami contacts, who in exchange for promises of reduced sentences put Conde in touch with an FBI front company, according to a U.S. law enforcement official involved in the investigation, who spoke on condition of anonymity for security reasons. (Source: AP)
Asia
President Lee Myung-bak offered Friday to resume dialogue with North Korea, saying he was willing to provide humanitarian aid and implement previous agreements between his predecessors and the Communist leader, Kim Jong-il. Lee’s proposal, reversing his approach to the North, came as a tour company in Seoul said a South Korean woman visiting a North Korean tourism enclave was killed by a Communist soldier. The 53-year-old woman, identified as Park Wang-ja, was shot shortly before dawn on Friday after wandering into a fenced-off military area near t Diamond Mountain, a tourist zone that was opened to South Koreans in 1998. South Korea immediately suspended visits to the zone, a symbol of cross-border reconciliation. Nearly 2 million South Koreans have visited Diamond Mountain, a scenic spot at the southeastern tip of North Korea, first by ferry and later on a land route. (Source: IHT)
Just five months after a military junta handed power back through a parliamentary election, Thailand’s latest try at democracy is being severely tested by street demonstrations and a barrage of court cases. On Thursday, the foreign minister, Noppadon Pattama, was forced to resign by a nationalist furor over a centuries-old dispute with Cambodia regarding ownership of a 900-year-old Hindu temple on their common border. In contemporary terms, the temple dispute has become a vehicle for growing pressure on the government as the divisions that led to a coup in September 2006 have begun to resurface. The coup, which deposed former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, had the support of much of Bangkok’s elite and middle class, which staged months of protests and accused him of corruption and abuse of power. (Source: IHT)
Suspected rebel gunmen ambushed a crowded passenger bus Friday as it traveled down a small rural road in southern Sri Lanka, killing three people, the military said. The attack came amid a sharp spike in fighting in Sri Lanka’s civil war between government troops and Tamil Tiger rebels in the jungles of the north, and underscored the rebels’ continued ability to strike deep inside government-controlled territory. (Source: AP)
Europe
Nearly half of the members of British armed forces regularly think of quitting, according to a major Defense Ministry survey that comes amid concerns that sustained war in Iraq and Afghanistan is hurting morale. In a survey of nearly 9,000 people in the army, air force and navy, the first of its kind, respondents cited the impact of overseas tours on personal life, pay and job opportunities outside the military as top reasons to leave. Excitement and pensions were listed as reasons to stay. (Source: Washington Post)
A Dutch court ruled Thursday that it had no jurisdiction in a civil suit against the United Nations by survivors of the 1995 Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, affirming UN immunity from prosecution, even when genocide is involved. A group called the Mothers of Srebrenica was seeking compensation for the failure of Dutch UN troops to prevent the slaughter by Serbian forces of more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys in the UN-declared safe zone. The Hague District Court said the UN’s immunity, which is written into its founding charter, meant it could not be held liable in any country’s national court.
(Source: AP)
For a few hundred dollars, Hasan Nuhanovic learned that his mother managed to fatally slice open her veins moments before six armed men burst into her jail cell near the end of the Bosnian war. For a few hundred more, he hopes to find out where she is buried. Thirteen years after Bosnia’s 1992-95 war, a conflict that killed more than 100,000 people, forensics experts are still uncovering mass graves and exhuming bodies moved to secret locations by war criminals trying to conceal their atrocities. How do they know where to dig? Those involved say some locations are revealed by witnesses who come forward without asking for any reward. But some want cash, anything between a few dollars to tens of thousands, or favors such as building materials or help getting a visa for a Western country. Officials say one man agreed to provide information about the location of a mass grave after he was promised a new microwave oven. “Currently we are negotiating with a man who is asking for 20,000 euros ($31,400) for the location of a mass grave that may contain 1,100 bodies,” said Munira Subasic, head of the Mothers of Srebrenica, an association of widows and mothers of victims of Europe’s worst slaughter of civilians since World War II. (Source: IHT)
A Turkish news agency reported Friday that army troops clashed with Kurdish rebels in the southeast and that 10 of the rebels were killed. Dogan news agency said the clashes occurred on Mount Kato, in the predominantly Kurdish province of Sirnak, which borders Iraq. The report, which could not immediately be confirmed, also said a village guard, armed and paid by the government to help troops fight the rebels, was killed in the violence. The rebels of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, have been fighting for self-rule in southeast Turkey since 1984. The fighting has killed tens of thousands of people. (Source: AP)
Russia has accused the British Embassy’s top trade official in Moscow of espionage, the British Foreign Office confirmed Friday. The accusation appears likely to worsen Russian-British relations, already strained in part by the continuing fight for control at the TNK-BP oil company, which is jointly owned by the British company and Russian billionaires. The Interfax news agency, citing a source in Russia’s secret services, reported Thursday that the head of the embassy’s trade and investment section, Christopher Bowers, was believed to be a senior British intelligence officer. The British Foreign Office said the accused diplomat was acting head of U.K. Trade and Investment at the embassy and confirmed his name was Chris Bowers. The former top trade official, Andrew Levi, was one of four British Embassy officials expelled from Moscow last summer. The expulsions were retaliation for Britain’s expulsion of four Russian diplomats after Russia refused to hand over the main suspect in the 2006 poisoning death of Kremlin critic and former Federal Security Service officer Alexander Litvinenko in London. (Source: AP)
Russia’s foreign ministry on Friday demanded Georgia sign a document pledging not to use force in its separatist conflicts and also called for the withdrawal of Georgian troops from Abkhazia. A resolution “can only be found through an end to provocations and the immediate signing of documents on renouncing the use of force,” the ministry said in a statement, referring to conflicts in the separatist provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. In the case of Abkhazia, the pledge “must be accompanied by the complete withdrawal of Georgian troops from the upper Kodori Gorge,” the ministry said.
The Kodori Gorge, located 25 kilometres (15 miles) from the Abkhaz separatist capital of Sukhumi, is the only part of Abkhazia under Georgian control. The rest of Abkhazia has enjoyed de facto independence from Tbilisi since a bloody conflict in the early 1990s, but its self-declared government is not formally recognized by any other state. Tensions have mounted this month with a series of bomb attacks in Abkhazia, the arrest by South Ossetia of four Georgian soldiers and flights over South Ossetia by Russia’s air force, which Moscow says are needed to prevent “bloodshed.” Russia, which tacitly supports the separatists, has been angered by US support for Georgia’s plans to join NATO.
Washington also supports Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili in his drive to regain control of the two renegade provinces. (Source: AFP)
A Georgian official warned Russia on Friday that it will have to “collect the shattered fragments” of its planes if they intrude on Georgian airspace again. Russia has confirmed that four of its planes circled over the Georgian breakaway province of South Ossetia late Wednesday for about 40 minutes, and said the mission was ordered to head off a possible “invasion” of the region by Georgian troops. Georgia, which has accused Russia of aiming to annex the province, said the mission was an illegal invasion of Georgian airspace. (Source: AP)
Middle East
An Israeli was wounded early Friday when a Palestinian opened fire at his vehicle near the Yakir Junction in the West Bank. Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) scoured the area for the terrorist, who opened fire at the soldiers and wounded one. The terrorist was killed during the exchange of fire. The injured Israeli told soldiers that the decision to continue driving after being shot at apparently saved his life. (Source: Ynet News)
Palestinians in Gaza fired two Kassam rockets toward Israel on Thursday. One of them landed near a kibbutz. Hamas arrested three Palestinians from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jabalya who fired the rockets, the first such detentions. Hamas had previously said it would not use force against those who violate the truce. (Source: Ynet News)
Israeli security forces arrested eight residents of Issawiya, north of Jerusalem, who have confessed to throwing Molotov cocktails at Israeli vehicles in and around the capital, according to a report cleared for publication on Thursday. They admitted to being part of a cell of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). (Source: Ynet News)
In a series of consultations apparently aimed at coordinating policies against the Iranian nuclear threat, Defense Minister Ehud Barak will head to the U.S. on Monday for talks at the Pentagon, days after Mossad chief Meir Dagan was in Washington for meetings with key intelligence officials. Sources say Israel is urgently trying to convince the U.S. that Iran is closer to passing the nuclear threshold than Washington believes. A week after Barak’s visit, IDF Chief of Staff Lieutenant-General Gabi Ashkenazi will head to Washington for his own round of talks. Barak told a meeting of the Labor Party faction: “Israel is the strongest country in the region and we have proven in the past that we are not deterred from acting when our vital interests are at stake.” A senior U.S. official recently said there was a discrepancy of six to 12 months between the time Israel believed Iran would pass the nuclear point of no return, and when the U.S. felt Teheran will have mastered the nuclear cycle. (Source: Jerusalem Post)
An Israeli business jet modified to function as an Airborne Early Warning and Control plane went on display on Thursday ahead of its first exhibition at the Farnborough international aerospace event in Britain. The Israeli Air Force has already taken delivery of three of the Gulfstream G550 business jets, converted by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI). Such planes, crammed with sophisticated electronic gear, provide intelligence and communications assistance to strike aircraft and would likely play a central role in directing any Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear installations. An IAI spokeswoman said the decision to display the aircraft had “no connection to the recent news” about Iran, and the timing was “completely coincidental.” (Source: Reuters)
Lebanon announced a 30-member national unity government on Friday, one-and-a-half years after the outbreak of its worst political crisis since a 1975-1990 civil war. The lineup was announced in a decree signed by President Michel Sleiman and Prime Minister Fuad Siniora and came seven weeks after an accord which saved Lebanon from the brink of renewed civil war. The accord between Lebanon’s political rivals sealed in Doha on May 21 allocated 16 cabinet seats to the Western-backed parliamentary majority and 11 to the opposition led by Hezbollah, giving it veto powers. The opposition took the coveted posts of foreign minister and deputy prime minister in the new cabinet, while the ruling bloc maintained its hold on the finance ministry. The president, who himself only took office four days after the Doha accord, filling a post left vacant since November, made three appointments, including Elias Murr, who kept the defence porfolio, despite opposition reservations. Siniora , who was appointed by Sleiman, Lebanon’s armed forces chief at the time he took over as president, named Mohammed Fneish of the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Shiite militant group Hezbollah as labor minister. (Source: AFP)
Four people were killed and dozens wounded in street battles between rival sectarian camps armed with rockets, sniper rifles and grenades in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli on Wednesday. Fighting raged between Sunni supporters of the parliamentary majority led by MP Saad Hariri and members of the Alawite community. (Source: AFP/Daily Star-Lebanon)
Israeli defense and diplomatic officials warned on Thursday against a new initiative that calls on Jerusalem to hand over the Shebaa Farms area on the Lebanese border to the UN. The proposal is reportedly the brainchild of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who will host a meeting Sunday of the newly-formed Mediterranean Union. “The Shebaa Farms are of vital strategic importance for Israel and therefore have security significance. Handing the land over to the UN means that Hizbullah will be there,” a top defense official said Thursday. The official rejected the claim that giving up the area would bolster Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Seniora and deprive Hizbullah of its raison d’etre, saying that after an Israeli withdrawal, Hizbullah would simply find a new excuse for its existence. As if proving this point, a senior Shi’ite religious leader was quoted in the Hizbullah-linked Al-Akhbar newspaper this week as saying that Hizbullah should liberate former Shi’ite villages now in northern Israel. The defense official said the security establishment’s recommendation to the political echelon was to relinquish the land only as part of a comprehensive peace deal either with Syria or with Lebanon. Israel completely pulled out of Lebanon when it withdrew its troops in 2000, something the UN also attested to. If Lebanon believes the area is theirs, and not Syria’s, then Israel was willing to talk about it with Beirut in direct negotiations. (Source: Jerusalem Post)
The confrontation between Iran and the United States seemed to sharpen on Thursday as Iran said it tested missiles for a second day and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said the United States would defend its allies and protect its interests against an attack. Rice was speaking in the former Soviet republic of Georgia at the end of a three-day tour of Eastern Europe. Shortly after she spoke, state-run media in Iran began reporting the new missile tests, which it said included a relatively new torpedo. Iranian state television showed a missile blasting off in darkness. The television reports said the new tests took place during Wednesday night and into Thursday. A commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards had said earlier that night missile maneuvers would take place but did not give details. Meanwhile, American and British warships are engaged in maneuvers in the Persian Gulf.
A private group of scientists in the United States interpreted the situation as a battle of exaggeration waged by both the Iranians and the Bush administration, Iran overstating the strength of its missiles and the United States overstating the need for missile defenses. “Iran frequently exaggerates the capability of its missiles, and it appears it is continuing that tradition with this week’s tests,” said Dr. David Wright, a physicist with the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Meanwhile, the Bush administration is using Iran’s missile tests to promote the U.S. antimissile system in Eastern Europe that has never been shown to work in a real-world situation.” Dr. Wright said that the range of Iran’s biggest missiles appeared to be significantly less than Tehran routinely claimed.
Charles P. Vick, an Iranian rocket program expert at GlobalSecurity.org, a research group in Alexandria, Va., said that what appeared to be two large Shahab missiles lifting off Wednesday within seconds of each other turned out to a Shahab and a Scud-C, the range of which is far less. In a telephone interview on Thursday, he said that Iran seemed to be testing a few new systems, like the Hoot, but mostly clearing out old inventory. “It’s basically a demonstration of all the weapon systems they bought from Russia, China or North Korea over the last decade,” he said. Iran claimed to have first tested the Hoot in April 2006. A senior military official at the time described the missile as a sonar-evading torpedo capable of traveling about 230 miles per hour, about three times the speed of Western torpedoes. Military analysts have said that the Hoot resembles a Russian rocket-propelled torpedo called the VA-111 Shkval, a limited-range weapon used in close-proximity combat.
(Source: New York Times)
The official Iranian news agency reported the successful launch of an enhanced version of the Shihab-3 intermediate-range ballistic missile. Iran, who has warned against any attack on its nuclear facilities, said the Shihab-3 was test-launched by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Wednesday during a major military exercise in the Gulf. Iranian officials said the missile was more accurate and deadly than previous models of the Shihab-3, said to have a range of 2,000 kilometers. In Washington, the Bush administration confirmed the Shihab-3 test. Senior officials said the missile launch marked an emerging long-range Iranian missile capability. “The fact is, they’ve just tested a missile that has a pretty extended range,” U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said.
A leading Israeli analyst, however, asserted that the Shihab-3 launched on Wednesday was an older model with a range of 1,300 kilometers. The analyst, former Israeli missile defense chief Uzi Rubin, said Teheran has not yet test-fired the Shihab-3 model with a range of 2,000 kilometers. “From what I saw, this is an old version of the Shihab-3, and contrary to their claims, it is not capable of reaching 2,000 kilometers, rather 1,300 kilometers,” Rubin, who monitors Iranian missile development, said. “The 2,000-kilometer-range Shihab-3 missiles were tested to demonstrate Iran’s capability in hitting its enemies accurately at the early stages of their probable attacks against the Islamic republic,” the official Iranian news agency, Irna, said. Iran said the latest Shihab-3 contained a 1,000 kilogram warhead, large enough to accommodate a nuclear weapon. The missile, fired on the third day of the Great Prophet-3 exercise, was meant to mark a key element in Iran’s retaliatory strategy against Israel and the United States. (Source: World Tribune)
An Iranian photograph showing a cluster of missile launches was apparently altered to add a fourth missile lifting off from a desert range, a defense analyst said Thursday. “There’s no doubt the photo was doctored,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, director of the Non-Proliferation Program for the London-based International Institute For Strategic Studies.
The image, posted Wednesday on a Web site owned by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, showed four missiles moments after launch, leaving trails of glowing exhaust and clouds of billowing brown dust. The scene was described as part of military maneuvers in which nine missiles were test fired, including an enhanced version of the Shahab-3. Iranian officials say the new missile has a range of 1,250 miles, which would enable a strike on Israel and most of the Middle East. The tests drew immediate criticism from Washington.
(Source: World Tribune)
Israelis, to whom Iran’s nuclear program represents a threat to their existence, are coming to believe that the time for patient diplomacy is running out. According to David Albright, one of the most-heeded technical authorities on Iran’s program, the Iranians are producing 1.2 kilograms of enriched uranium a day on average, which would give them enough for a bomb by late 2009. (In more technical terms, that means they would have enough low-enriched uranium, about 700 kilograms, to enrich up to the 20 to 25 kilograms of weapons-grade needed for a crude fission bomb by then.) (Source: Newsweek)
Joe Varner is Assistant Professor and Program Manager for Homeland Security at American Military University.
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