An open source, around the world tour of international security-related news.
By Professor Joseph B. Varner
Global War on Terror
A deadly attack on a remote NATO outpost in the eastern province of Kunar is being viewed as a serious escalation in the fighting between the insurgents and the international forces stationed in Afghanistan, and a possible shift in the insurgents’ tactical capability. The high casualties sustained by international forces in recent attacks have also increased the prospects that international troops could launch cross-border strikes into Pakistan with increasing frequency.
In contrast to their traditional hit-and-run tactics and reliance on use of explosives, bombs, and suicide attacks, militants directly engaged soldiers at the outpost, in the village of Wanat, in a style that had not been seen for more than a year. A wave of insurgents attacked the outpost from multiple sides and some were able to get inside, killing nine U.S. troops and wounding 15. The attack was the worst for U.S. troops since June 2005, when 16 Americans were killed after their helicopter was shot down. Captain Michael Finney, acting spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan, said in an interview, “The attack on Sunday was a carefully planned one, with upward of 200 insurgents, to give it weight of force.” Captain Finney said the attack was ultimately repelled with on-the-ground fighting as well as air power.
But the battle, analysts say, exhibited the capacity of the insurgents, beginning early in the morning and continuing throughout the day with militants firing machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, and mortars. Haroun Mir, the deputy director for Afghanistan’s Center for Research and Policy Studies, said the attack’s superior planning was clear evidence of the presence of Al Qaeda troops in the area. Recent incidents have pointed to an increased capability of the insurgents, marked first by a major jailbreak in Kandahar in June and the influx of Taliban fighters into Kandahar Province in the south. Analysts have also noted activity of the insurgent group Hezb-i Islami and the Taliban in Nuristan Province, which neighbors Kunar Province. (Source: CSM)
Afghanistan’s Ministry of Defense says that seven insurgents have been killed in fighting in eastern Afghanistan. The statement says the clash on Monday happened in Wanat, a village in Nuristan province where on Sunday nine U.S. soldiers were killed when militants breached their remote base. It says that an “Arab terrorist” was also captured during the operation. Violence has been increasing in Afghanistan, and many people are questioning whether the Taliban-led insurgency is gaining momentum seven years after a U.S.-led invasion ousted the hard-line Islamic regime. (Source: AP)
The federal government has warned bidders on a high-profile reconstruction project in Afghanistan that they will largely be responsible for their own security, raising the prospect that private security firms will form the first line of defence against the Taliban. The Harper government announced last month that the refurbishment of the Dahla Dam will be one of Canada’s “signature” projects in Kandahar province. Canada has promised to invest as much as $50 million over three years to repair the long-neglected dam and its irrigation system, which supplies most of the farmers in the province. Military commanders in Afghanistan have insisted the Canadian Forces will play an active role in protecting the dam, which observers expect to become a target for the Taliban. (Source: Canada.com)
Disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan should remain under de facto house arrest because he risks implicating the Pakistani state in nuclear proliferation, government lawyers said Tuesday. Khan, a national hero for his key role in developing Pakistan’s atomic arms, has been confined to his home since he took sole responsibility in 2004 for the leaking of the country’s nuclear secrets to countries including Iran. However, Khan recently disowned his confession, proclaimed his innocence of any wrongdoing, and began agitating for an end to the restrictions. Earlier this month, Khan told The Associated Press that the Pakistan army under President Pervez Musharraf oversaw a 2000 shipment of nuclear components to North Korea, a claim swiftly denied by Musharraf’s office. (Source: AP)
Tony Blair today hastily cancelled his visit to the Gaza Strip and headed back to Jerusalem after receiving what his aides described as a “specific security threat” minutes before crossing the border. With his advanced security party having already gone through the Erez passenger crossing into the territory at 9.45am local time, the international peace envoy’s motorcade was ordered to turn around and abort its journey. Details of the threat against Mr Blair, who aimed to visit infrastructure projects in his capacity as international Middle Eastern peace envoy, were this morning unknown.
However, as well as security fears, it may have been postponed for diplomatic reasons as Mr Blair would have had to pass through several Hamas military checkpoints to get to the sites he was visiting, a prospect which it is believed may have caused diplomatic embarrassment as the West currently has no relations with the territory’s Islamist rulers. (Source: The Times-UK)
The Canadian Internet service provider iWeb recently removed three websites powered by Hamas and Hizbullah – both designated as terrorist organizations in Canada. Jonathan Halevi, co-founder of the Orient Research Group Ltd. and a senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, had filed a complaint after discovering that an official Hamas website was being hosted in Canada. After reporting that Hizbullah may be activating sleeper cells in Canada, CBC questioned iWeb about two additional websites, one promoting Hizbullah and the other in support of Hamas, both of which were eventually taken down. According to Halevi, as much as 95% of online activity powered by terrorist organizations, including Al Qaeda and Hamas, is hosted by American servers. “Nobody is getting sued for supporting terrorist organizations on the Web. There is an urgent need for an international Internet police,” he said. (Source: Jerusalem Post)
Iraq
Two suicide bombers blew themselves up in a crowd of army recruits Tuesday in an Iraqi province where devastating attacks persist despite security improvements in the rest of the country. At least 28 people died. The bombings came ahead of what Iraqi military officials have described as an imminent offensive in troubled Diyala province, northeast of Baghdad. The U.S. military says it will support that effort, which they called an enhancement of existing patrols and actions there. The blasts at the Saad military camp in Baqouba, the capital of Diyala, recalled the scenes of mass terror and grief that were almost a daily routine in previous years. Violence in Iraq is at its lowest level in about four years. The explosions wounded at least 57 recruits.
A military officer in Baqouba, 35 miles (60 kilometers) from Baghdad, confirmed the death toll and said soldiers were among the casualties. The U.S. military said in a statement that the attack occurred around 8 a.m. It said 20 police recruits were killed and 55 were injured. There was no immediate explanation for the discrepancy in the reports. Diyala is critical to Baghdad’s security because of its strategic importance as an entrance to the capital and a threat to supply routes going north. The volatile, ethnically mixed area also borders Iran, which the United States has accused of helping militants to stage attacks on American troops.
Last year, U.S. troops largely subdued militancy in Baqouba, which had been held by Al Qaeda in Iraq and other Sunni extremist groups. But many insurgents were believed to have melted away and now appear to be regrouping. Loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s regime had homes in Buhriz, a southern suburb of Baqouba, and the area served as a staging ground for Sunni attacks that drove Shiites out of the city. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was killed by a U.S. airstrike in Diyala province in June 2006. On June 22, a female suicide bomber concealing explosives beneath her black robe struck outside a government complex in Baqouba. At least 15 people were killed and more than 40 were wounded. A car bomb across the street from the same compound killed at least 40 people in April.
The decline in violence in Iraq has been driven by a variety of factors, including the 2007 U.S. troop surge and a Sunni revolt against Al Qaeda in Iraq. U.S.-backed Iraqi forces have scored successes in offensives against Shiite militants in Baghdad’s Sadr City district and the southern cities of Basra and Amarah, and against Sunni extremists in Mosul in the north. Also Tuesday, the U.S. military said it had captured the Iranian-trained leader of an explosives cell in the Adhamiyah district of Baghdad. It said the suspect has been linked to attacks against U.S. and Iraqi bases in the capital. (Source: AP)
United States
Top allies of Senator John McCain and Senator Barack Obama waged heated verbal battle Monday over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, particularly over Obama’s assertion that the war in Iraq had never been central to the fight against terrorism. “If we would’ve followed his advice,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a key supporter of McCain’s presidential campaign, “Iraq would’ve crumbled.” His comment came in reaction to an op-ed article by Obama in The New York Times in which the Illinois senator proposed sending 10,000 more soldiers to Afghanistan, following a rise in Taliban-linked violence, while reducing the U.S. presence in Iraq. It also came as both presidential candidates renewed their focus on the two wars.
Surrogates for both candidates employed tough language as polls showed the race tightening; they seemed to forget the civility both have pleaded for. An Obama supporter, Susan Rice, a former deputy national security adviser, accused the other side of “old-school fear-mongering.” And Graham said the op-ed article from Obama “just highlights how hellbent he is on looking at Iraq through a political lens.” (Source: IHT)
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll finds the country split down the middle between those backing Sen. Barack Obama’s 16-month timeline for withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq and those agreeing with Sen. John McCain’s position that events, not timetables, should dictate when forces come home. Obama, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, will deliver what his campaign is billing as a “major address” on Iraq today in Washington, part of an effort to convince voters that he could serve effectively as commander in chief. The public is also evenly divided on that question, with 48 percent saying he would be an effective leader of the military and 48 percent saying he would not. On Iraq policy in general, Americans continue to side with Obama and McCain, his Republican rival, in roughly equal numbers, with 47 percent of those polled saying they trust McCain more to handle the war, and 45 percent having more faith in Obama. The poll results suggest that months of Democratic attacks on McCain’s Iraq position have not dented voters’ basic trust in his ability to lead the country’s armed forces: Seventy-two percent said McCain would make a good commander in chief. (Source: Washington Post)
The Justice Department’s former top criminal prosecutor says the government’s terror watch list likely has caused thousands of innocent Americans to be questioned, searched or otherwise hassled. Former assistant attorney general Jim Robinson would know: he’s one of them. Robinson joined another mistaken-identity American and the American Civil Liberties Union on Monday to urge fixing the list that’s supposed to identify suspected terrorists. “It’s a pain in the neck, and significantly interferes with my travel arrangements,” said Robinson, the head of the Justice Department’s criminal division during President Bill Clinton’s administration. He believes his name matches that of someone who was put on the list in early 2005, and is routinely delayed while flying, despite having his own government top-secret security clearances renewed last year. (Source: Canoe-CAN)
Attorneys for Salim Ahmed Hamdan said Monday that they intend to call other detainees to testify at his upcoming military trial here, entangling the landmark proceeding in yet another difficult legal issue. The lawyers representing Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s former driver, said the eight prospective witnesses include Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, who is being held at the U.S. military prison here along with Hamdan and about 265 other captives. Hamdan’s trial, scheduled to start Monday, would be the first U.S. military commission trial in more than half a century.
Navy Captain Keith J. Allred, who is overseeing the proceedings in a threadbare building overlooking Guantanamo Bay, made it clear that the testimony would be admitted in some form, and likely would help Hamdan’s case. Allred instructed both sides to work out an arrangement, possibly a time delay or videotaped depositions, to protect national security. (Source: Washington Post)
Africa
Foreign mercenaries have joined so-called “war veterans” and militiamen attacking opposition supporters in rural parts of Zimbabwe, human rights workers have confirmed. Eyewitnesses say the men are more vicious than their Zimbabwean counterparts, with the marauding gangs attacking suspected members of the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), forcing them to renounce the party. They dress in army fatigues, carry Russian-made guns and are accompanied by interpreters when out with the militias. Patrick Chitaka, the MDC chairman in Manicaland province in the east of the country, said the foreigners had been identified in the past two to three weeks supporting government-backed men. (Source: The Independent)
Sudan promised to turn Darfur into a graveyard yesterday as it reacted with fury to charges laid by an international prosecutor accusing President al-Bashir of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The threat was made by an official in Darfur after Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), called for the arrest of Omar al-Bashir for his Government’s ruthless campaign of violence in the war-torn region. Outlining his case in The Hague, Mr Moreno-Ocampo said that Mr al-Bashir resorted to the alleged crimes after a rebellion by three ethnic groups in Darfur. He asked the court to issue an arrest warrant before 2.5 million more displaced people died a slow death.
The Sudanese government responded by staging rallies in Khartoum and El Fasher, the capital of north Darfur, where about 1,000 demonstrators chanted: “We don’t need Ocampo, we don’t need the ICC.” Idris Abdullah Hassan, the town’s deputy mayor, told the crowd: “We say to you, President al-Bashir, that the people of Darfur will go with you wherever you go, and Darfur will be the graveyard for the enemies of Sudan.” (Source: The Times)
The Sudanese government defiantly rejected International Criminal Court charges of genocide against President Omar Hassan al-Bashir on Monday, vowing to fight them “legally and diplomatically” instead of retaliating against U.N. peacekeepers, aid workers or residents of Darfur, a reaction that is feared in the volatile, western Sudanese region.
Sudan’s U.N. envoy, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, called the court’s charges a “catastrophe” that will have “disastrous consequences” on peace efforts in Darfur, where a brutal government campaign against rebels and civilians has left as many as 450,000 people dead from disease and violence, and nearly half the region’s population displaced. The Sudanese government says those figures are exaggerated. (Source: Washington Post)
China expressed “grave concern” on Tuesday after the International Criminal Court’s prosecutor charged Sudan’s president with genocide in Darfur. In Khartoum, the United Nations told its staff to stay at home as thousands of Sudanese prepared to rally in support of President Omar Hassan al-Bashir. (Source: Reuters)
Americas
After a series of Canadian court orders, remarkable footage of Canadian federal agents questioning Mr. Khadr is to be released this morning, starting with a 10-minute highlight reel to be released at 5 a.m., and a full seven hours of footage to come later in the afternoon. Mr. Khadr was sent to Guantanamo after being captured in Afghanistan in 2002. The footage, compiled from three days of interviews taped six months after his capture, is being released by his defence team. Edmonton lawyers Nathan Whitling and Dennis Edney, who fought a successful legal battle for the DVDs to be disclosed, now hope to shame Canadian politicians into lobbying Washington for the repatriation of the now-21-year-old, still jailed, but not convicted after six years.
The video will allow the public its first glimpse of an interview undertaken inside the U.S. military jail for terrorism suspects that operates on leased land in Cuba. It is also the first footage ever shown of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in action during its 24-year history. (Source: Globe and Mail-CAN)
Canada has sent three warships to help thwart swarms of modern-day Long John Silvers and Jack Sparrows who have been terrorizing maritime traffic in the Indian Ocean. Piracy exploded into the news earlier this year when helicopter-borne French commandos captured five pirates and took them back to France to face trial. The pirates, from the breakaway part of Somalia known as Puntland, had stormed a luxury yacht and held it and its 30 crew members hostage until a ransom was paid. The problem of piracy in the Horn of Africa began five years ago when Somali fisherman reacted to foreign overfishing by seizing trawlers and their crews and holding them for ransom. Civil war and anarchy had left their shattered government unable to protect its fisheries. When such tactics produced money, it emboldened the pirates to go after freighters and yachts on their way to and from Europe and Asia.
There have been 24 acts of piracy off the Somali coast this year, the Kuala Lumpur-based International Maritime Bureau reported last week. Among the victims were a German-registered freighter and its mostly Ukrainian crew, seized in May and freed on July 8 for a ransom of $800,000. A Dutch freighter and its mostly Filipino and Russian crew held for 31 days and exchanged for a ransom as much as $700,000 in June. A German yacht with four people aboard captured two weeks ago remains in the hands of pirates who have demanded $2 million to set their hostages free. To avoid getting hijacked, ships have begun taking a more indirect, costly route near Yemen that takes them 200 to 300 kilometres away from the Somali coast. This has forced Somalia’s buccaneers, who use speedboats, to venture much further offshore to hunt their prey.
To deter such crimes, Task Force 150, led by Commodore Bob Davidson, who uses the Iroquois as his flagship, includes a changing cast of warships from the United States, five European countries and Pakistan. (Source: Canada.com)
Asia
The main South Korean investor in North Korea failed to persuade the communist nation to cooperate in an investigation into the killing of a South Korean tourist at a northern mountain resort, the firm’s head said Tuesday. North Korea reiterated its refusal to allow South Korean officials to visit the area of Friday’s shooting where a 53-year-old housewife was killed by a North Korean soldier, Yoon Man-jun, head of Hyundai Asan, said after a four-day trip to the Diamond Mountain resort. (Source: AP)
Police say a 70-year-old U.S. Army retiree from Port Isabel, Texas has been strangled by suspected robbers in his apartment in the central Philippines. Regional Chief Superintendent Ronald Roderos says Billie Thomas Hannon was found bound with an electric cord around his neck Monday. Roderos said Tuesday that police are still investigating but suspect that robbers killed Hannon, who lived alone in Lapu-Lapu city. Hannon was divorced from his Filipina wife and had been living in the area since 2004. (Source: AP)
A Cambodian official claimed that about 40 Thai troops entered Cambodia on Tuesday as tension escalated between the two countries over disputed land around an ancient temple. The Thai military denied any border violation. The long-standing dispute between Phnom Penh and Bangkok over which country owns the land that surrounds the 11th-century Preah Vihear temple flared last week after the temple was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Thai troops entered Cambodian territory near the temple, said Hang Soth, director-general of the national authority for Preah Vihear temple, an agency responsible for the monument. Cambodian troops were placed on alert but ordered not to be the first to fire. (Source: AP)
Europe
They changed the way the world flies. Now the British-born men accused of plotting to blow a Toronto-bound jetliner to smithereens with liquid explosives are changing their plea. Five of the eight men facing maximum life sentences in the alleged 2006 transatlantic bomb plot targeting flights to Toronto and five other cities unexpectedly pleaded guilty to lesser charges yesterday, including “conspiring to cause a public nuisance” by publishing videos threatening attacks. As the three-month trial entered its final phase in a London courthouse, the jury yesterday learned that three defendants accused as ringleaders, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, now admit to a plan to set off bombs, but not, they insist, with the intention of targeting passenger planes or even causing death.
Instead, the defence maintains, the bombers aspired to score a propaganda coup with non-lethal explosions at Heathrow Airport and the British House of Commons. It was also revealed that they and two other defendants, Ibrahim Savant, 27, and Umar Islam, 30, pleaded guilty to the public nuisance charge relating to videos discovered after their August 2006 roundup by British security teams in raids in and around London.
All eight face maximum life sentences on the more severe charges of conspiracy to commit mass murder using explosives disguised in soft-drink bottles. The jury is to weigh that question after the trial comes to a close next week. British terrorism experts said the unexpected switch to guilty pleas on lesser charges further complicates the trial’s outcome and also raises new questions about the gravity of the original threat, which prosecutors say was taking shape against seven specific flights from London’s Heathrow Airport to destinations including Toronto, Montreal, Chicago, New York, San Francisco and Washington. (Source: The Star)
Turkey’s vast secular-religious divide — and the high-stakes struggle between the two sides, was on spectacular display yesterday as prosecutors accused dozens of senior military, business and media figures of planning a coup against the country’s mildly Islamist government. Depending on which side of the divide you stand, the indictment is either an instance of the judicial system acting to preserve democracy against an interventionist military, or a spectacular example of the governing AK Party persecuting its opponents. Turkey’s religious and secular elites have been at odds for decades, but now the struggle for power seems set to be decided in the country’s courtrooms. The coup plot allegations come as the AK Party is facing a constitutional court challenge, brought forward by its secular foes, that could see Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul forced to resign and their party banned from politics. The stakes clearly couldn’t be any higher. The 2,455-page indictment filed yesterday by Istanbul’s public prosecutor, Aykut Cengiz Engin, accuses 86 individuals of being members of a secret ultranationalist organization called Ergenekon that sought to defend Turkey’s secular traditions by bringing down Mr. Erdogan’s government.
The alleged conspirators were accused of planning to spread violence and chaos through the country, eventually forcing the army to intervene and seize power in the name of maintaining order. The case first came to light last year, when a cache of grenades and explosives was discovered during a police raid on a house in Istanbul. Prosecutors have linked Ergenekon to a number of violent incidents around the country in the past two years, including the assassination of Turkish-Armenian journalist Hrant Dink in 2007. The shadowy organization is allegedly headed by Sener Eruygur, the retired head of the Gendarmerie, a branch of the Turkish armed forces responsible for maintaining public order, and Hursit Tolon, another retired general.
Though the details of the indictment will not be made public until a court agrees to hear the case, many of the names and specific allegations have already been leaked in the Turkish press. Most of the other alleged conspirators are reported also to be retired military officials, while several prominent journalists and academics, as well as leaders of the left-wing Workers’ Party, are also believed to have been named in the indictment. Forty-eight of the suspects are already in police custody, some of them having been arrested as far back as a year ago. (Source: Globe and Mail-CAN)
Turkey’s military says 22 Kurdish rebels have been killed in recent clashes in southeastern Turkey. The military says the clashes occurred in the rugged Sirnak province. A statement on the military’s Web site says aircraft and artillery units shelled rebel positions in the area from Friday to Monday, killing 22 rebels. It says the military units also destroyed rebel shelters in the region. The military does not cite any military casualties. The rebels have been fighting for more than two decades for autonomy in southeastern Turkey. They use strongholds in northern Iraq for cross-border raids. (Source: AP)
One thousand U.S. troops began a military training exercise in Georgia on Tuesday against a backdrop of growing friction between Georgia and neighboring Russia. Officials said the exercise, called “Immediate Response 2008”, had been planned for months and was not linked to a stand-off between Moscow and Tbilisi over two Russian-backed separatists regions of Georgia. The United States is an ally of Georgia and has irritated Russia by backing Tbilisi’s bid to join the NATO military alliance. The war games involve 600 Georgian troops and smaller numbers from ex-Soviet Armenia, Azerbaijan and Ukraine. The two-week exercise was taking place at the Vaziani military base near the capital Tbilisi, which was a Russian air force base until Russian forces withdrew at the start of this decade under a European arms reduction agreement. Georgia and the Pentagon cooperate closely. Georgia has a 2,000-strong contingent supporting the U.S.-led coalition in Iraq, and Washington provides training and equipment to the Georgian military. (Source: Reuters)
Middle East
Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Monday branded UN Security Council Resolution 1701 that ended the Second Lebanon War a failure, saying that it had not achieved the aim of disarming Hizbullah in Lebanon. Barak told a Labor Party forum on Monday that the resolution had not worked, does not work now, and will probably never work. Despite the resolution’s call for a strict ban on arms shipments to Hizbullah, the group has rearmed and now has a larger rocket arsenal than it did during the war. “Hizbullah is continuing to ignore [the resolution] with the ongoing intimate assistance of the Syrians,” Barak said. (Source: Ha’aretz)
The Iranian and Syrian militaries have assisted Hizbullah in setting up advanced radar installations atop Mt. Sannine in Lebanon’s Beka Valley which can be used to track Israeli planes from the Mediterranean Sea to Damascus, the Azerbaijan-based Trend News Agency reported. (Source: Jerusalem Post)
Iran’s missile tests last week will strengthen its position in diplomatic discussions over its disputed nuclear plans, Deputy Defense Minister Nasrullah Ezatti said Monday. He said, “The maneuvers helped the Islamic Republic to go to the negotiating table with a full hand.” (Source: Reuters)
Joe Varner is Assistant Professor and Program Manager for Homeland Security at American Military University.
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