WAR 05-27-2017-to-06-02-2017_____THEWINDSofWAR

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

(269) 05-06-2017-to-05-12-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...12-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(271) 05-13-2017-to-05-19-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...19-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

(272) 05-20-2017-to-05-26-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...26-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

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Sorry folks, it's been one of those 24 hour rotations on the planet's axis....
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USS NIMITZ headed to Korea - US to deploy 3rd carrier group to deter North Korea
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UK, reported explosion, gunfire at Ariana Grande show at Manchester Arena
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Philippine President Declares Martial Law
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DHS chief: If you knew what I knew about terror, you’d ‘never leave the house’
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Muslims open fire on Christian in Egypt
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Islamic State Urges ‘All Out War’ on West for Ramadan: ‘Attack Them in Their Homes’
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NATO Members Look Less Than Thrilled When Trump Calls Them Out For Slacking on Defense $$$
Started by thompson‎, 05-25-2017 03:06 PM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...-Trump-Calls-Them-Out-For-Slacking-on-Defense

Main Russia/Ukraine invasion thread - 8/11/16 Ukraine Military On "Combat" Alert
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ne-Military-On-quot-Combat-quot-Alert/page467

Syria Has Effectively Ceased to Exist
Started by Dozdoats‎, 05-24-2017 08:22 AM
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?517675-Syria-Has-Effectively-Ceased-to-Exist

North Korea Main Thread - All things Korea May 20th - May 26th
http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/show...ain-Thread-All-things-Korea-May-20th-May-26th

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Posted for fair use.....
https://www.washingtonpost.com/worl...40ffced2ddb_story.html?utm_term=.d9311bbe4927

Africa

After UK, Egypt attacks, Libya seen as militants’ haven

By Rami Musa and Hamza Hendawi | AP May 27 at 3:06 PM
BENGHAZI, Libya — The Libya connection in the May 22 Manchester concert suicide bombing and Friday’s attack on Christians in Egypt has shone a light on the threat posed by militant Islamic groups that have taken advantage of lawlessness in the troubled North African nation to put down roots, recruit fighters and export jihadists to cause death and carnage elsewhere.

Libya has been embroiled in violence since a 2011 uprising toppled and killed Moammar Gadhafi. Vast and oil-rich, Libya currently has rival administrations, an army led by a Gadhafi-era general as well as powerful Islamist militias that compete for territory, resources and political leverage.

At the peak of its power in Libya, the Islamic State group controlled a 160-kilometer (100-mile) stretch of Libyan coastline and boasted between 2,000 and 5,000 fighters, many of them from Egypt and Tunisia.

It is that Libya that the alleged Manchester bomber, 22-year-old British citizen Salman Abedi, found when he and his family moved back from Britain after Gadhafi’s ouster in 2011.

Monday’s bombing left 22 dead, including an 8-year-old girl, and was claimed by IS. Abedi’s brother Hashim has been taken into custody in Tripoli and, according to Libyan authorities, has confessed that he and Salman were IS members.

In Egypt, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi sent his fighter-jets to bomb militant positions in eastern Libya just hours after IS fighters shot dead 29 Christians on their way to a remote desert monastery. The military said the attackers were trained in Libya.

Egypt also has long complained that weapons smuggled across the porous desert border with Libya have reached militants operating on its soil. It also has claimed that militants who bombed three Christian churches since December received military training in IS bases in Libya.

THE GENESIS OF LIBYA’S MILITANCY:

Hundreds of Libyan youths answered the call to Jihad in the 1980s, traveling to Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. When they returned home after the war, Many of them wanted Islamic Sharia laws implemented in their country. They formed underground cells to escape the regime’s watchful eyes and unsuccessfully tried to assassinate Gadhafi.

After Gadhafi’s fall, veteran jihadists, al-Qaida sympathizers and Islamists of all shades formed militias that filled the post-Gadhafi power vacuum. Libya’s present woes are rooted in the failure of the very first transitional government to dismantle those militias and integrate them into a national army. Instead, they carved up Libya into fiefdoms.

WHERE ARE THE MILITANTS NOW?

DARNA:

The eastern Libyan city, where militant positions were targeted by Egyptian warplanes on Friday, has historically been a bastion of radical Islamic groups as well as highly respected Islamic scholars. Extremists made the city their stronghold in the 1980s and 1990s, protected by the rugged terrain of the surrounding Green Mountain range. It was the main source of Libyan jihadists for the insurgency in Iraq. Entire brigades of Darna natives are known to be fighting in Syria’s civil war.

During the 2011 uprising, residents formed the “Abusaleem Martyrs” brigade to fight Gadhafi loyalists. It proved to be one of the most effective rebel outfits. Its ranks soon later swelled and its fighters seized the city, setting up the Darna Mujahideen Shura Council to replace the local government.

The Islamic State group’s Libyan affiliate had a robust presence in Darna, but the IS faction eventually fell out with the council and was driven out. The IS fighters relocated to the coastal city of Sirte and Darna remains to this day under the control of the Mujahideen Shura Council.

BENGHAZI:

Benghazi, Libya’s second largest city, was the first to fall under the influence of extremist Islamic militias. Many of those militias were formed to fight the Gadhafi regime in 2011 and were led by radicals, widely viewed as experienced and motivated.

Perhaps the most notorious of the Benghazi militias is Ansar Al-Sharia, blamed for the killings of hundreds of former Libyan soldiers and for the death of the U.S. ambassador in 2012.

For more than two years, the so-called Libyan National Army led by Gen. Khalifa Hifter has battled an alliance of Benghazi’s militias. His forces have managed to secure most of the city, except for pockets of a seaside neighborhood, heavily fortified and surrounded by fields of land mines.

SIRTE:

Sirte was where Gadhafi and his loyalists made a last stand in the 2011 civil war. The city, Gadhafi’s hometown, was almost completely destroyed in the fighting. Furious over the city’s loyalty to Gadhafi, anti-government rebels punished the city’s residents with extrajudicial killings and revenge attacks.

In 2013, Sirte fell under the control of Ansar Al- Sharia, which made alliances with local tribes and an uneasy truce with other militias and the small number of remaining army troops. The group took over a sprawling former Gadhafi compound and boasted its own TV and radio station. IS also slowly infiltrated the city as fighters from countries like Mali, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria moved in and later declared Sirte an IS emirate.

Last year, militiamen from Misrata and other localities in western Libya, acting with the support of a U.N.-backed government in Tripoli, waged a protracted and bloody campaign to drive IS militants from Sirte. When fighting stalled, the government sought support from the United States, which responded with airstrikes that sped up the collapse of IS in the city.

IS was finally defeated in Sirte and the fighters who survived the carnage fled to the vast deserts to the south.

SEBRATHA:

Sebratha has earned a reputation as a small but tenacious stronghold of Islamic radicals, something that made it easier for IS militants to find a foothold there and spawned a lucrative business in human trafficking to Europe. The city is the main IS gateway due to its location near the Tunisian border. The jumble of various militias have helped IS keep a low profile in the city, but a 2016 U.S. airstrike that killed about 40 of the group’s operatives highlighted their presence in Sebratha.

___

Hendawi reported from Cairo. Associated Press writer Maggie Michael in Cairo contributed to this report.

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/d...tries-to-seek-nuclear-weapons/article/2623911

Dan Coats: Ukraine, Libya taught other countries to seek nuclear weapons

by Joel Gehrke | May 23, 2017, 12:04 PM

The experiences of Ukraine and Libya have taught other vulnerable countries around the world not to surrender their weapons of mass destruction under pressure from the west, according to Dan Coats, President Trump's director of national intelligence.

"Unfortunately, the lessons learned have been if you have nuclear weapons, never give them up, because it's a deterrent from other actors who may want to interfere in your country," Dan Coats told the Senate Armed Services Committee. "If you don't have them, get them."

Coats referred specifically to Ukraine and Libya as cautionary tales for "rogue" and "marginal" states that might feel vulnerable. Ukraine agreed in 1994 to surrender its Soviet-era nuclear weapons stockpile in exchange for a pledge from the United States, the United Kingdom and Russia that none of the countries would violate Ukrainian sovereignty.

But Russian President Vladimir Putin sent forces to annex Crimea, a region of Ukraine, and backed a separatist-movement in the eastern part of the country in 2014.

"And so we see what's happened in Ukraine probably would not have happened if they had maintained a nuclear weapons capability," Coats said.

And in Libya, the late dictator Moammar Gaddafi finally dismantled his weapons program, after years of sanctions and the George W. Bush-era invasion of Iraq. But Libya was eventually overthrown by western powers in 2011.

He noted that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un "believes that regime survival is dependent solely on becoming a nuclear power," and that this drives home his point around the world.

"We, unfortunately, tend to be moving in the wrong direction as countries around the world think that gaining nuclear capability is a protection," Coats said. "Or, potentially, it could be used for offensive capabilities."

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

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http://www.realcleardefense.com/art...d_fighting_islamic_state_in_mosul_111464.html

Iranian Commander Killed Fighting Islamic State in Mosul

By Qassim Abdul-Zahra
May 27, 2017

BAGHDAD (AP) — A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander was killed in an explosion during clashes with the Islamic State group west of Mosul, an Iraqi official told The Associated Press on Saturday, as aid groups voiced concern for the safety of civilians after Iraq’s government called for residents in militant-held neighborhoods to flee immediately.

Gen. Shaaban Nasiiri was an adviser to Qassem Soleimani, the head of Iran’s elite Quds Force. Soleimani has acted as a key adviser to Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces — an umbrella group of Mostly Shiite militia forces sanctioned by the Iraqi government — in the fight against IS since 2014.

The Iraqi official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations, said Nasiiri was killed Friday and is the first senior Iranian commander to die in the Mosul fight.

Inside Mosul, U.S.-backed Iraqi forces began the push to retake the Old City on Saturday morning, moving in on the district from three directions, according to a statement from Nineveh operations command, the authority overseeing the Mosul fight.

The IS hold on Mosul has shrunk to just a handful of neighborhoods in and around the Old City district where narrow streets and a dense civilian population is expected to complicate the fight there.

Iraqi planes dropped leaflets over the area Friday telling civilians to flee “immediately” to “safe passages” where they will be greeted by “guides, protectors and (transportation) to reach safe places,” according to a government statement.

However, it is unclear how the government intends to ensure safe passage for civilians as IS fighters have repeatedly targeted fleeing civilians with small arms and mortar fire.

The move to clear the Old City marks a shift in approach. Since the Mosul operation was launched in October, Iraqi forces have encouraged civilians to remain in their homes to avoid massive displacement. However, more than 730,000 people have fled the fight to date according to United Nations figures.

“As many as 200,000 additional people may try to leave in coming days,” the U.N. said Saturday in a statement following the call for Old City civilians to leave. Save the Children warned that fleeing civilians could be caught in the crossfire, leading to “deadly chaos” in a statement Friday.

Both Iraqi forces and IS fighters are obligated under international law to protect civilians, the U.N. statement added.

More than 100,000 civilians are estimated to still be inside IS-held Mosul neighborhoods.

While U.S.-backed forces have fought inside Mosul during the operation to retake it from IS, Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Forces have largely operated in the deserts to the west cutting supply lines and attempting to begin securing Iraq’s border with Syria.

The Popular Mobilization Forces are largely supported by Tehran, a key Iraqi ally in the fight against IS. Iran has provided weapons, training and advisers credited with important early victories against the extremists in 2014 before the U.S. began a campaign of airstrikes targeting the group.

Mosul’s eastern half was declared liberated in January and the push for the city’s west began the following month. While some Iraqi commanders said they hoped to retake the city before Ramadan, the Muslim holy month that began Friday night, grueling urban combat has repeatedly slowed the pace of operations.

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

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https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/26/...n-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=2

ASIA PACIFIC | NEWS ANALYSIS

In Indonesia and Philippines, Militants Find a Common Bond: ISIS

By RICHARD C. PADDOCK
MAY 26, 2017

BANGKOK — An eruption of violence in the southern Philippines and suicide bombings in Indonesia this week highlight the growing threat posed by militant backers of the Islamic State in Southeast Asia.

While the timing of the Jakarta bombings and the fighting on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao appears to be coincidental, experts on terrorism have been warning for months that the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, has provided a new basis for cooperation among extremists in the region.

“Setbacks in Syria and Iraq have heightened the importance of other theaters for ISIS, and in Southeast Asia, the focus is the Philippines,” said Sidney Jones, director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict, based in Jakarta. “ISIS supporters around the region have been urged to join the jihad in the Philippines if they can’t get to Syria, and to wage war at home if they can’t travel at all.”

There is no indication that this week’s violence was directed or coordinated by Islamic State leaders in the Middle East. Still, the attacks posed a test for the authorities in the Philippines and in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation, as they confront like-minded extremists who support the creation of an Islamic state in Southeast Asia.

Clashes in Marawi, a city of about 200,000 on Mindanao, continued for a fourth day on Friday as government forces, using tanks and attack helicopters, tried to dislodge militants from at least two Islamist groups.

Continue reading the main story
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The government said it was conducting “surgical airstrikes” to drive out the militants, whose snipers held strategic positions in the city.

The fighting began on Tuesday after Philippine forces tried to capture Isnilon Hapilon, who has been designated by the Islamic State as its leader in the Philippines. He has long been associated with Abu Sayyaf, an Islamist-oriented kidnap-for-ransom gang that has made millions of dollars by taking hostages and sometimes killing them. The group beheaded a German hostage this year and two Canadians last year. The United States has offered a $5 million reward for Mr. Hapilon’s capture.

In moving to take Mr. Hapilon, the government underestimated the militants’ strength, and the raid went awry. He escaped, and the Islamist forces took over much of the city, setting fire to a cathedral and a hospital and reportedly taking hostages, including a Roman Catholic priest.

The fighting led President Rodrigo Duterte to declare 60 days of martial law for all of Mindanao.

The government reports that more than 40 people have been killed in the fighting, including more than 30 militants, although official figures in the Philippines are notoriously unreliable.

Abu Sayyaf was joined by fighters from the smaller Maute group, which has also staged attacks in the southern Philippines. Both groups have pledged to support the Islamic State.

Underscoring the threat from Islamist militancy, officials said that Indonesians, Malaysians and Singaporeans were fighting in Marawi alongside the local militants, and that six foreign fighters had been killed.

“What’s happening in Mindanao is no longer a rebellion of Filipino citizens,” said Jose Calida, the solicitor general of the Philippines. “It has transmogrified into an invasion by foreign terrorists who heeded the clarion call of the ISIS to go to the Philippines if they find difficulty in going to Iraq or Syria.”

In Jakarta, two suicide bombers attacked police officers Wednesday evening outside the Kampung Melayu bus terminal, a few minutes apart. Three police officers died, along with the two attackers.

Setyo Wasisto, a spokesman for the Indonesian police, said an identity card found at the scene bore the name of a man with known connections to the Islamic State. The authorities are conducting a DNA test to confirm whether he was one of the bombers, he said.

It was the worst attack by extremists since January 2016, when militants attacked a police post in Jakarta. The police said the attack was organized by an Indonesian member of the Islamic State in Syria. Four civilians were killed in that attack, along with four of the attackers.

About 500 Indonesians have tried to travel to Syria and join the Islamic State, but most were detained before getting there and were sent back to Indonesia. However, some Indonesians who succeeded in joining the Islamic State have played a key role in Syria in coordinating activities in the Philippines and Indonesia, Ms. Jones said.

In the past, the Indonesian leaders of three groups within the Islamic State competed with one another for resources to organize attacks, she said.

Zachary M. Abuza, a professor at the National War College in Washington who specializes in Southeast Asian security issues, said that the Islamic State was happy to take responsibility for terrorist attacks in other countries, but that he believed the group’s focus on Southeast Asia had diminished as it faced military pressure from the United States and its allies in Iraq and Syria.

“Southeast Asia was never a priority for ISIS,” he said, “and it is hard for me to make the case that fighting for survival in Iraq and Syria, or at least trying not to lose any more territory, that they will stay focused on Southeast Asia.”

The southern Philippines, home to a sizable Muslim population in a mostly Catholic country, has long served as a base for Islamist extremists, including militants from Indonesia, Malaysia and other countries, who have taken refuge there or trained at remote jungle camps.

Together, Indonesia and the Philippines have nearly 25,000 islands and share a little-patrolled ocean border. Militants can easily travel by boat between the southern Philippines and eastern Indonesia without having to pass through immigration control.

Since the early 2000s, the United States has stationed military advisers in the southern Philippines to aid in the fight against Abu Sayyaf and other Islamic extremists.

Richard Javad Heydarian, a political science professor at De La Salle University in Manila, said that Mr. Duterte was under mounting pressure to address the crisis in his home island, Mindanao, and that he may need further assistance from Washington.

“As the first president from Mindanao, public expectations have been and continue to be high,” Mr. Heydarian said. “Counterterrorism will likely dominate his agenda in the short to medium run, and this will likely nudge him to solicit assistance from tried and tested allies like America.”

Rights activists, who are already alarmed by Mr. Duterte’s campaign against drugs that has claimed the lives of more than 4,000 people, are concerned that his declaration of martial law will lead to even more killing.

Mr. Duterte has threatened to expand martial law nationwide, an echo of the Marcos dictatorship, when the country lived under martial law for nine years. The period was marked by widespread abuses, extrajudicial killings, disappearances and torture.

“Duterte’s martial law threatens military abuses in Mindanao that could rival the murderous ‘drug war’ in urban areas,” said Phelim Kine, deputy Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

Reporting was contributed by Felipe Villamor, Sol Vanzi and Aurora Almendral from Manila, and Fira Abdurachman from Jakarta, Indonesia.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on May 27, 2017, on Page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: In Indonesia and Philippines, Militants Find a Common Bond: ISIS.

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

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https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/me...rid=ZGRpbGVnZ2VAc21hbGx3YXJzam91cm5hbC5jb20S1

Mexico’s Drug War

Violence continues to rage in Mexico more than a decade after former President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on drug cartels.

Backgrounder by Brianna Lee and Danielle Renwick
Last updated May 25, 2017

Introduction

Mexican authorities have been waging a bloody war against drug trafficking organizations for more than a decade with limited success. Independent researchers estimate that since 2006, the year President Felipe Calderon launched an intensive counternarcotics campaign, drug cartels have contributed to the killings of more than one hundred thousand people, including politicians, students, and journalists. There were nearly twenty-three thousand reported homicides in 2016, although it is unclear how much of this was drug-related.

Over the last decade, the U.S. government has committed more than $2 billion in funding and intelligence resources to supplement Mexico’s counternarcotics efforts, but Washington’s primary focus has been stanching the flow of drugs into the United States and bolstering domestic law enforcement. Meanwhile, gradual moves have been made at the U.S. state level toward legalization and decriminalization of marijuana, one of the primary substances involved in the drug war.

What drugs do the cartels traffic?

Mexican drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) are the largest foreign suppliers of heroin, methamphetamines, and cocaine to the United States, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Mexican suppliers are responsible for most heroine and methamphetamine production, while cocaine is largely produced in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, and then transported through Mexico. Mexican cartels are also leading manufacturers and suppliers of Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid many times more potent than heroin. U.S. seizures of the drug have soared in the last five years.

The U.S. government says that Mexican DTOs net tens of billions of dollars every year.

The cartels also produce and smuggle vast quantities of marijuana into the United States, but legalization of the drug in some U.S. jurisdictions has diminished cartel profits. As a result, experts note that DTOs are shifting their focus to harder drugs like heroin. By 2017, twenty-eight U.S. states and Washington, DC, had legalized the use of marijuana for either recreational or medicinal purposes, and lawmakers in Mexico were considering legislation to allow use of medicinal marijuana.

The U.S. government says that Mexican DTOs net tens of billions of dollars every year from drug sales in the United States, although estimates vary.

Which are the largest cartels?

Mexico’s drug cartels are in a constant state of flux. Over the decades, they have grown, splintered, forged new alliances, and battled one another for territory. The cartels that have the greatest impact on the United States, according to a 2016 DEA report [PDF], are:

Sinaloa. Formerly led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, who was arrested in 2016 and extradited to the United States in 2017, Sinaloa is one of Mexico’s oldest and most influential cartels. With strongholds along Mexico’s Pacific coast, it has the largest international footprint among its Mexican rivals.

Jalisco New Generation. The Jalisco cartel splintered from the Sinaloa cartel in 2010. According to the DEA, “its rapid territorial expansion is characterized by the organization’s willingness to engage in violent confrontations” with authorities and other cartels.

Juarez. A longstanding rival of Sinaloa, the Juarez cartel’s stronghold is the north-central state of Chihuahua, across the border from New Mexico and Texas.

Gulf. The Gulf cartel’s base of power is in the northeastern state of Tamaulipas. According to the DEA, the arrests of Gulf leaders in recent years has diminished the organization’s influence.

Los Zetas. Originally a paramilitary group for the Gulf cartel, Los Zetas was singled out in 2007 by the DEA as the country’s most “technologically advanced, sophisticated, and violent” group. It splintered from the Gulf cartel in 2010 and held sway over swaths of eastern, central, and southern Mexico, but it has reportedly lost power in recent years.

Beltran-Leyva Organization. Formed when the Beltran-Leyva brothers split from the Sinaloa cartel in 2008, the organization partners with the Juarez and Los Zetas cartels. Since 2008, all four Beltran-Leyva brothers have been arrested or killed, but their loyalists operate throughout Mexico.

What factors led to their growth?

Experts point to both domestic and international forces at play. In Mexico, cartels have used vast drug profits to neutralize government opposition, paying off judges, police, politicians, and other officials. For decades during the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one-year one-party rule, DTOs exploited Mexico’s entrenched politics to create “a system-wide network of corruption that ensured distribution rights, market access, and even official government protection for drug traffickers in exchange for lucrative bribes,” wrote David Shirk, director of the Justice in Mexico program at the University of San Diego, in a 2011 CFR report.

PRI’s unbroken reign finally came to an end in 2000 with the presidential election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN), and subsequent “democratization upended the equilibrium [PDF] that had developed between state actors … and organized crime,” according to a 2017 Congressional Research Service report. “DTO violence directed at the government appears to be an attempt to reestablish impunity, while the inter-cartel violence seems to be an attempt to reestablish dominance over specific drug trafficking plazas,” the report continues.

DTO violence directed at the government appears to be an attempt to reestablish impunity.
June S. Beittel, Congressional Research Service

At the international level, Mexican cartels began to take on a much larger role in the drug trafficking business in the late 1980s, after U.S. government agencies successfully broke up the Caribbean networks used by Colombian cartels to smuggle cocaine. Mexican gangs eventually shifted from being couriers for Colombian DTOs to being wholesalers.

All the while, the United States government, despite conducting a so-called “war on drugs” and other counternarcotics efforts, has made little progress in reducing the demand for illegal drugs. A 2014 Rand Corporation study prepared for the White House found Americans spent about $109 billion in 2010 on illicit drugs, roughly the same amount they spent in 2000.

What did President Felipe Calderon do to counter DTOs?

Calderon declared war on the cartels shortly after taking office in 2006. Over the course of his six-year term, he deployed tens of thousands of military personnel to supplement and, in many cases, replace local police forces. Under his leadership, the Mexican military, with U.S. assistance, captured or killed twenty-five of the top thirty-seven most wanted drug kingpins in Mexico.

But the crackdown on cartel leaders had its drawbacks. President Enrique Pena Nieto’s administration says Calderon’s so-called “kingpin strategy” splintered the organizations, creating between sixty and eighty new, smaller drug trafficking gangs. Succession battles and territorial rivalries between cartels intensified, and violence spread. Criminal organizations increasingly turned to kidnapping and extortion to supplement their incomes. Nearly one hundred mayors and former mayors were killed, along with dozens of municipal leaders, between 2006 and 2016 as cartels vied for political power, according to the New York Times.

The government registered 120,000 homicides over the course of Calderon’s term, nearly twice as many as occurred during his predecessor’s time in office. Because official Mexican government statistics do not single out drug-related deaths, quantifying the precise toll of the drug war has been a challenge. The Justice in Mexico project’s 2017 report on drug violence estimates that organized-crime-style killings make up between one-third and one-half of the total homicides in a given year, depending on the sources used to calculate the figures.

Per 100,000
Homicide Rate in Mexico, 1990–2016
1990
1992
1994
1996
1998
2000
2002
2004
2006
2008
2010
2012
2014
2016
0
4
8
12
16
20
24
28
2001● Rate: 10.1
Credit: Claire Felter Source: University of San Diego
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What have Pena Nieto’s efforts been?

Pena Nieto, who took office in 2012, said he would focus more on reducing violence against civilians and businesses and less on removing the leaders of cartels. Despite these ambitions, Pena Nieto has relied heavily [PDF] on the Mexican military in combination with the federal police to address violence using “essentially the same operational” strategy as Calderon, wrote Brookings Institution senior fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown in a 2014 report.

After peaking at twenty-seven thousand deaths [PDF] in 2011, homicides declined in the first years of Pena Nieto’s presidency. But 2016 saw an uptick: the government reported nearly twenty-three thousand deaths, up 22.8 percent from the year before. Some experts have attributed this, in part, to the recapture in January 2016 of Guzman and the territorial fights that have ensued in his absence.

What has the toll been on human rights?

Civil liberties groups, journalists, and others have criticized the Mexican government’s war against cartels for years. A 2016 Human Rights Watch report says that Mexico’s security forces have been linked to the extrajudicial killing of thousands of civilians and the disappearances of twenty-seven thousand people since 2006.

Mass protests erupted across the country in 2014 after forty-three students disappeared in the town of Iguala, in the state of Guerrero, following deadly clashes with local police. Mexican investigators found that the police handed the students over to a local drug gang at the behest of the mayor, who had ties to the gang. The incident showed “a failure of the political system to root out close links between the cartels and political parties,” says Mexico-based journalist Ioan Grillo in a 2017 interview.

Compounding human rights issues is the emergence of vigilante groups, known as autodefensas, in recent years. Made up largely of farmers in rural areas, these civilian militias have attempted to fight drug traffickers and restore order to towns, filling in where local police have failed. Though illegal, these groups gained momentum and became a formidable force against the cartels in states like Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Michoacan. Concerns have arisen over whether some of these groups are tied to organized crime or whether they may turn on the people they say they protect.

What assistance has the U.S. government provided?

Through the Merida Initiative, the United States has committed to providing approximately $2.5 billion in funding, technical assistance, and intelligence over more than a decade to increase Mexico’s institutional capacity to address drug trafficking. The United States has provided information and equipment that has helped Mexican authorities capture several high-profile traffickers, including Guzman.

Timeline
U.S.-Mexico Relations
1810 - 2010

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US Border Patrol
The United States and Mexico renewed this partnership in 2010, which placed a larger emphasis on addressing the socioeconomic factors contributing to the violence. In recent years, the United States has sent unarmed drones to collect intelligence on traffickers, and has also sent CIA operatives and security contractors to train Mexican federal police.

Meanwhile, the United States has ramped up security on its side of the border, increasing the number of agents there [PDF] from around eleven thousand in 2004 to more than seventeen thousand in 2016.

U.S. President Donald J. Trump made immigration and border security centerpieces of his 2016 campaign. Trump has signed executive orders calling for the construction of a border wall between the two countries and increases in border patrol personnel. Some experts worry tensions between the United States and Mexico during Trump’s presidency could affect cooperation on security policy. “What remains to be seen is how well—and in what areas—the United States will be willing to work with Mexico,” said Shirk in a 2017 CFR interview.

Introduction
What drugs do the cartels traffic?
Which are the largest cartels?
What factors led to their growth?
What did President Felipe Calderon do to counter DTOs?
What have Pena Nieto’s efforts been?
What has the toll been on human rights?
What assistance has the U.S. government provided?
Resources

Lilbitsnana · May 27, 2017

I'll put this here since I didn't see NK thread

Sputnik‏Verified account @SputnikInt 53s54 seconds ago

#NorthKorea Claims #Seoul Surveillance #Drones Violated Air Space
http://sptnkne.ws/e4We

posted for fair use and discussion
https://sputniknews.com/military/201705271054052704-pyongyang-claims-seoul-violated-airspace/

North Korea Claims Seoul Surveillance Drones Violated Air Space
© AP Photo/ Ahn Young-joon
Military & Intelligence
21:47 27.05.2017(updated 02:48 28.05.2017)

Pyongyang has accused Seoul of flying Israeli-built surveillance drones within DPRK borders, a move South Korea has denied.

The People's Democratic Republic of North Korea (DPRK), through its state-run media arm KCNA, accused South Korea of invading Pyongyang airspace through the use of surveillance drones.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un reacts with members of the Korean People's Army in this undated photo released by North Korea's Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) on May 15, 2017.
© REUTERS/ KCNA
Beijing Urges Pyongyang to Stick to Denuclearization Policy

The Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) claimed that an Israeli-built South Korean HERON unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) violated Pyongyang airspace four times during an eleven-hour period, describing the alleged overstep as a "grave military provocation," according to Yonhap.

Seoul responded that KCNA's Saturday accusations were "untrue," adding that the HERON UAV, one of three purchased from Israel at approximately $10 million apiece, remained within South Korean borders and was involved in a "normal" operation that was deployed "as planned."

KCNA accusations detailed that the South Korean HERON entered the DPRK western border area a total of four times between 7:46 a.m. and 8:40 p.m. on Friday, cited by Yonhap.

The DPRK alleged that the violation took place as four US Global Hawk spy drones and some US 100 military personnel arrived in Japan's Yokota Air Base on what Pyongyang suggested was a pretext of avoiding inclement weather in the region.

The KCNA allegations included the warning that military provocations would be met with a "merciless retaliatory response."

Increased ballistic missile testing by Pyongyang has put the region on edge, as the US and its allies, alongside China and Russia, have urged the DPRK to end its continuing weapons development.

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

I'll put this here since I didn't see NK thread

Yeah, sorry about that...

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1781067-russia-is-bring-back-its-wwii-shock-armies

Russia Is Bring Back Its WWII 'Shock Armies'

MICHAEL PECK
8:57 AM

Moscow is merely using the glories and heroism of the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War to motivate its soldiers of today.

During World War II, one of the weapons that the Soviet Union employed to destroy Nazi Germany was the “Shock Army.” These were reinforced army-sized formations used to tear holes in the German lines for Soviet tanks to exploit.

Now Russia plans to bring back [3] Shock units. Yet lest anyone fear this is a prelude to a Russian blitz of Ukraine or the Baltic states, the title “Shock” will be an honorific reward for units that perform particularly well.

“78 units, subunits and formations are currently being considered for the ‘shock unit’ title,” Lieutenant-General Ivan Buvaltsev, head of the Russian military's Main Administration of Combat Training of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in a May 11 article [4] in the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Buvaltsev also said “the title may be given to forces including motorized rifle troops, tank units, marines, airborne, air assault and other units and subunits.”

“This use of ‘shock’ is apparently designed to recognize subunits, units, and formations that demonstrate a higher degree of training and performance,” David Glantz, a retired U.S. Army colonel and expert on the Russian military, told the National Interest. “The emphasis here is on improving force readiness.”

Glantz, perhaps the foremost Western historian of the Soviet military in World War II, explained that the Shock Army concept predates World War II. “Actually, the term ‘shock army’ dates back to the early 1930s, when, according to Field Regulations, these were highly trained and reinforced armies designated to spearhead offensive operations. The task assigned to these armies was to create tactical penetrations through which mobile forces (initially cavalry, but later mechanized corps) were to conduct exploitation into the operational depths.”

Thus shock armies were to be battering rams that would blast a hole in enemy lines, through which armored units would fan out into the enemy's rear areas, severing supply lines and overrunning command posts and artillery batteries. It illustrates how sophisticated Soviet doctrine was for conducting army-level maneuver operations, at least on par with German blitzkrieg theory and far more advanced than American, British and French thinking at the time.

Unfortunately, Stalin’s purges of most every competent prewar Soviet general, and the devastation of the German invasion in June 1941, rendered such operations beyond the Red Army’s capacity in the early days of the Russo-German War. However, in December 1941 and January 1942, the Soviets created four shock armies to lead their winter counteroffensive. The First, Third and Fourth Shock Armies were deployed near Moscow, where they threw back the German forces threatening the city. The Second Shock Army was deployed at Leningrad, where it was twice encircled and destroyed by the Germans in 1942 (its commander, Andrei Vlasov, was captured by the Germans and defected, becoming the commander of an anti-Soviet army raised by the Nazis).

More successful was the Fifth Shock Army, which reinforced the devastating Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in December, and fought off attempts by the German Forty-Eighth Panzer Corps to relieve the encircled Sixth Army.

Despite prewar doctrine that called for shock armies to heavily reinforced and well-trained, wartime exigencies made the actual formations much more haphazard. “1st Shock consisted of hastily raised and deployed rifle brigades and meager tank support, while the other three shock armies fielded in late 1941 and early 1942 were made up of rifle divisions and tank brigades, leavened by the first several Soviet Guards rifle corps,” Glantz said. The Fifth Shock Army was the strongest, with an attached tank corps and Guards cavalry corps.

The elite units of the Red Army in World War II were actually the Guards units, so designated because they had distinguished themselves in battle. By 1943, “shock armies were seldom larger or more powerful than other field armies, nor did they have the (theoretically) stronger composition of a Guards army,” Glantz says.

In that sense, the new shock units sound closer to the Guards formations of World War II. Should the West be concerned? No more than the Russian should be when the United States names its warships after famous battles, like the USS Anzio and Saipan. The U.S. Army also highlights the historical lineage of units such as the Eighty-Second Airborne.

Moscow is merely using the glories and heroism of the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War to motivate its soldiers of today.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter [5] and Facebook [6].

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2017/05/longest-war-fades-even-nato/138229/

The Longest War Fades Even at NATO

BY GAYLE TZEMACH LEMMON
COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
READ BIO
MAY 26, 2017

Cameras focused on Trump, but war commanders in Afghanistan wanted more troops from NATO, not promises.

This was the big stage and the NATO spotlight. At least it was supposed to be. For months, U.S. commanders said they needed thousands more NATO and American troops to help Afghans hold back the resurgent and unrelenting fighting of more than 20 terrorist groups across the country. They looked to their commanders in chief, their heads of state, to commit to a mini-surge of advisors, some help with counterterrorism operations, and renewed pressure on Pakistan to do more on its side of the border.

Instead, the Afghanistan War is so forgotten – or, we are so numbed – it now fades into the background even at the headquarters of the very organization tasked to fight it: NATO.

Afghanistan was overshadowed by President Donald Trump’s first visit to a NATO summit and his message on financial burden-sharing targeted at Europe. Nearly no mention of NATO’s continuing mission in Afghanistan could be spotted in the headlines coming out of Europe. It was just talk of transatlantic tensions and bills due to Washington.

Here’s what the NATO summit coverage left out: Afghan leaders and U.S. generals mired in a very long war in which Afghan forces are taking an unsustainable level of casualties received more of the same vague assurances they’ve heard for years, that members are “in support” of the Resolute Support mission but there are still no decisions on troop levels for 2018. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis last week said he was “very soon” to make his recommendation to the White House, but it was not in time for the summit. So the up or down on whether to add “a few thousand more” troops to support the training and advising of Afghan forces., which Gen. John Nicholson, top U.S. war commander in Kabul, advocated for on the Hill this past February still awaits Mattis, and the rest of the Trump administration. That conversation is said to be riven by the same divides that marked the Obama administration: to do or not to do, and how many, for how long and to what end.

Related: NATO, Dunford Laying Groundwork to Send More Troops To Iraq, Afghanistan
Related: The Trump Effect: One Path To A New NATO
Related: ISIS-in-Afghanistan Is Losing Recruits to Other Groups, US Officials Say

“It shouldn’t take too long. I’ve got to integrate a fair number of issues to give a good recommendation for the way ahead,” Mattis told reporters. That was in February. In March, the head of U.S. Central Command, Gen. Joseph Votel, told lawmakers that “we are developing a strategy, and we are in discussions with the secretary and the department right now,” noting that he thought “it will involve additional forces to ensure that we can make the advise-and-assist mission more effective.” And the head of U.S. Special Operations Command, Gen. Tony Thomas, said in his testimony he didn’t need to allocate more elite American units to fight terrorists, he wanted to more conventional troops to help them do the job.

“More conventional forces that would thicken the ability to advise and assist Afghan forces — that would absolutely be to our benefit,” Thomas told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mattis told reporters assembled at the Pentagon earlier this month that the Afghan troop recommendation “is being put together by the chairman and myself, and I expect it’ll go to decision very, very soon.”

When? And what will it mean, given the time it will take to get forces onto the battlefield while the Taliban and other enemy groups make gains? Is the Washington stalemate (and focus elsewhere) taking a toll on the Afghan stalemate?

Officials inside the White House working on Afghanistan who expected to see a decision on U.S. troop levels before the Trump Middle East tour began now say it should come after the president has returned. But for commanders from Tampa to Kabul, and the forces serving in theater, the waiting already has gone on for months. Obama heard the same request in his final months but elected to hand off any new troop-level decisions to the incoming president who would be in command by the time they were enacted. Meanwhile Afghan forces in one year have taken nearly the same amount of losses as the U.S. experienced in both Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11.

The war that began 16 years ago is not over and may never be in our lifetime. And if the White House — which says it is focused on getting U.S. commanders what they need in the field — is serious about fulfilling its words, it will make a decision soon on whether or not to add the forces requested. Rally NATO allies to continue the non-combat work of training and assisting Afghan forces. And then explain to the American public, either way, the rationale behind its decision and the strategy it is serving. For years the Afghanistan war has been out of sight, remembered only by those asked to fight it. That did not change at the NATO meeting this week. But the moment for decisions and a national discussion has arrived — let’s just hope we are not too late to seize it.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a regular contributor to Defense One. Lemmon is the author of Ashley's War: The Untold Story of a Team of Women Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. FULL BIO

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.defenseone.com/technolog...ceptor-fast-track/138213/?oref=d-channelriver

US Puts Multi-Warhead Interceptor On the Fast Track

BY PATRICK TUCKER
READ BIO
MAY 26, 2017

Officials won’t say it’s because of North Korea. But experts say Pyongyang’s planned ICBMs will almost certainly release decoys to cloak their nukes.

The Missile Defense Agency, or MDA, is accelerating the development of an interceptor that can take down several incoming warheads — or one warhead and several decoys — simultaneously. While MDA officials say the move is not a response to any specific threat, one prominent defense watcher notes that North Korea is likely working hard on missiles that can fire decoys to confuse interceptors.

The most recent Pentagon budget request seeks $259 million to move the Multi-Object Kill Vehicle, or MOKV, program into a new development phase — and speed up its projected completion by five years.

“We have accelerated MOKV risk reduction and product development phases to achieve a demonstrated capability in the 2025 timeframe,” said an MDA official in an email to Defense One.

MDA’s decision to accelerate the MKOV program is, in part, a vote of confidence in recent technological gains. On Tuesday, Boeing announced that MDA had awarded the company a $58 million, 35-month contract, to demonstrate their MOKV design.

“Our MOKV concept gives the Missile Defense Agency flexibility in eliminating threats more efficiently and affordably,” Paul Geery, a vice president of Boeing Phantom Works, said in a press release.

Related: Pick Up the Pace on Missile Defense

Related: As Missile Defense Technology Improves, So Do Odds of an Arms Race in the Pacific

Related: The Dirty Secret of US-Israel Missile Defense Cooperation

The MDA official said the acceleration decision is “not in response to any specific intelligence, but to stay ahead of potential future threats.”

How far along is North Korea in developing a missile that can shoot decoys and more easily avoid interception? In March, Defense One put that question to Mitch Stevison, vice president of Raytheon Missile Systems.

“I’m really careful about talking about threats because those immediately go into areas that we can’t really talk about,” said Stevison. “I would characterize it like this: the pace that we see the potential adversaries testing should tell us something.”

David Wright, the co-director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Global Security Program, was a bit more forthcoming. “It’s very likely that [North Korea] is working on [missile interceptor] countermeasures of various kinds, including adding multiple decoys to its missiles, and this is something it should be able to do. Since the decoys are intended to work above the atmosphere (as is the kill vehicle) they can be very lightweight, so you avoid the problem of too much mass,” Wright said.

“Too much mass” is a key reason why North Korea has not yet been able to put a 650-plus-kilogram nuclear warhead atop an ICBM that could hit the United States.

In 2000, the Union pulled together a group of experts to assess next-generation missile countermeasures. Wright says that the basic conclusions of their report, including the likely use of decoys, still hold up.

“Our bottom line was that if a country has the technical ability and motivation to build a long-range missile and a nuclear warhead to go on it, it will also have the technical capability to add countermeasures to that missile that will be effective in defeating the defense, and it will have the motivation to add them to the missile,” he said. “It does not make sense to assume that countermeasures will be an afterthought. We expect North Korea would be developing them as an integral part of developing ballistic missiles in the age of missile defenses.”

MDA hopes to develop and test “command and control strategies in both digital and hardware,” in 2017, an agency official told Scout Warrior in February.

Patrick Tucker is technology editor for Defense One. He’s also the author of The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move? (Current, 2014). Previously, Tucker was deputy editor for The Futurist for nine years. Tucker has written about emerging technology in Slate, ... FULL BIO

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/apr/13/who-are-the-new-jihadis

The long read

Who are the new jihadis?

Biographies of ‘homegrown’ European terrorists show they are violent nihilists who adopt Islam, rather than religious fundamentalists who turn to violence

by Olivier Roy

There is something new about the jihadi terrorist violence of the past two decades. Both terrorism and jihad have existed for many years, and forms of “globalised” terror – in which highly symbolic locations or innocent civilians are targeted, with no regard for national borders – go back at least as far as the anarchist movement of the late 19th century. What is unprecedented is the way that terrorists now deliberately pursue their own deaths.

Over the past 20 years – from Khaled Kelkal, a leader of a plot to bomb Paris trains in 1995, to the Bataclan killers of 2015 – nearly every terrorist in France blew themselves up or got themselves killed by the police. Mohamed Merah, who killed a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school in Toulouse in 2012, uttered a variant of a famous statement attributed to Osama bin Laden and routinely used by other jihadis: “We love death as you love life.” Now, the terrorist’s death is no longer just a possibility or an unfortunate consequence of his actions; it is a central part of his plan. The same fascination with death is found among the jihadis who join Islamic State. Suicide attacks are perceived as the ultimate goal of their engagement.

This systematic choice of death is a recent development. The perpetrators of terrorist attacks in France in the 1970s and 1980s, whether or not they had any connection with the Middle East, carefully planned their escapes. Muslim tradition, while it recognises the merits of the martyr who dies in combat, does not prize those who strike out in pursuit of their own deaths, because doing so interferes with God’s will. So, why, for the past 20 years, have terrorists regularly chosen to die? What does it say about contemporary Islamic radicalism? And what does it say about our societies today?

The latter question is all the more relevant as this attitude toward death is inextricably linked to the fact that contemporary jihadism, at least in the west – as well as in the Maghreb and in Turkey – is a youth movement that is not only constructed independently of parental religion and culture, but is also rooted in wider youth culture. This aspect of modern-day jihadism is fundamental.

Wherever such generational hatred occurs, it also takes the form of cultural iconoclasm. Not only are human beings destroyed, statues, places of worship and books are too. Memory is annihilated. “Wiping the slate clean,” is a goal common to Mao Zedong’s Red Guards, the Khmer Rouge and Isis fighters. As one British jihadi wrote in a recruitment guide for the organisation: “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington … not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and, most painfully, convert your children who will then go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.”

How the changing media is changing terrorism
Read more
While all revolutions attract the energy and zeal of young people, most do not attempt to destroy what has gone before. The Bolshevik revolution decided to put the past into museums rather than reduce it to ruins, and the revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran has never considered blowing up Persepolis.

This self-destructive dimension has nothing to do with the politics of the Middle East. It is even counterproductive as a strategy. Though Isis proclaims its mission to restore the caliphate, its nihilism makes it impossible to reach a political solution, engage in any form of negotiation, or achieve any stable society within recognised borders.

The caliphate is a fantasy. It is the myth of an ideological entity constantly expanding its territory. Its strategic impossibility explains why those who identify with it, instead of devoting themselves to the interests of local Muslims, have chosen to enter a death pact. There is no political perspective, no bright future, not even a place to pray in peace. But while the concept of the caliphate is indeed part of the Muslim religious imagination, the same cannot be said for the pursuit of death.

Additionally, suicide terrorism is not even effective from a military standpoint. While some degree of rationality can be found in “simple” terrorism – in which a few determined individuals inflict considerable damage on a far more powerful enemy – it is entirely absent from suicide attacks. The fact that hardened militants are used only once is not rational. Terrorist attacks do not bring western societies to their knees – they only provoke a counter-reaction. And this kind of terrorism today claims more Muslim than western lives.

The systematic association with death is one of the keys to understanding today’s radicalisation: the nihilist dimension is central. What seduces and fascinates is the idea of pure revolt. Violence is not a means. It is an end in itself.

This is not the whole story: it is perfectly conceivable that other, more “rational”, forms of terrorism might soon emerge on the scene. It is also possible that this form of terrorism is merely temporary.

The reasons for the rise of Isis are without question related to the politics of the Middle East, and its demise will not change the basic elements of the situation. Isis did not invent terrorism: it draws from a pool that already exists. The genius of Isis is the way it offers young volunteers a narrative framework within which they can achieve their aspirations. So much the better for Isis if those who volunteer to die – the disturbed, the vulnerable, the rebel without a cause – have little to do with the movement, but are prepared to declare allegiance to Isis so that their suicidal acts become part of a global narrative.

This is why we need a new approach to the problem of Isis, one that seeks to understand contemporary Islamic violence alongside other forms of violence and radicalism that are very similar to it – those that feature generational revolt, self-destruction, a radical break with society, an aesthetic of violence, doomsday cults.

It is too often forgotten that suicide terrorism and organisations such as al-Qaida and Isis are new in the history of the Muslim world, and cannot be explained simply by the rise of fundamentalism. We must understand that terrorism does not arise from the radicalisation of Islam, but from the Islamisation of radicalism.

Far from exonerating Islam, the “Islamisation of radicalism” forces us to ask why and how rebellious youths have found in Islam the paradigm of their total revolt. It does not deny the fact that a fundamentalist Islam has been developing for more than 40 years.

There has been vocal criticism of this approach. One scholar claims that I have neglected the political causes of the revolt – essentially, the colonial legacy, western military interventions against peoples of the Middle East, and the social exclusion of immigrants and their children. From the other side, I have been accused of disregarding the link between terrorist violence and the religious radicalisation of Islam through Salafism, the ultra-conservative interpretation of the faith. I am fully aware of all of these dimensions; I am simply saying that they are inadequate to account for the phenomena we study, because no causal link can be found on the basis of the empirical data we have available.

My argument is that violent radicalisation is not the consequence of religious radicalisation, even if it often takes the same paths and borrows the same paradigms. Religious fundamentalism exists, of course, and it poses considerable societal problems, because it rejects values based on individual choice and personal freedom. But it does not necessarily lead to political violence.

The objection that radicals are motivated by the “suffering” experienced by Muslims who were formerly colonised, or victims of racism or any other sort of discrimination, US bombardments, drones, Orientalism, and so on, would imply that the revolt is primarily led by victims. But the relationship between radicals and victims is more imaginary than real.

Those who perpetrate attacks in Europe are not inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, Libya or Afghanistan. They are not necessarily the poorest, the most humiliated or the least integrated. The fact that 25% of jihadis are converts shows that the link between radicals and their “people” is also a largely imaginary construct.

Revolutionaries almost never come from the suffering classes. In their identification with the proletariat, the “masses” and the colonised, there is a choice based on something other than their objective situation. Very few terrorists or jihadis advertise their own life stories. They generally talk about what they have seen of others’ suffering. It was not Palestinians who shot up the Bataclan.

Up until the mid-1990s, most international jihadis came from the Middle East and had fought in Afghanistan prior to the fall of the communist regime there in 1992. Afterwards, they returned to their home countries to take part in jihad, or took the cause abroad. These were the people who mounted the first wave of “globalised” attacks (the first attempt on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, against the US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the US Navy destroyer Cole in 2000).

This first generation of jihadis was mentored by the likes of Bin Laden, Ramzi Yousef and Khaled Sheikh Mohammed. But from 1995 onwards, a new breed began to develop – known in the west as the “homegrown terrorist”.

Who are these new radicals? We know many of their names thanks to police identification of perpetrators of attacks in Europe and the US. More still have been caught plotting attacks. We also have all the biographical information that has been gathered by journalists. There is no need to embark on painstaking fieldwork to figure out terrorist trajectories. All the data and profiles are available.

When it comes to understanding their motivations, we have traces of their speech: tweets, Google chats, Skype conversations, messages on WhatsApp and Facebook. They call their friends and family. They issue statements before they die and leave testaments on video. In short, even if we cannot be sure that we understand them, we are familiar with them.

We certainly have more information on the lives of terrorists operating in Europe than we do on jihadis who leave for foreign countries and never return. But, as a Sciences Po study on French jihadis who died in Syria has shown, there are many similarities between these groups. Here I will focus primarily on Franco-Belgians, who supply most of the ranks of western jihadis. But Germany, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and the Netherlands also have significant contingents on the frontlines.

Using this information, I have compiled a database of roughly 100 people who have been involved in terrorism in France, or have left France or Belgium to take part in global jihad in the past 20 years. It includes the perpetrators of all the major attacks targeting French or Belgian territory.

There is no standard terrorist profile, but there are recurrent characteristics. The first conclusion that can be drawn is that the profiles have hardly changed over the past 20 years. Khaled Kelkal, France’s first homegrown terrorist, and the Kouachi brothers (Charlie Hebdo, Paris, 2015) share a number of common features: second generation; fairly well integrated at first; period of petty crime; radicalisation in prison; attack and death – weapons in hand – in a standoff with the police.

Another characteristic that all western countries have in common is that radicals are almost all “born-again” Muslims who, after living a highly secular life – frequenting clubs, drinking alcohol, involvement in petty crime – suddenly renew their religious observance, either individually or in the context of a small group. The Abdeslam brothers ran a Brussels bar and went out to nightclubs in the months preceding the Bataclan shooting. Most move into action in the months following their religious “reconversion” or “conversion”, but have usually already exhibited signs of radicalisation.

In almost every case, the processes by which a radical group is formed are nearly identical. The group’s membership is always the same: brothers, childhood friends, acquaintances from prison, sometimes from a training camp. The number of sets of siblings found is also remarkable.

This over-representation of siblings does not occur in any other context of radicalisation, whether on the extreme left or Islamist groups. It highlights the significance of the generational dimension of radicalisation.

As the former jihadi David Vallat has written, the radical preachers’ rhetoric could basically be summarised as: “Your father’s Islam is what the colonisers left behind, the Islam of those who bow down and obey. Our Islam is the Islam of combatants, of blood, of resistance.”

Radicals are in fact often orphans – as the Kouachi brothers were – or come from dysfunctional families. They are not necessarily rebelling against their parents personally, but against what they represent: humiliation, concessions made to society, and what they view as their religious ignorance.

Most of the new radicals are deeply immersed in youth culture: they go to nightclubs, pick up girls, smoke and drink. Nearly 50% of the jihadis in France, according to my database, have a history of petty crime – mainly drug dealing, but also acts of violence and, less frequently, armed robbery. A similar figure is found in Germany and the United States – including a surprising number of arrests for drunk driving. Their dress habits also conform to those of today’s youth: brands, baseball caps, hoods, in other words streetwear, and not even of the Islamic variety.

Their musical tastes are also those of the times: they like rap music and go out to clubs. One of the best-known radicalised figures is a German rapper, Denis Cuspert – first known as Deso Dogg, then as Abu Talha al-Almani – who went to fight in Syria. Naturally, they are also gaming enthusiasts and are fond of violent American movies.

Their violent tendencies can have outlets other than jihad and terrorism – as we see in the gang wars of Marseille. They can also be channelled, either by institutions – Mohammed Merah wanted to enlist in the army – or by sport. One group of Portuguese converts, most of whom were originally Angolan, left London to join Isis after bonding at a Thai boxing club started by a British NGO. Combat sport clubs are more important than mosques in jihadi social life.

The language spoken by radicals is always that of their country of residence. In France, they often switch to a Salafised version of French banlieue speech when they reconvert.

Prison time puts them in contact with radicalised “peers” and far outside of any institutionalised religion. Prison amplifies many of the factors that fuel contemporary radicalisation: the generational dimension; revolt against the system; the diffusion of a simplified Salafism; the formation of a tight-knit group; the search for dignity related to respect for the norm; and the reinterpretation of crime as legitimate political protest.

Another common feature is the radicals’ distance from their immediate circle. They did not live in a particularly religious environment. Their relationship to the local mosque was ambivalent: either they attended episodically, or they were expelled for having shown disrespect for the local imam. None of them belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood, none of them had worked with a Muslim charity, none of them had taken part in proselytising activities, none of them were members of a Palestinian solidarity movement, and lastly, none of them, to my knowledge, took part in the rioting in French suburbs in 2005. They were not first radicalised by a religious movement before turning to terrorism.

If indeed there was religious radicalisation, it did not occur in the framework of Salafi mosques, but individually or within the group. The only exceptions are in Britain, which has a network of militant mosques frequented by members of al-Muhajiroun, which gave rise to an even more radical group, Sharia4UK, led by Anjem Choudary. The question is therefore when and where jihadis embrace religion. Religious fervour arises outside community structures, belatedly, fairly suddenly, and not long before terrorists move into action.

To summarise: the typical radical is a young, second-generation immigrant or convert, very often involved in episodes of petty crime, with practically no religious education, but having a rapid and recent trajectory of conversion/reconversion, more often in the framework of a group of friends or over the internet than in the context of a mosque. The embrace of religion is rarely kept secret, but rather is exhibited, but it does not necessarily correspond to immersion in religious practice. The rhetoric of rupture is violent – the enemy is kafir, one with whom no compromise is possible – but also includes their own family, the members of which are accused of observing Islam improperly, or refusing to convert.

At the same time, it is obvious that the radicals’ decision to identify with jihad and to claim affiliation with a radical Islamic group is not merely an opportunistic choice: the reference to Islam makes all the difference between jihad and the other forms of violence that young people indulge in. Pointing out this pervasive culture of violence does not amount to “exonerating” Islam. The fact that these young people choose Islam as a framework for thought and action is fundamental, and it is precisely the Islamisation of radicalism that we must strive to understand.

Aside from the common characteristics discussed above, there is no typical social and economic profile of the radicalised. There is a popular and very simplistic explanation that views terrorism as the consequence of unsuccessful integration – and thus the harbinger of a civil war to come – without for a moment taking into account the masses of well-integrated and socially ascendant Muslims. It is, for instance, an unassailable fact that in France far more Muslims are enrolled in the police and security forces than are involved in jihad.

Furthermore, radicals do not come from hardline communities. The Abdeslam brothers’ Brussels bar sat in a neighbourhood that has been described as “Salafised” – which would therefore be off-limits to people who drink liquor and women not wearing the hijab. But this example shows that the reality of these neighbourhoods is more complex than we are led to believe.

It is very common to view jihadism as an extension of Salafism. Not all Salafis are jihadis, but all jihadis are supposedly Salafis, and so Salafism is the gateway to jihadism. In a word, religious radicalisation is considered to be the first stage of political radicalisation. But things are more complicated than that, as we have seen.

Clearly, however, these young radicals are sincere believers: they truly believe that they will go to heaven, and their frame of reference is deeply Islamic. They join organisations that want to set up an Islamic system, or even, in the case of Isis, to restore the caliphate. But what form of Islam are we talking about?

As we have seen, jihadis do not descend into violence after poring over sacred texts. They do not have the necessary religious culture – and, above all, care little about having one. They do not become radicals because they have misread the texts or because they have been manipulated. They are radicals because they choose to be, because only radicalism appeals to them. No matter what database is taken as a reference, the paucity of religious knowledge among jihadis is glaring. According to leaked Isis records containing details for more than 4,000 foreign recruits, while most of the fighters are well-educated, 70% state that they have only basic knowledge of Islam.

It is important to distinguish here between the version of Islam espoused by Isis itself, which is much more grounded in the methodological tradition of exegesis of the prophet Muhammad’s words, and ostensibly based on the work of “scholars” – and the Islam of the jihadis who claim allegiance to Isis, which first of all revolves around a vision of heroism and modern-day violence.

The scriptural exegeses that fill the pages of Dabiq and Dar al-Islam, the two recent Isis magazines written in English and French, are not the cause of radicalisation. They help to provide a theological rationalisation for the violence of the radicals – based not on real knowledge, but an appeal to authority. When young jihadis speak of “truth”, it is never in reference to discursive knowledge. They are referring to their own certainty, sometimes supported by an incantatory reference to the sheikhs, whom they have never read. For example Cédric, a converted Frenchman, claimed at his own trial: “I’m not a keyboard jihadi, I didn’t convert on YouTube. I read the scholars, the real ones.” He said this even though he cannot read Arabic and met the members of his network over the internet.

It probably makes sense to start by listening to what the terrorists say. The same themes recur with all of them, summed up in the posthumous statement made by Mohammad Siddique Khan, leader of the group that carried out the London bombings on 7 July 2005.

The first motivation he cited is atrocities committed by western countries against the “Muslim people” (in the transcript he says, “my people all over the world”); the second is the role of avenging hero (“I am directly responsible for protecting and avenging my Muslim brothers and sisters,” “Now you too will taste the reality of this situation”); the third is death (“We love death as much as you love life”), and his reception in heaven (“May Allah ... raise me amongst those whom I love like the prophets, the messengers, the martyrs”).

The Muslim community such terrorists are eager to avenge is almost never specified. It is a non-historical and non-spatial reality. When they rail against western policy in the Middle East, jihadis use the term “crusaders”; they do not refer to the French colonisation of Algeria.

Radicals never refer explicitly to the colonial period. They reject or disregard all political and religious movements that have come before them. They do not align themselves with the struggles of their fathers; almost none of them go back to their parents’ countries of origin to wage jihad. It is noteworthy that none of the jihadis, whether born Muslim or converted, has to my knowledge campaigned as part of a pro-Palestinian movement or belonged to any sort of association to combat Islamophobia, or even an Islamic NGO. These radicalised youths read texts in French or English circulating over the internet, but not works in Arabic.

Oddly enough, the defenders of the Islamic State never talk about sharia and almost never about the Islamic society that will be built under the auspices of Isis. Those who say that they went to Syria because they wanted “to live in a true Islamic society” are typically returnees who deny having participated in violence while there – as if wanting to wage jihad and wanting to live according to Islamic law were incompatible. And they are, in a way, because living in an Islamic society does not interest jihadis: they do not go to the Middle East to live, but to die. That is the paradox: these young radicals are not utopians, they are nihilists.

What is more radical about the new radicals than earlier generations of revolutionaries, Islamists and Salafis is their hatred of existing societies, whether western or Muslim. This hatred is embodied in the pursuit of their own death when committing mass murder. They kill themselves along with the world they reject. Since 11 September 2001, this is the radicals’ preferred modus operandi.

The suicidal mass killer is unfortunately a common contemporary figure. The typical example is the American school shooter, who goes to his school heavily armed, indiscriminately kills as many people as possible, then kills himself or lets himself be killed by the police. He has already posted photographs, videos and statements online. In them he assumed heroic poses and delighted in the fact that everyone would now know who he was. In the United States there were 50 attacks or attempted attacks of this sort between 1999 and 2016.

The boundaries between a suicidal mass killer of this sort and a militant for the caliphate are understandably hazy. The Nice killer, for instance, was first described as mentally ill and later as an Isis militant whose crime had been premeditated. But these ideas are not mutually exclusive.

The point here is not to mix all these categories together. Each one is specific, but there is a striking common thread that runs through the mass murders perpetrated by disaffected, nihilistic and suicidal youths. What organisations like al-Qaida and Isis provide is a script.

The strength of Isis is to play on our fears. And the principal fear is the fear of Islam. The only strategic impact of the attacks is their psychological effect. They do not affect the west’s military capabilities; they even strengthen them, by putting an end to military budget cuts. They have a marginal economic effect, and only jeopardise our democratic institutions to the extent that we ourselves call them into question through the everlasting debate on the conflict between security and the rule of law. The fear is that our own societies will implode and there will be a civil war between Muslims and the “others”.

We ask ourselves what Islam wants, what Islam is, without for a moment realising that this world of Islam does not exist; that the ummah is at best a pious wish and at worst an illusion; that the conflicts are first and foremost among Muslims themselves; that the key to these conflicts is first of all political; that national issues remain the key to the Middle East and social issues the key to integration.

Certainly Isis, like al-Qaida, has fashioned a grandiose imaginary system in which it pictures itself as conquering and defeating the west. It is a huge fantasy, like all millenarian ideologies.

But, unlike the major secular ideologies of the 20th century, jihadism has a very narrow social and political base. As we have seen, it does not mobilise the masses, and only draws in those on the fringe.

There is a temptation to see in Islam a radical ideology that mobilises throngs of people in the Muslim world, just as Nazism was able to mobilise large sections of the German population. But the reality is that Isis’s pretension to establish a global caliphate is a delusion – that is why it draws in violent youngsters who have delusions of grandeur.

This is an edited extract from Jihad and Death: The Global Appeal of Islamic State by Olivier Roy, published by Hurst.

• Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, or sign up to the long read weekly email here

Housecarl · May 27, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.economist.com/news/middl...eated-desert-where-they-are-potent-threat-how

Down but not out: How Islamic State clings on in Libya

The jihadists have retreated to the desert, where they are a potent threat

Print edition | Middle East and Africa
May 27th 2017 | RIYADH

LIKE their comrades in Iraq and Syria, the jihadists of Islamic State (IS) in Libya were in retreat earlier this year. Their branch, considered the most lethal outside the Levant, was pushed out of Sirte, its coastal stronghold, in December and hit hard by American bombers in January. The blows seemed to dispel the idea that, as the core of its “caliphate” crumbled, Libya might serve as a fallback base for IS.

But although the jihadists are down in Libya, they are not out. And they may have international reach. Many of the fighters have regrouped in a swathe of desert valleys and rocky hills south-east of Tripoli. British police are probing links between Salman Abedi, the suicide-bomber who murdered 22 people at a concert in Manchester on May 22nd, and IS, which claimed responsibility for the attack. Mr Abedi was in Libya recently; his brother and father were arrested in Tripoli on May 24th. The militia holding them says the brother is a member of IS and was planning an attack on Tripoli.

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Chaos has been the norm in Libya since the uprising that toppled Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. Myriad armed groups, loosely aligned with rival governments in the east and west, vie for power. A UN-backed peace deal, signed by some of the adversaries in 2015, has failed to unite the country or create an effective state under the “government of national accord” (GNA). IS has fed on the chaos—and added to it, lately by attacking water pipelines and pumping stations.

https://cdn.static-economist.com/si...ges/2017/05/articles/body/20170527_mam913.png

There are thought to be around 500 IS fighters operating in Libya, not the thousands estimated before their recent setbacks. But there are perhaps 3,000 jihadists of all types. In a sign of how fluid things are, IS is now said to be receiving support from local al-Qaeda fighters, despite feuding between the groups’ leaders abroad. In Libya they operate in the same areas. Fighters move back and forth between them. “I can well imagine that they are co-operating on logistics and sharing information,” says Wolfgang Pusztai, a former Austrian defence attaché to Libya.

The terrain in the south makes it difficult to attack IS from the ground, say GNA officials, who oversaw the retaking of Sirte. But there are problems with air strikes too—the jihadists stopped travelling in large numbers after American bombers killed more than 80 of them in one set of strikes in January. Now they move in small groups along unpatrolled roads. The GNA says it is keeping tabs on them from a base near Bani Walid, while America is watching from the air. It has been flying surveillance drones over Libya from bases in Tunisia since last summer, and it is building a new drone base in Niger.

Neighbours worry that their own militants will find inspiration and training in Libya—and then return home. Chad closed its border with Libya in January, fearing an influx of jihadists. (It has since reopened one crossing.) Algeria has opened a new air base to guard its frontiers. Tunisia, which has suffered several attacks by jihadists, has built a 200km (125-mile) earth wall along its border with Libya. But even so, IS maintains cells near Sabratha, in the west, to help its fighters get in and out.

Europe, only some 400km away, is eyeing the situation with concern. The chaos has made Libya the main point of entry to Europe for African migrants. Despite more patrols, some 50,000 migrants are thought to have reached Italy by boat so far this year, over 40% more than in the same period last year. Some believe the smuggling business helps to finance terrorism—and that jihadists may be among those making the trip.

For now IS and its allies are keeping a low profile in Libya, if not elsewhere, as they try to rebuild their strength. Meanwhile, hopes of a settlement to the conflict look dim. The chaos is likely to continue, giving the jihadists an opportunity to reassert themselves at home.

This article appeared in the Middle East and Africa section of the print edition under the headline "Down but not out"

Housecarl · May 29, 2017

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----------

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-militants-idUSKBN18P0DX

World News | Mon May 29, 2017 | 6:59am EDT

Philippines military says close to defeating Islamist rebels

By Tom Allard | MARAWI, Philippines
The Philippines military said on Monday it was close to retaking a southern city held for a seventh day by Islamist militants, as helicopters unleashed more rockets on positions held by the rebels aligned with Islamic State.

The clashes in Marawi city with the Maute militia, a group hardly known a year ago, has become the biggest security challenge of Rodrigo Duterte's 11-month presidency, with gunmen resisting air and ground assaults and still in control of central parts of a city of 200,000 people.

The military said the rebels may be getting help from "sympathetic elements" and fighters they had freed from jail during the rampage that started on Tuesday and caught the military by surprise.

"Our ground commanders have assured that the end is almost there," military spokesman, Restituto Padilla told reporters.

"We can control who comes in and who comes out, who moves around and who doesn't. And we're trying to isolate all these pockets of resistance."

More than 100 people have been killed, most of them militants, according to the military, and most of the city's residents have fled.

The military said the Maute group was still present in nine of the city's 96 Barangays, or communities.

The Maute group's ability to fight off the military for so long will add to fears that Islamic State's radical ideology is spreading in the southern Philippines and it could become a haven for militants from Indonesia, Malaysia and beyond.

The government believes the Maute carried out their assault before the Muslim holy month of Ramadan to capture the attention of Islamic State and earn recognition as a Southeast Asian affiliate.

The military's estimates of the size of the rebel force and the extent of its occupation have fluctuated each day. It has maintained throughout that it is in full control of the situation and says supporters of the Maute were making exaggerated claims on social media.

According to witnesses, men with black headbands typical of Islamic State were seen on city streets in recent days. A photograph taken by a resident shows 10 men carrying assault rifles and dressed entirely in black.

A Reuters photographer saw an Islamic State flag in an oil drum in an abandoned street on Monday, where chickens roamed in front of damaged shops and homes.

LOCKDOWN

Iligan City, 38 km (24 miles) away, was overflowing with evacuees and was on lockdown over fears that fighters had sneaked out of Marawi by blending in with civilians.

"We don't want what's happening in Marawi to spill over in Iligan," said Colonel Alex Aduca, chief of the Fourth Mechanized Infantry Battalion.

Sixty-one militants, 20 members of the security forces and 19 civilians have been killed since Tuesday, when Maute rebels went on the rampage after a botched military operation to arrest Isnilon Hapilon, who the government believes is a point man for Islamic State in the Philippines.

Some troops tried to eliminate Maute snipers on Monday as others guarded deserted streets, taken back block-by-block.

Helicopters circled the lakeside city and smoke poured out of some buildings. Artillery explosions echoed.

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Though most people have left, thousands are stranded, worried they could be intercepted by militants at checkpoints on routes out of the city.

There were still bodies of civilians in Marawi and residents urged the military to halt air strikes, said Zia Alonto Adiong, a politician involved in evacuation efforts.

"The anticipation of death is worse than death itself," he told news channel ANC. "We appeal to our military forces to do a different approach."

The military said air strikes were taken on "known and verified enemy positions".

"We are using precision ammunition in our surgical air strikes," said another army spokesman, Colonal Edgard Arevalo. "We have highly skilled and trained pilots delivering the payload."

Bodies of what appeared to be executed civilians were found in a ravine outside Marawi on Sunday as the crisis took a more sinister turn. Most of the eight men were shot in the head and some had bound hands.

Duterte imposed martial law last week on Mindanao, an island of 22 million people where both Marawi and Iligan are located, to quell the unrest and wipe out militancy.

He made an unconventional offer on Saturday to Muslim separatists and communist rebels to join his fight against extremists, and said he would give them the same pay and benefits as government troops.

(Additional reporting by Erik de Castro in MARAWI and Neil Jerome Morales, Karen Lema and Manuel Mogato in MANILA; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Robert Birsel)

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

Nidal‏ @Nidalgazaui 24s24 seconds ago

#BREAKING: Gigantic explosion rocked central #Bagdad moments ago. #Iraq

Al Arabiya English‏Verified account @AlArabiya_Eng 42s42 seconds ago

#BREAKING: Al Arabiya correspondent: Car bomb explosion in central #Baghdad

Rami‏ @RamiAILoIah 3m3 minutes ago

#BREAKING Massive explosion rocked center of Baghdad a while ago.. #Iraq

The Intel Crab‏ @IntelCrab 34s34 seconds ago

Blast in #Baghdad was likely an ISIS-led VBIED attack. More information incoming.

Iraqi Day ??‏ @iraqi_day 13m13 minutes ago

#BREAKING
#ISIS car bomb exploded outside a ice cream shop in #Karrada central #Baghdad, first casualty numbers are 6 dead wounded. #Iraq

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

Steven nabil‏Verified account @thestevennabil 4m4 minutes ago

#breaking Al jadria blast , #isis uses Ramadan to Kill Iraqi muslims. People were having ice cream and trying to spend their night peacefuly

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

Yusra M.‏ @Temimi_Yusra 1m1 minute ago

#BREAKING: Terrorist attack strikes busy #Karrada in Baghdad, reports of 30 victims b/w killed & injured

Musti Obaid‏ @MustiObaid 4m4 minutes ago
Replying to @MustiObaid

UPDATE: Death toll has risen to 11 & 20 wounded after a car bomb targeted a popular restaurant in central #Baghdad. May they rest in peace.

Short vid on top at link. Some dead bodies:

Integrity UK‏ @integrity_UK 2m2 minutes ago
Replying to @integrity_UK

Initial moments after car bomb exploded. #Baghdad #Iraq

https://twitter.com/integrity_UK

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

What's left of the car.

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

Scroll down a bit at the link. How awful....

Steven nabil‏Verified account @thestevennabil 5m5 minutes ago

#breaking moment of blast that targeted a busy #baghdad district tonight , you can see the heavy traffic, it was an ice cream shop #iraq

https://twitter.com/thestevennabil

mzkitty · May 29, 2017

Steven nabil‏Verified account @thestevennabil

Families at an ice cream shop in #baghdad were murdered today, blown up to pieces by #isis terrorists. Stand with #baghdad please!

darren‏ @MrDarren007 13m13 minutes ago
darren Retweeted Rudaw English

#BREAKING: ISIS claims responsibility for attack on ice-cream shop in Karrada, #Baghdad. #Terror #Bomb #Cowards

More photos here:

https://twitter.com/RudawEnglish

Meadowlark · May 29, 2017

Housecarl said:
Hummm....

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.scout.com/military/warrior/story/1781067-russia-is-bring-back-its-wwii-shock-armies

Russia Is Bring Back Its WWII 'Shock Armies'

MICHAEL PECK
8:57 AM

Moscow is merely using the glories and heroism of the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War to motivate its soldiers of today.

During World War II, one of the weapons that the Soviet Union employed to destroy Nazi Germany was the “Shock Army.” These were reinforced army-sized formations used to tear holes in the German lines for Soviet tanks to exploit.

Now Russia plans to bring back [3] Shock units. Yet lest anyone fear this is a prelude to a Russian blitz of Ukraine or the Baltic states, the title “Shock” will be an honorific reward for units that perform particularly well.

“78 units, subunits and formations are currently being considered for the ‘shock unit’ title,” Lieutenant-General Ivan Buvaltsev, head of the Russian military's Main Administration of Combat Training of the Russian Armed Forces, wrote in a May 11 article [4] in the Russian military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda. Buvaltsev also said “the title may be given to forces including motorized rifle troops, tank units, marines, airborne, air assault and other units and subunits.”

“This use of ‘shock’ is apparently designed to recognize subunits, units, and formations that demonstrate a higher degree of training and performance,” David Glantz, a retired U.S. Army colonel and expert on the Russian military, told the National Interest. “The emphasis here is on improving force readiness.”

Glantz, perhaps the foremost Western historian of the Soviet military in World War II, explained that the Shock Army concept predates World War II. “Actually, the term ‘shock army’ dates back to the early 1930s, when, according to Field Regulations, these were highly trained and reinforced armies designated to spearhead offensive operations. The task assigned to these armies was to create tactical penetrations through which mobile forces (initially cavalry, but later mechanized corps) were to conduct exploitation into the operational depths.”

Thus shock armies were to be battering rams that would blast a hole in enemy lines, through which armored units would fan out into the enemy's rear areas, severing supply lines and overrunning command posts and artillery batteries. It illustrates how sophisticated Soviet doctrine was for conducting army-level maneuver operations, at least on par with German blitzkrieg theory and far more advanced than American, British and French thinking at the time.

Unfortunately, Stalin’s purges of most every competent prewar Soviet general, and the devastation of the German invasion in June 1941, rendered such operations beyond the Red Army’s capacity in the early days of the Russo-German War. However, in December 1941 and January 1942, the Soviets created four shock armies to lead their winter counteroffensive. The First, Third and Fourth Shock Armies were deployed near Moscow, where they threw back the German forces threatening the city. The Second Shock Army was deployed at Leningrad, where it was twice encircled and destroyed by the Germans in 1942 (its commander, Andrei Vlasov, was captured by the Germans and defected, becoming the commander of an anti-Soviet army raised by the Nazis).

More successful was the Fifth Shock Army, which reinforced the devastating Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad in December, and fought off attempts by the German Forty-Eighth Panzer Corps to relieve the encircled Sixth Army.

Despite prewar doctrine that called for shock armies to heavily reinforced and well-trained, wartime exigencies made the actual formations much more haphazard. “1st Shock consisted of hastily raised and deployed rifle brigades and meager tank support, while the other three shock armies fielded in late 1941 and early 1942 were made up of rifle divisions and tank brigades, leavened by the first several Soviet Guards rifle corps,” Glantz said. The Fifth Shock Army was the strongest, with an attached tank corps and Guards cavalry corps.

The elite units of the Red Army in World War II were actually the Guards units, so designated because they had distinguished themselves in battle. By 1943, “shock armies were seldom larger or more powerful than other field armies, nor did they have the (theoretically) stronger composition of a Guards army,” Glantz says.

In that sense, the new shock units sound closer to the Guards formations of World War II. Should the West be concerned? No more than the Russian should be when the United States names its warships after famous battles, like the USS Anzio and Saipan. The U.S. Army also highlights the historical lineage of units such as the Eighty-Second Airborne.

Moscow is merely using the glories and heroism of the Red Army of the Great Patriotic War to motivate its soldiers of today.

Michael Peck is a contributing writer for the National Interest. He can be found on Twitter [5] and Facebook [6].

They were incredibly wasteful formations. Of course they punched holes through the German lines. The germans simply let them through reinforced the lines and then encircled the pushed through Russian formations easily. Why you ask. The Russians would amass their forces with well telegraphed overwhelming artillery barrages, rush forward in great force and as soon as their objectives were met, they would literally stand there waiting for further orders. While this happened the germans regrouped, surrounded and then annihilate them. That is how the war on the eastern front proceeded after Kursk and why it took the Russians another two years to reach Berlin.

They gradually beat the germans down who ran out of oil, men and other resources with overwhelming firepower, manpower and bravery, despite poor training and even worse tactics, not to mention widespread drunkeness. And when I say bravery, I quote Stalin who once said it truly takes a brave man not to be a hero in the red army.

Lilbitsnana · May 30, 2017

Steve Herman‏Verified account @W7VOA 23m23 minutes ago

Media reports say US has begun shipping weapons to Syrian Kurdish fighters.

Lilbitsnana · May 30, 2017

The Intel Crab Retweeted
Breaking News‏ @BreakingNLive 2h2 hours ago

BREAKING: RIGHT NOW: Terrorist attack foiled in Paris right now, 2 arrested, tried to activate explosives, nearby cafes evacuated - Reports

Josh Caplan‏ @joshdcaplan 1h1 hour ago

Armed terror police swarm Paris bus amid reports of two men carrying explosives.

Breaking911‏Verified account @Breaking911 35m35 minutes ago

BREAKING: Armed terror police arrest men threatening to 'blow up bus' in Paris - http://breaking911.com/breaking-armed-terror-police-arrest-men-threatening-blow-bus-paris/ …

posted for fair use
http://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/lat...ce-bus-two-men-explosives-France-attack-fears

BREAKING: Armed terror police swarm Paris bus amid reports of men carrying explosives

ANTI-TERROR police swooped to a bus in central Paris amid reports that three men armed with explosives were in the area.
By Tom Evans / Published 30th May 2017

Armed police in Paris TWITTER
SCRAMBLE: Armed cops rushed to the scene

Shocked onlookers claim police carrying firearms rushed to the scene shortly after 6pm this evening.

A police operation took place in the city's Gobelins district as three men reportedly threatened to blow up a bus.

The area was cordoned off and the nearby metro station was closed.

A suspicious package was then reported on Bus 91 along Saint-Marcel Boulevard as terror cops rushed to calm the situation.

The security forces intervened "as a precaution" and checks are in progress, according to local media.

The men reportedly "uttered threats" as emergency services arrived at the scene.

It was later confirmed that three men were arrested in the incident.

The men were decribed as "petty criminals" by the police.

France has been in a state of emergency ever since the November 2015 Paris attacks that killed 137 people.

The country has been the subject of a string of atrocities – with ISIS-inspired attacks hitting Nice and Normandy last summer.

And it comes just days after 22 people were killed in Manchester when a suicide bomber detonated at the end of an Ariana Grande concert at the Manchester Arena.

Lilbitsnana · May 30, 2017

Conflict News‏ @Conflicts 19m19 minutes ago

BREAKING: U.S. started shipping weapons to Syrian Kurdish fighters in past 24 hours - official - @ReutersWorld

Conflict News‏ @Conflicts 21m21 minutes ago

SYRIA: US has begun providing weapons and military equipment to the YPG - @NBCNews

posted for fair use and discussion
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-m...BN18Q1R4?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=Social

Tue May 30, 2017 | 11:59am EDT
Syrian rebels say U.S., allies sending more arms to fend off Iran threat

By Tom Perry, Suleiman Al-Khalidi and Maher Chmaytelli | BEIRUT/AMMAN/BAGHDAD

Syrian rebels say the United States and its allies are sending them more arms to try to fend off a new push into the southeast by Iran-backed militias aiming to open an overland supply route between Iraq and Syria.

The stakes are high as Iran seeks to secure its influence from Tehran to Beirut in a "Shi'ite crescent" of Iranian influence through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where Sunni Arab states have lost out in power struggles with Iran.

Tensions escalated in the southeastern region of Syria, known as the Badia, this month when government forces supported by Iraqi Shi'ite militias deployed in a challenge to rebels backed by President Bashar al-Assad's enemies.

This has coincided with a march toward the Syrian border by Shi'ite militias from Iraq. They reached the frontier adjoining northern Syria on Monday. A top Iraqi militia commander said a wider operation to take the area from Sunni jihadist Islamic State would start on Tuesday and this would help Syria's army.

While in Iraq the United States has fought alongside Iranian-backed Iraqi government forces and Shi'ite militias against Islamic State, in Syria Washington has lined up against Assad's Iranian-backed government and wants to block a further expansion of Iranian influence, with its regional allies.

The sides are vying for pole position in the next major phase of the fight against Islamic State: the battle to dislodge it from the eastern Syrian province of Deir al-Zor where many of the jihadists have relocated from Raqqa and Mosul.

Several rebel groups fighting under the Free Syrian Army (FSA) banner operate in the sparsely populated Badia, where they captured swathes of territory from Islamic State this year. U.S. air strikes on May 18 targeted Iran-backed fighters who had moved into the area.

Also in May, Damascus declared both the Badia and Deir al-Zor priorities of its campaign to re-establish its rule over Syria, which has been shattered by six years of war that have killed hundreds of thousands of people. The government is being helped by both Iran and Russia, while the opposition has been helped by the West and regional states which oppose Assad.

Rebels said military aid has been boosted through two separate channels: a program backed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), known as the MOC, and regional states including Jordan and Saudi Arabia, and one run by the Pentagon.

"There has been an increase in the support," said Tlass Salameh, head of the Jaish Usoud al-Sharqiya, one of the FSA groups backed via the CIA-backed program. "There's no way we can let them open the Baghdad-Damascus highway," he said.

A senior commander of a Pentagon-backed group, Maghawir al-Thawra, told Reuters a steady flow of weapons had arrived at their base near the Iraqi border since the pro-Damascus forces began deploying this month.

He said efforts to recruit and train local fighters from Deir al-Zor had accelerated at their garrison at Tanf, on the highway some 20 km (12 miles) from the Iraqi border.

"The equipment and reinforcements come and go daily ... but in the last few weeks they have brought in more heavy military vehicles, TOW (missiles), and armored vehicles," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Two armored vehicles newly delivered to the Tanf garrison were shown in photos sent to Reuters from a rebel source. A video showed fighters unpacking mortar bombs.

In a written response to emailed questions from Reuters, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition did not say if coalition support to Maghawir al-Thawra had increased.

Colonel Ryan Dillon said coalition forces were "prepared to defend themselves if pro-regime forces refuse to vacate" a de-confliction zone around Tanf.

"The coalition has observed pro-regime forces patrolling in the vicinity of the established de-confliction zone around the Tanf training site in Syria ... Pro-regime patrols and the continued armed and hostile presence of forces inside the ... zone is unacceptable and threatening to coalition forces."

U.S. jets this week dropped leaflets on pro-government forces instructing them to pull out of the Tanf area to the Zaza junction further from the border. The leaflets were obtained by Hammurabi Justice, a Maghawir-linked website.

The Syrian army could not be reached for comment.

A commander in the military alliance fighting in support of Assad told Reuters the deployment of government forces and pro-Damascus Iraqi fighters in the Badia would "obstruct all the plans of the MOC, Jordan and America".

The commander, a non-Syrian, said Assad's enemies were committed to blocking "what they call the (Shi'ite) Crescent". But, he said, "Now, our axis is insistent on this matter and it will be accomplished."

The Iraqi Badr militia said its advance to the Syrian border would help the Syrian army reach the border from the other side. "The Americans will not be allowed to control the border," its leader, Hadi al-Amiri, told al-Mayadeen TV.

(Additional reporting by Laila Bassam in Beirut; Writing by Tom Perry; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Lilbitsnana · May 30, 2017

I looked them up, google said they are military refueling tankers.

The

Boeing KC-135 Stratotanker is a military aerial refueling aircraft.

Not sure if it is important or training or what, but seemed like I should post it.

The Intel Crab Retweeted
Bunker Alpha‏ @BunkerAlpha 2h2 hours ago

Two KC-135s airborne from Bangor, Maine showing as Maine87/88 - suspect will be for first US AR20(NE) NOTAM #radiogeek #avgeek

ETA:

Bunker Alpha‏ @BunkerAlpha 1h1 hour ago

Bunker Alpha Retweeted Bunker Alpha

Looks like I was wrong as these aircraft are tracking south of New York. Time will tell if anything is heading this way overnight.

Bunker Alpha added,

Bunker Alpha @BunkerAlpha
Two KC-135s airborne from Bangor, Maine showing as Maine87/88 - suspect will be for first US AR20(NE) NOTAM #radiogeek #avgeek

Housecarl · May 30, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.aspistrategist.org.au/north-korean-h-bomb/

A North Korean H-bomb

30 May 2017|Paul Bracken

A hydrogen bomb fits North Korean nuclear strategy so perfectly that it’s likely to be a top priority program. Most discussion of North Korea’s nuclear effort focuses on matters of “can and when”. Can they miniaturise a nuclear weapon? Can they marry it to a missile? Can they build an ICBM that will reach the United States?

Those are obviously important questions. But they don’t cover another fundamental question. What difference would it make if North Korea was to get a hydrogen bomb?

A hydrogen (fusion) bomb is a lot more powerful than a fission weapon of the type the DPRK has tested to date. It’s more complicated to make, too. That complexity adds to the status of the achievement. An H-bomb is a significant technological accomplishment. It took the United States seven years after Hiroshima to achieve it, and it took the efforts of the country’s top scientists, including Edward Teller, Stan Ulam and John von Neumann. That gave it a star quality of national achievement.

It was also a reason China went all out to get an H-bomb too. It took them only three years following their first nuclear test in 1964 to get one. Given that the Soviets had cut them off from technology know-how years before, and the deterioration of Chinese science and technology during the Maoist era, it was an extraordinary achievement with significant domestic and international consequences. Think of how careful and risk averse that made the United States in Vietnam. Big escalation strategies were taken off the table.

What difference would a North Korean H-bomb make? My sense is that it would make a big domestic difference in North Korea, which would become the only country not in the official nuclear club of the NPT ‘haves’ and the Permanent 5 of the United Nations with a hydrogen bomb. It’d be quite an achievement for a small destitute country, and would certainly be touted at home as a sign of national accomplishment. It would provide some badly needed solidification for the regime.

An H-bomb would have big impacts on foreign policy as well. Strategies aimed at North Korea involving sanctions, blockades, financial warfare or cyber-attacks might look quite different with several hydrogen bombs in the mix. When the consequences of an eruption of violence become so stark, they also become crystal clear. With 20–30 fission bombs and a handful of hydrogen bombs, it becomes impossible not to ask the question as to where things might go in the event of escalation. What if sanctions drive North Korea into famine, or if financial attacks bankrupt the elite? What happens next? To a risk averse China, and even more cautious neighbours, bellicose demands by Washington to ’confront evil in Pyongyang’ will look even more dangerous than they do now.

Today North Korea has a nuclear force that’s objectively more powerful than China had in the 1960s. Add an H-bomb to its arsenal and the North’s potential for devastating attacks becomes unambiguous. No one is going to go too far to pressure this regime. Any plan to attack it with conventional precision strikes will always generate the question, ’What if we miss some of the nuclear missiles?’. Now add to that ‘What if we miss one of the H-bombs?’.

An H-bomb will have an especially significant impact on the North’s command and control. They’re now moving to a system of mobile launchers, on land-based missile carriers and submarines. Command and control of a mobile nuclear force is quite complicated. It requires marrying warheads to launchers, assurance that the ‘go’ order gets through, and backup command centres in case the original ones are destroyed. It also means pre-delegated launch authority disseminated in case the high command is destroyed.

There are several problems here. One is the ‘coup risk’, something we know has been a consuming issue for the Kim family for generations. There’s extreme compartmentation and surveillance to prevent it. A rogue group of North Korean officers that gets physical control of a hydrogen bomb would possess the premier symbol of national power. In the unpredictable circumstances of internal disorder it cannot be ruled out that this device might actually be used—or detonated to prevent it from falling into wrong hands.

That leads to a second command and control problem. The lack of experience in handling nuclear arms means that moving them around the country on mobile launchers could produce an accidental firing. It could be an accidental launch at Japan. Or, more likely, it could result in an accident on North Korean soil. Here’s where an H-bomb matters. A ground burst H-bomb would produce far more radioactive fallout than a small, fission bomb. A hydrogen bomb would rain fallout on Japan, South Korea, and, days later, the United States.

With its enormous killing radius, an H-bomb turns what is today a dangerous nuclear threat from North Korea into the powder keg of Northeast Asia. The image of the Balkans in the early 1900s was of a great game of grand strategy played by the big powers. That was replaced by one where the whole region became a keg of TNT, one with convoluted strategy risks that could spark the eruption. The game had changed, fundamentally, as diplomats saw in 1914.

Author
Paul Bracken is professor of Management and Political Science at Yale University. He is the author of The Second Nuclear Age, Strategy, Danger, and the New Power Politics (Macmillan). Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.

Housecarl · May 30, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-northkorea-missiles-usa-china-idUSKBN18Q2E4

World News | Tue May 30, 2017 | 3:59pm EDT

U.S., China debating when U.N. should act on North Korea: Haley

By Michelle Nichols | UNITED NATIONS

The United States and China are negotiating when they should push for further United Nations Security Council action on North Korea and could reach a decision this week, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said on Tuesday.

Haley characterized the discussions between Washington and Beijing as "at what point ... do we say 'OK, now it's time for a resolution?'"

U.N. diplomats, speaking on condition of anonymity, have said it appeared China was still only prepared to act if North Korea conducted a long-range missile launch or a nuclear test and that Beijing does not view the dozens of ballistic missile launches in the past year as warranting further U.N. sanctions.

"(The Chinese) have the lay of the land and so we're going to keep the pressure on China, but we're going to continue to work with them in any way that they think is best, and I think that we'll decide this week on what that looks like," Haley told reporters.

The Security Council first imposed sanctions on Pyongyang in 2006 over its ballistic missile and nuclear programs and has ratcheted up the measures in response to five nuclear tests and two long-range missile launches. North Korea is threatening a sixth nuclear test.

U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson told the U.N. Security Council on April 28 that the 15-member body needed to act before North Korea does. Just hours after the meeting, chaired by Tillerson, Pyongyang launched yet another ballistic missile.

Within days the United States proposed to China that the Security Council strengthen sanctions on North Korea over its repeated ballistic missile launches. Traditionally, the United States and China have negotiated new sanctions before involving the other 13 council members.

Since then Pyongyang has launched several more ballistic missiles, including a short-range ballistic missile on Monday that landed in the sea off its east coast.

"Nothing is changing North Korea's actions," said Haley, adding that it was time to say: "OK, what are we going to do if this is going to happen every other day? How should we respond in a way that we actually stop these things or slow it down?"

Haley said the United States believes "China is doing back-channel networking with North Korea in a way that's getting them to try and stop the nuclear testing. So we believe that they are being productive."

(Reporting by Michelle Nichols; Editing by James Dalgleish)

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/31/asia/kabul-explosion-hits-diplomatic-area/

Kabul explosion: 80 killed in blast near diplomatic area in Afghanistan

By Ehsan Popalzai and Faith Karimi, CNN
Updated 4:25 AM ET, Wed May 31, 2017

Kabul, Afghanistan (CNN)A huge explosion hit near the German Embassy in Kabul during rush hour Wednesday morning, killing at least 80 people and injuring 300 others close to a highly secure diplomatic area.

Video from the scene showed a towering plume of black smoke and emergency vehicles speeding toward it. Soldiers in fatigues stood with guns drawn as sounds of screams, blaring sirens and traffic pierced the morning sky.

Bystanders lifted an injured man from the back of a pickup as others hovered nearby, blood streaming down their faces. Mangled, burning cars stood nearby.

Map

400 yards away
The blast was caused by a suicide attack, according to Najib Danish, a spokesman for the interior ministry. The Afghan health ministry confirmed the casualty numbers, which are expected to rise.

It hit about 400 yards from the German Embassy, and was in a water delivery truck, according to journalist Jennifer Glasse. She said the presidential palace and the Indian Embassy are also nearby.

"By God's grace, Indian Embassy staff are safe in the massive Kabul blast," India's foreign minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted.

The US Embassy said "a large vehicle borne improvised explosive device" detonated near the southern edge of the diplomatic area.

"The US Embassy does not appear to have been the target of the blast," a spokesperson said, and referred questions on casualties to the Afghanistan government.

'I was lucky'
Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Donati said a vehicle packed with explosives detonated close to the green zone entrance. It injured one employee and shattered windows in the newspaper's bureau, which is in the most fortified area and requires passing through several checkpoints to get there, she said.

https://twitter.com/jessdonati/status/869772669310435328/photo/1
Jessica Donati
✔
@jessdonati
So the blast film held up pretty well outside my bedroom #kabulattack
9:28 PM - 30 May 2017
244
244 Retweets
287
287 likes

The blast hit when everyone was going to work, and occurred on the first few days of the holy month of Ramadan, which started Friday.

"A lot of people come into this part of the city to work in embassies or at the military base," Donati said. "I was lucky because I was in the shower at the time."

The green zone houses western embassies, government institutions and the residences of high-ranking officials and their families.

This month, another attack targeted a convoy of foreign troops near the US Embassy in Kabul, killing eight people. ISIS claimed responsibility for that attack.

Deteriorating security
There has been no claim of responsibility in Wednesday's attack, but it highlights the deteriorating security situation across Afghanistan.

The Pentagon is considering sending additional troops to the country, US military officials told the Senate Armed Services Committee this month.

The troops could consist of special forces personnel and more conventional soldiers, and would be part of the NATO-led mission to train, advise and assist the Afghan army in its fight against militants.

There are about 8,400 US troops in Afghanistan -- a majority of them are involved in training and advising Afghan troops. About 2,000 US servicemembers participate in a counterterrorism mission that targets terror groups such as al Qaeda and ISIS.

US troops have been in Afghanistan for nearly 16 years, where the government and coalition allies are battling several terror groups, including the Taliban and ISIS.
CNN's Emily Smith contributed to this report.

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/0...iles-at-islamic-state-positions-in-syria.html

isis

Russian warships fire cruise missiles at Islamic State positions in Syria

Published May 31, 2017
Fox News

Russian warships in the Mediterranean Sea fired four cruise missiles at Islamic State militants in Syria, officials said Wednesday.

The Admiral Essen frigate and the Krasnodar submarine launched missiles at ISIS targets in the area of the ancient city of Palmyra, the Russian Defense Ministry said in a statement.

It added that the missiles successfully hit heavy weapons and fighters whom the group had deployed and moved to Palmyra from its de facto capital of Raqqa.

The ministry said it had notified the U.S., Turkish and Israeli militaries beforehand of the coming strike. It added the Russian strike was promptly executed following the order, a testimony to the navy's high readiness and capabilities.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

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Posted for fair use.....
http://www.military.com/daily-news/...epts-ballistic-missile-target-in-pacific.html

US Successfully Intercepts Ballistic Missile Target in Pacific

Military.com | 30 May 2017 | by Richard Sisk
Updated 7:02 p.m. EST

The Defense Department on Tuesday improved a spotty record by destroying a mock intercontinental ballistic missile over the Pacific with a new hit-to-kill vehicle meant to protect the homeland against the growing threat from North Korea.

The launch of a Ground-based Midcourse Defense, or GMD, interceptor missile launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California against an ICBM-class target fired from the Reagan Test Site on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands resulted in a "direct collision," the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency said in a statement.

"The intercept of a complex, threat-representative ICBM target is an incredible accomplishment for the GMD system and a critical milestone for this program," Vice Adm. Jim Syring, the agency's director, said in a statement. "This system is vitally important to the defense of our homeland, and this test demonstrates that we have a capable, credible deterrent against a very real threat."

Advocates of the system -- which had failed in eight of 17 previous tests -- said the success on Tuesday validated the investments in the program.

"This was a good day for homeland defense and a bad day for Kim Jong-un," said Thomas Karako, a senior fellow for the Missile Defense Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a think tank in Washington, D.C., referring to the North Korean dictator.

The test that MDA estimated at $244 million had long been planned for May 30 but came as North Korea was stepping up its own medium and short-range missile tests and boasting of developing an ICBM with the range to hit the U.S. mainland with a "miniaturized" nuclear warhead that could survive reentry from space.

For the U.S., the intercept marked the first live-fire test against an ICBM-class target for the GMD missile, which is being developed by Boeing Co., according to the Missile Defense Agency.

The test was also the first for the new CE-II Block 1 kill vehicle, which uses newly-designed divert thrusters to correct previous problems with the guidance of the kill vehicle, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that opposes nuclear arms proliferation. Divert thrusters are the small motors that make course adjustments when the kill vehicle is homing on its target and can make the difference between a hit and a miss, it said.

Karako of CSIS described it as "the latest configuration of the previous CE-II vehicle."

The hit-to-kill missile was designed to strike and destroy an incoming long-range missile by kinetic force, often compared to hitting a bullet with a bullet.

In previous tests, intercept team leaders knew the general trajectory of the target beforehand.

Chris Johnson, a spokesman for MDA, would not confirm that the trajectory of the target in the Tuesday test was given to the intercept team, but said that Vandenberg had a "general launch window."

Overall, the MDA said in a fact sheet, "Testing to date has given us confidence in the basic design, effectiveness, and operational capability for short, medium, and long-range ballistic missile defense."

Since the integrated defense system was initiated in 2001, MDA said that "75 of 92 hit-to-kill intercept attempts have been successful across all programs." The programs included GMD, the Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD), Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), and PATRIOT Advanced Capability-3.

Nine of 17 GMD tests before May 30 were successful intercepts, MDA said. Of the eight that failed, three were because the interceptor and the booster failed to separate. Another failure was attributed to a kill vehicle guidance error in the final seconds of flight.

Other reasons for failures were cited as kill vehicle's infrared sensor cooling malfunctioned; interceptor failed to launch due to problematic software configuration; interceptor failed to launch after a silo support arm did not retract, triggering an automatic abort; and, simply, kill vehicle and system sensor performance issues.

During the test Tuesday, multiple sensors provided target acquisition and tracking data to the Command, Control, Battle Management and Communication (C2BMC) system. The Sea-Based X-band radar, positioned in the Pacific Ocean, also acquired and tracked the target, MDA said, and the GMD system received the target tracking data and developed a fire control solution to intercept the target.

In recent weeks, President Donald Trump has repeatedly warned of the threat from North Korea developing missiles capable of hitting the U.S. mainland with a nuclear warhead and has pressed China to rein in Kim Jong-un.

North Korea has detonated underground nuclear devices three times in the last five years and has greatly accelerated its testing of ballistic missiles. In its 12th test launch this year, North Korea on Monday fired a missile that flew about 280 miles before landing in the Sea of Japan.

The U.S. has also been concerned about North Korea switching from liquid to solid fuel for its missiles, which would significantly cut the time for launch preparations and limit the time for detection by satellite.

North Korea's actions appeared to have altered the policy initiatives of new South Korean President Moon Jae-in, who had spoken during the campaign of the need for new negotiations with North Korea rather than confrontation and also questioned the placement of the U.S. Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea.

In phone talks Tuesday with Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Moon said he would press for more sanctions on North Korea before considering new talks, South Korea's Yonhap news agency reported.

"I agree with the prime minister's (Abe's) words that now is not time for dialogue with North Korea, but a time to heighten sanctions and pressure," spokesman Park Soo-hyun quoted Moon as saying.

-- Brendan McGarry contributed to this report.
-- Richard Sisk can be reached at richard.sisk@military.com.

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017...ssiles-on-us-china-does-too-lets-wake-up.html

North Korea wants to rain missiles on the US -- China does, too. Let's wake up

By Harry J. Kazianis
Published May 30, 2017
Fox News

Video

North Korea’s latest missile launch, while certainly not the most sophisticated of its recent firings, sends an ominous message: Pyongyang will not be denied the ability to hit any target it desires, including U.S. bases and eventually the homeland. But is Kim Jong Un simply copying the well-worn playbook of its ally, the People’s Republic of China (PRC)?

The evidence is quite telling. While North Korea’s missile arsenal --*now at over 1,000 short, medium and long-range weapons -- is creating nothing short of a slow-moving Cuban Missile Crisis in Northeast Asia, China has also been working to perfect its own missile technology on a much more massive scale, and per some experts, represents the gravest threat to the U.S. military today.

Indeed, since the days of the early Cold War, Beijing has been developing missile platforms to deter the West. China’s efforts picked up rapid speed after the thawing of relations with the United States in the 1970s, allowing for the acquisition of dual-use technologies to aid their efforts. Beijing developed short, medium, and long-range missiles, pairing them with miniaturized nuclear warheads to deter Moscow, at the time its most dangerous adversary.

But as the Cold War ended, China began to craft new missile platforms to take on what it considered its next challenge: the United States. Beijing watched with horror as Washington crushed what was then considered one of the more powerful militaries of the world in Iraq in near lightening fashion in 1991. Chinese leaders would correctly conclude that if war between America and China occurred anytime soon they would lose, and lose royally.

Events closer to home would see China’s worst nightmare almost come true. The 1995-1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis nearly brought Beijing and Washington to blows. The blows, however, would have been all American, as China’s military would soon discover they could not even find American aircraft carriers operating close to their shores, let alone attack them.

The PRC was determined not to suffer that fate. Chinese leaders, even today, know they can’t match America in all aspects of modern warfare. However, missiles give them an asymmetric advantage as they are cheap to build and hard to defend against.

For the last twenty years, Beijing has been on a crash course to ensure it has not only the ability to strike carriers operating in the Pacific with showers of missiles, but also any military bases near China, or any U.S. allies such as Japan or Taiwan for that matter. Beijing can now call upon thousands of ballistic, cruise and in the future, hypersonic missiles to strike across large swaths of Asia. And of most concern, a “carrier-killer” missile that could target and sink naval vessels at ranges as far as 2,500 miles.

North Korea, it seems, is following a slower but similar strategy. Guided by Chinese direct and indirect assistance, the Kim regime is now pursuing missiles of all different ranges, sizes and capabilities—even developing what could end up becoming its very own carrier-killer.

Just like China, North Korea knows it can’t match America’s military might head-on. So instead, Pyongyang is betting the sheer size and scale of its missile arsenal will keep President Trump at bay—and Kim Jong Un in power.

This leaves the United States in a bind as it faces not one, but two nations armed with quickly growing missiles arsenals in a part of the world where Washington’s interests are vital. Missile defenses systems could certainly be deployed across Northeast Asia and the wider Asia-Pacific but are expensive, so expensive that defending against every single missile threat is impossible.

There does seem a simple solution: for Washington to deploy land-based missiles, just like China and North Korea. However, thanks to the Intermediate-Range Forces Treaty (INF) signed by the U.S. and Russia towards the end of the Cold War, Washington is prohibited from developing missiles with ranges of 310-3420 miles, the exact range or weapons America needs.

So how should America respond? With no restriction on sea-based weapons, America could expand dramatically the size of its submarine fleet that can carry cruise missiles to ensure Washington could respond dramatically to any Chinese or North Korean threat. But building more subs takes years, and America and its allies are facing this threat now.

America could also withdraw from the INF treaty, perhaps not upsetting Russia as it has been caught violating it anyway. But unfortunately, it would still take years for America to build new missile platforms and would open the door for Russia to quickly deploy new systems to Europe, potentially gaining a crucial military advantage over NATO.

For the moment, China and now North Korea might have one crucial military advantage over America. One that nations like Iran and others will be all too eager to replicate.

Harry J. Kazianis (@grecianformula) is director of defense studies at the Center for the National Interest, founded by former President Richard M. Nixon. Click here, for more on Mr. Kazianis.

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

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Posted for fair use.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/...fight-iran-he-ll-soon-get-the-chance-in-syria

If Trump Wants to Fight Iran, He’ll Soon Get the Chance in Syria
by Henry Meyer and Nafeesa Syeed
May 30, 2017 9:01 PM PDT

Forces backed by U.S., Iran in race to take Islamic State land
‘This is the most complicated battlespace anyone’s ever known’

Islamic State’s self-declared caliphate in eastern Syria is surrounded by some of the world’s strongest military powers. Their forces are advancing on several fronts. The battlefield odds aren’t even close.

That’s why the commanders of those armies -- in Washington, Moscow and Tehran, as well as Damascus and Ankara -- are looking beyond the coming showdown with the jihadists. When they’re killed or driven out, who’ll take over? It’s an especially sharp dilemma for President Donald Trump. Because for the second time this century, the U.S. risks defeating one Middle Eastern enemy only to see another one, Iran, emerge as the big winner.

Video

The U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 toppled Iran’s bitter rival Saddam Hussein and replaced him with a sympathetic Shiite-led government. In Syria today, Iranian ally Bashar al-Assad has survived six years of civil war during which U.S. leaders repeatedly insisted that he had to go. His army, fighting alongside militias loyal to Tehran, is driving into Islamic State-held territory, setting up a race with U.S.-backed forces to liberate it. Even the areas where the Americans arrive first may eventually revert to Assad’s control.

That might not have been a problem for Trump the candidate. Before the election, he vowed to smash Islamic State without getting sucked into a wider war, and said he’d work with Russia, Assad’s other key backer. It could be a problem for the President Trump who told America’s regional allies last week that he’ll help roll back Iranian power -- a promise that, in Syria at least, won’t be easy to keep.

‘Cares More’
“There’s not much the U.S. can do about Iran in Syria,” said Cliff Kupchan, chairman of Eurasia Group, a New York-based risk consultancy. “They’re just not going to walk,” he said. “Iran is closer, and cares more.”

Iran faces growing hostility from Saudi Arabia and its Gulf allies to the south. That makes preserving the Shiite-friendly governments to its west, in Baghdad and Damascus, even more important. A land corridor through those countries allows Iran to supply weapons to the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon, a key instrument of Iranian power, which is also fighting on Assad’s side.

Islamic State’s stronghold in eastern Syria blocked that route -- and the blockage will remain if American-backed forces take over. In Raqqa, the jihadist capital, it’s likely that they will. The ground campaign there is mostly being waged by Kurdish fighters armed, trained and given air support by the U.S.

https://assets.bwbx.io/images/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/iDKcBNRzumNU/v2/800x-1.png

After they win, “what we envision is a governance reflective of the local population” in Raqqa, which is mostly Arab, Defense Department spokesman Eric Pahon said in an interview. He said the U.S. could provide “civil affairs troops” as it’s done elsewhere, giving guidance on how to fix infrastructure, for instance.

Still, it’s not clear what relationship those new local authorities would have with Assad’s government, which says it expects to regain power over the whole country. Damascus has extended an olive-branch to the Kurds, saying their fight against Islamic State is “legitimate.” And the Kurds say they’re ready to negotiate with Assad for autonomy -- because the opposition groups backed by Turkey and Gulf Arabs are radical Islamists who are “even worse,” according to Abdsalam Ali, a representative of the Syrian Kurdish PYD party in Moscow.

So some of America’s local allies, at least, are ready to cut a deal with the Iranian camp. If others aren’t, it’s not clear what kind of backup they could expect.

‘Bunch of Tanks’
The U.S. “would certainly respond as necessary” to protect local partners, Pahon said. But in the event of an Assad advance on Raqqa, “I don’t think our response would necessarily be to move in a whole bunch of tanks,” as diplomatic options would be pursued, he said.

The Kurds face another threat from Turkey, which also has troops inside Syria and strongly opposes any move toward Kurdish autonomy there. Last month, after Turkish planes bombed Kurdish fighters, the U.S. had to send soldiers to shield one of its allies from another.

Farther south, it’s the forces of the Assad-Russia-Iran alliance -- which has shown little sign of internal dissension -- that are leading the fight to oust Islamic State. They’re pushing toward Deir Ezzor, a city about 140 kilometers (85 miles) southeast of Raqqa, which has been besieged by the jihadists since 2015, and also offers control of the frontier with Iraq.

The border regions have seen the most direct clash so far between the American and Iranian sides. On May 18, American planes bombed a convoy of pro-Assad fighters. The Pentagon said they ignored warnings to stop approaching a base at At-Tanf, near the border with Iraq and Jordan, where U.S. troops are training anti-Assad militias.

‘Anything Can Happen’
As armies from both camps maneuver around a smallish stretch of land in eastern Syria, there’s the potential for more such flashpoints. “Anything can happen,” the Pentagon’s Pahon said. “This is the most complicated battle-space anybody has ever known.”

Pahon said the U.S. hasn’t pivoted toward taking on Assad. The At-Tanf strike was in response to a direct threat and, “now that they’ve backed off, we’re not going after them,” he said. “This is not a new policy.”

America’s stance has already shifted under Trump. He ordered missile strikes on Syrian army positions last month, as punishment for a chemical attack he blamed on Assad; in a similar situation, his predecessor Barack Obama decided against military action. Still, defeating Islamic State has remained the overwhelming U.S. priority.

That’s a short-sighted view of the Middle East, a region that’s already witnessed “the most dramatic collapse of American power since World War II” on Obama’s watch, according to James Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Turkey and Iraq.

America “gravitates toward fighting ISIS and claiming that’s the center of everything, which is easy to do and wins universal applause,” but doesn’t constitute a “long-term strategy,” he said. “In 2017, ISIS is not a threat to regional stability. The threat now is Iran.”

In the Persian Gulf and Israel this month, Trump heard a similar message.

But to policy makers in Russia, it’s the U.S. and its allies who are destabilizing Syria, and their anti-Iranian rhetoric lacks realism.

“Does anyone think Iran is going to leave this region and Syria?” Russian Middle East envoy Mikhail Bogdanov said in an interview. “As if you could wave a magic wand and Iran would disappear?”

Housecarl · May 31, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://in.reuters.com/article/philippines-militants-foreigners-idINKBN18R0T7

Edition: India

World News | Wed May 31, 2017 | 1:11pm IST

Ominous signs of an Asian hub for Islamic State in the Philippines

By Tom Allard | MARAWI CITY, Philippines

Dozens of foreign jihadis have fought side-by-side with Islamic State sympathisers against security forces in the southern Philippines over the past week, evidence that the restive region is fast becoming an Asian hub for the ultra-radical group.

A Philippines intelligence source said that of the 400-500 marauding fighters who overran Marawi City on the island of Mindanao last Tuesday, as many as 40 had recently come from overseas, including from countries in the Middle East.

The source said they included Indonesians, Malaysians, at least one Pakistani, a Saudi, a Chechen, a Yemeni, an Indian, a Moroccan and one man with a Turkish passport.

"IS is shrinking in Iraq and Syria, and decentralising in parts of Asia and the Middle East," said Rohan Gunaratna, a security expert at Singapore's S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies.

"One of the areas where it is expanding is Southeast Asia and the Philippines is the centre of gravity."

Mindanao has been roiled for decades by bandits, local insurgencies and separatist movements. But officials have long warned that the poverty, lawlessness and porous borders of Mindanao's predominantly Muslim areas mean it could become a base for radicals from Southeast Asia and beyond, especially as Islamic State fighters are driven out of Iraq and Syria.

Although Islamic State and groups affiliated to the movement have claimed several attacks across Southeast Asia in the last two years, the battle in Marawi City was the first long drawn-out confrontation with security forces.

On Tuesday, a week after the fighting began, the government said it was close to retaking the city. As helicopters circled, troops cleared rebel positions amid explosions and automatic gunfire, moving house by house and street by street.

Last year, Southeast Asian militants fighting for Islamic State in Syria released a video urging their countrymen to join the cause in the southern Philippines or launch attacks at home rather than attempting to travel to Syria.

Jakarta-based terrorism expert Sidney Jones passed to Reuters some recent messages in a chatroom of the Telegram app used by Islamic State supporters.

In one, a user reported that he was in the heart of Marawi City where he could see the army "run like pigs" and "their filthy blood mix with the dead bodies of their comrades".

He asked others in the group to pass information on to the Amaq News Agency, a mouthpiece for Islamic State.

Another user replied, using an Arabic word meaning pilgrimage: "Hijrah to the Philippines. Door is opening."

The clash in Marawi City began with an army raid to capture Isnilon Hapilon, a leader of Abu Sayyaf, a group notorious for piracy and for kidnapping and beheading Westerners.

Abu Sayyaf and a relatively new group called Maute, both of which have pledged allegiance to Islamic State, have fought alongside each other in Marawi City, torching a hospital and a cathedral, and kidnapping a Catholic priest.

The urban battle prompted Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte to impose martial law across the whole island of Mindanao, an area roughly the size of South Korea with a population of around 21 million.

FIGHTERS FROM THE MIDDLE EAST
The head of the Malaysian police force's counter-terrorism division, Ayob Khan Mydin Pitchay, named four Malaysians who are known to have travelled to Mindanao to join militant groups.

Among them were Mahmud Ahmad, a Malaysian university lecturer who is poised to take over the leadership of Islamic State in the southern Philippines if Hapilon is killed, he said.

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Security expert Gunaratna said that Ahmad has played a key role in establishing Islamic State's platform in the region.

According to his school's research, eight of 33 militants killed in the first four days of fighting in Marawi City were foreigners.

"This indicates that foreign terrorist fighters form an unusually high component of the IS fighters and emerging IS demography in Southeast Asia," Gunaratna said.
According to an intelligence brief seen by Reuters, authorities in Jakarta believe 38 Indonesians travelled to the southern Philippines to join Islamic State-affiliated groups and about 22 of them joined the fighting in Marawi City.

However, an Indonesian law-enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the actual number of Indonesians involved in the battle could be more than 40.

Indonesia officials believe some militants might have slipped into Marawi City under the cover of an annual gathering of the Tablighi Jamaat just days before the fighting erupted. The Tablighi Jamaat is a Sunni missionary movement that is non-political and encourages Muslims to become more pure.

An Indonesian anti-terrorism squad source told Reuters that authorities have beefed up surveillance at the northern end of the Kalimantan and Sulawesi regions to stop would-be fighters travelling by sea to the southern Philippines and to prevent an influx of others fleeing the military offensive in Marawi City.

"The distance between Marawi and Indonesian territory is just five hours," the source said. "It should not get to the point where they are entering our territory and carrying out such (militant) activities."

(Additional reporting by Rozanna Latiff in KUALA LUMPUR, Agustinus Beo Da Costa in JAKARTA, Kanupriya Kapoor in SINGAPORE and Manuel Mogato in MANILA; Writing by John Chalmers; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles

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Lilbitsnana · May 31, 2017

Steve Herman‏Verified account @W7VOA 11m11 minutes ago

Steve Herman Retweeted NBCWashington

Man with guns arrested at Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC.

Steve Herman added,
NBCWashingtonVerified account @nbcwashington
Police found two firearms inside his car. http://nbc4dc.com/w16keS4

Steve Herman‏Verified account @W7VOA 15m15 minutes ago

Steve Herman Retweeted ACS Saudi Arabia

Shooting reported but no children present, according to US Embassy in Riyadh. #KSA

Steve Herman added,

ACS Saudi ArabiaVerified account @KSA_ACS
Ongoing security incident at Kingdom School as of 3:00pm local time. Please avoid area due to heavy police presence.

Steve Herman‏Verified account @W7VOA 25m25 minutes ago

Multiple media reports say @POTUS to pull US out of #ParisAgreement.

Housecarl · Jun 1, 2017

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-philippines-militants-idUSKBN18S3QE

Edition: United States

World News | Thu Jun 1, 2017 | 3:46am EDT

Philippines air strike on rebel positions kills 10 government troops

By Neil Jerome Morales | MANILA

An air strike during Philippine military operations to drive Islamist rebels out of a southern city has killed 10 government troops, the defense minister said on Thursday, in a major blow to efforts to defeat fighters linked to the Islamic State group.

Seven other soldiers were wounded on Wednesday when two air force SF-260 close air support planes dropped bombs on a target in the heart of Marawi City, Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana told a news conference. The first plane hit the target but the second missed.

"It's very sad to be hitting our own troops," Lorenzana said. "There must be a mistake somewhere, either someone directing from the ground, or the pilot."

The armed forces have used a combination of ground troops and rocket strikes from helicopters since the weekend to try flush rebels of the Maute group out of buildings. Wednesday was the first day the SF-260 planes were deployed.

The pro-Islamic State Maute group has proven to be a fierce enemy, clinging on to the heart of Marawi City through days of air strikes the military has said are "surgical" and on known rebel targets.

The Maute's ability to fight off a military with greater numbers and superior firepower for so long will add to fears that it could win the recognition of the Islamic State leadership in the Middle East and become its Southeast Asian affiliate.

The deaths of the soldiers takes the number of security forces killed to 38, with 19 civilians and 120 rebel fighters killed in the battles in Marawi over the past nine days.

Lorenzana said militants who were Saudi, Malaysian, Indonesian, Yemeni and Chechen were among eight foreigners killed fighting with the Maute rebels.

In an earlier text message to reporters, he said of the "friendly fire" incident: "Sometimes that happens. Sometimes the fog of war ... The coordination was not properly done so we hit our own people."

The unrest started on May 23, when Maute rebels ran amok, torching and seizing buildings, stealing weapons and police vehicles, taking hostages, and freeing prisoners to join their fight.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is concerned radical ideology is spreading in the southern Philippines and it could become a haven for militants from Southeast Asia and beyond.

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Lorenzana said the military might suspend air strikes, describing the rebels as a small force that "cannot hold that long".

The military was carrying out air strikes on locations where it believes Isnilon Hapilon, the so-called "emir" of Islamic State, and point man for its operations in the Philippines, is hiding.

For graphic on battle of Marawi, click: tmsnrt.rs/2qBkSPk
For graphic on Islamic State-linked groups in Philippine south, click: tmsnrt.rs/2rYIHTj

(Additional reporting by Manuel Mogato and Karen Lema; Writing by Martin Petty; Editing by Paul Tait)

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Housecarl · Jun 1, 2017

Hummm......

For links see article source.....
Posted for fair use.....
http://nationalinterest.org/feature/can-germany-defend-europe-its-own-20914

Can Germany Defend Europe On Its Own?

Most of NATO’s frontline members in eastern and southern Europe are doing their part. Germany is not.

Salvatore Babones
May 30, 2017

German chancellor Angela Merkel has reaffirmed her position as the unlikely superhero of Europe’s liberal elites. Twelve years in power and facing a difficult election in September, she struck out at the least popular man in Europe: Donald Trump.

Fresh from last week’s G-7 summit, Merkel took a dig at Trump that won her liberal friends around the world. At a Sunday election rally in Munich, she declared that “the times when we could fully rely on others are to some extent over -- I experienced that in the last few days.” The last few days, that is, meeting with Trump.

That’s not rousing rhetoric, to be sure, but the world took her point. Alarmist headlines about the disintegration of the postwar order appeared throughout the world. Even in the United States there was talk of the United States losing its “closest and oldest allies.”

But the liberal internationalist applause for Merkel misses the point—twice. First, Germany is not among America’s “closest and oldest allies.” That honor surely goes to the United Kingdom. And second, Merkel didn’t single out just the United States. She said that Europe can no longer rely on the United States or the UK for its security.

In other words, Merkel wasn’t just declaring her independence from Donald Trump. She was declaring independence from Theresa May, too. But can Germany defend Europe itself? And even if it could, would Europe want it to?

The most likely answer to both questions is “no.” Since the reunification of Germany in 1990, the once-mighty German Bundeswehr has become notorious for its low levels of readiness. Fewer than half of its combat aircraft are operational at any given time. Germany’s tank forces also require serious modernization that will not be completed until 2023.

Germany’s international political position isn’t much better. Merkel’s demands for austerity policies in the weaker eurozone economies have made Germany extremely unpopular among large segments of the population in frontline NATO countries like Greece, Italy and Spain. These countries are now bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis brought on by Merkel’s 2015 open invitation to Syrian refugees.

Things are no better on Europe’s eastern front, where the governing parties of Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia have all been chastised by the same euroliberals who look to Merkel for leadership. If the leaders of these countries have started to flirt with Vladimir Putin in recent years, it’s not out of any love for Russia. It’s out of fear of Brussels—and Berlin.

And then there’s Turkey, a nominal NATO member that increasingly goes its own way on defense and whose president, Recep Tayyip Erdoðan, has a chilly and purely transactional relationship with Angela Merkel.

The simple fact is that when the countries of eastern Europe appeal for NATO support in shoring up their borders with Russia, it’s not German commitments they want; it’s American commitments. Germany is not considered a desirable partner, and in any case it doesn’t have the forces to commit.

For all the talk about Trump not respecting America’s Article Five commitment to collective defense—NATO’s “all for one and one for all”—the United States remains the ally of choice throughout eastern Europe, especially in those countries that share borders with Russia.

Few people in Poland or the Baltic states are clamoring for German or European Union defense commitments. The idea of a European rapid reaction force, a fantasy since the beginning of the new millennium, is still little more than a gleam in the eye of Europhiles. And even if it does someday come into existence under German leadership, no one knows for sure whether or not Germany would really fight on behalf of its neighbors.

A month after the hundredth anniversary of the United States entry into World War I, America’s willingness to fight on behalf of a just cause is clear. In fact, a population survey conducted in eight NATO allies showed that Americans and Canadians have the strongest commitment to defending their allies. The country where people were least supportive of going to war to protect another NATO country was .*.*. Germany.

Last year on the campaign trail, candidate Trump questioned the unlimited, one-sided, absolute nature of America’s Article Five commitments under the NATO treaty. The establishment response was all-out hysteria. But Trump was right: the reality is that NATO is not a mechanism for collective defense. In the absence of European capacity to provide for its own defense, NATO is in effect a one-way American guarantee.

If Europe wants collective defense, it is time for Europe to pass around the collection plate. Most of NATO’s frontline members in eastern and southern Europe are doing their part. Germany is not. And the worst shirker of all is European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker’s native Luxembourg.

The first step in meeting your obligations is having the capacity to meet them. The world knows that the United States has that capacity. And Trump has made clear that he would like nothing better than for Europe to develop that capacity, too. Your move, Chancellor Merkel.

Salvatore Babones is an associate professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.

Lilbitsnana · Jun 2, 2017

I haven't seen anything else yet, but it seems like a routine you're in my space, get lost kind of thing.

Strat 2 Intel‏ @Strat2Intel 4h4 hours ago

SKYBIRD call on 11175 usb. 98 miles in international airspace. Possible Rivet Joint air intercept off #Kaliningrad

The Intel Crab Retweeted
Strat 2 Intel‏ @Strat2Intel 4h4 hours ago

There is a Rivet Joint AND Combat Sent operating in the #Baltic. More than one a/c giving SKYBIRD calls.
0 r

The Intel Crab Retweeted
Strategic Sentinel‏ @StratSentinel 3h3 hours ago

#BREAKING Likely interception of USAF RC-135U 'Combat Sent' Intelligence Aircraft by Russian jets over Baltic Sea, off coast of Kaliningrad.

Strategic Sentinel‏ @StratSentinel 4h4 hours ago

#BREAKING Likely interception of USAF RC-135U 'Combat Sent' Intelligence Aircraft by Russian jets over Baltic Sea, off coast of Kaliningrad.

Basil Tishna Sanuri‏ @Basilllius 3h3 hours ago

Replying to @StratSentinel

Meaning

J I‏ @jeye1990 2h2 hours ago

US flew too close to them, they sent up a plane to say "stop it" and escort it out. Basically the plane was bounced from the club.

Will Moon‏ @WillMoonKnives 3h3 hours ago
Replying to @StratSentinel

Define "interception"? That can mean a lot of different things...

WAR 05-27-2017-to-06-02-2017_____****THE****WINDS****of****WAR****

On TB every waking moment

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On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

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On TB every waking moment

I give up.

Attachments

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Attachments

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Attachments

Has No Life - Lives on TB

On TB every waking moment

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On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

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On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

On TB every waking moment

WAR 05-27-2017-to-06-02-2017_____THEWINDSofWAR