Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

feel like egypt is maybe regretting negotiating so hard to get the sinai back

Thousands? Without a citation I have a hard time believing Sisi has murdered any more than hundreds

> 1600 killed in street protests, at least 1200 political death sentences, though to my knowledge only 8 executions (for non-political offenses) in 2014.

ty

2015 thread?

Looks like there is disagreement on a name and what countries can be included.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/world/middleeast/joan-peters-journalist-who-wrote-on-israeli-palestinian-conflict-dies-at-78.html

https://twitter.com/Mudar_Zahran/status/558251192548352002

Death and discrimination comes later?

he's hilarious - look at his timeline. "Mudar Zahran is a Jordanian Palestinian politician and the secretary general of the Jordanian Opposition Coalition"

https://twitter.com/Mudar_Zahran/status/558206642723246080

Never heard of the Houthi in Yemen till the other day

WASHINGTON — Only months ago, American officials were still referring to Yemen’s negotiated transition from autocracy to an elected president as a model for post-revolutionary Arab states.

Now, days of factional gun battles in the Yemeni capital have left the president a puppet figure confined to his residence. The country appears to be at risk of fragmenting in ways that could provide greater opportunities both for Iran and for Al Qaeda, whose Yemeni branch claimed responsibility for the first Paris terrorist attack this month.

The latest Yemeni crisis raises the prospect of yet another Arab country where the United States faces rising dangers but has no strong partners amid a landscape of sectarian violence. Although the Houthi rebels who now effectively control the state are at war with Al Qaeda, they are also allied with Iran and with Yemen’s meddlesome former president, Ali Abdullah Saleh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/22/world/middleeast/yemen-at-risk-of-fragmenting.html

King Abdullah has apparently died.

rip big man

good riddance

Heard on the BBC, former Prime Minister Blair calling him a reformer because more women are in universities now. Then the Amnesty International guy responded that while that was good, most of those women were likely from well-to-do families; plus the human rights issues remain horrible there and women can't drive, etc.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/23/saudi-arabias-king-misremembered-man-peace/

Who wants to bet Dick Cheney flies over to attend Abdullah's funeral.

I'm not watching this video fwiw but hey great friends of the US amirite

http://www.cnn.com/2015/01/21/middleeast/saudi-beheading-video/

my eurocentrism led me to believe all monarchial systems had pretty clear rules of succession. whoops!

He had suggested to an American counterterrorism official that electronic chips be implanted in detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

He said it had worked with horses and falcons, to which the American replied, “Horses don’t have good lawyers.”

truly a force for moderation

the American's reply is worse i think

whole exchange is disgusting, the American wink-wink "joke" included

Getting worse in Yemen:

Yemen Government in Limbo Amid Uncertainty Over President’s Resigation

Yemen could easily become a worse humanitarian crisis than Syria. Sana'a was already [running out of water](http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2012/aug/27/solution-yemen-water-crisis) when it had a semi-functioning government.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/yazidi-militia-makes-public-request-for-israeli-help/

ISIS in the Sinai, Yazidis on the right, here I am...

In Washington Post neo-con Editorial page editor Fred Hiatt's mind Obama's not trying hard enough to find the moderates throughout the region that the US should support. Not that I approve of US support for Saudi and Egyptian dictators or that I approve of the handling of Libya and elsewhere, but Hyatt does not seem to recognize just how difficult it is to find those moderates :

“After decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be,” the president said.

So what happened? The Arab Spring didn’t go as hoped — and the United States began to lose the war. An al-Qaeda offshoot shockingly conquered large swaths of Iraq and Syria. Libya descended into civil war. Yemen, which Obama cited just last year as proof of his successful strategy, is on a similar downward spiral. The Taliban is gaining ground in Afghanistan. Boko Haram is carving out another space for barbarism in Nigeria.

When Obama is questioned about this picture, he generally stands up his favorite straw man: “If the assertion is, is that had we invaded Syria we would be less prone to terrorist attacks, I’ll leave it to you to play out that scenario and whether that sounds accurate,” he said during his recent news conference with British leader David Cameron.

But that is not the assertion. What critics suggest is that Obama should implement the strategy he outlined in a speech at West Point in May: not a U.S. invasion, not a subcontracting of the war to heavy-handed dictators, but “a network of partnerships from South Asia to the Sahel” with moderate forces committed to fighting extremism.

Unfortunately, Obama has put little meat on that strategy. He toppled Libya’s strongman, then abandoned the country. He pulled all advisers out of Iraq and vows to do the same to Afghanistan. He emphasizes drone strikes, but with little of the institution-building that would engender cooperation over the long term. Help for Syrian moderates has been promised again and again for four years, with little to show for it. And instead of building public support for what must be a long and difficult effort, Obama barnstorms the country boasting that “our troops are coming home.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fred-hiatt-obamas-troubling-counterterrorism-allies-dictators/2015/01/25/56ad3d76-a288-11e4-9f89-561284a573f8_story.html

big suicide bombing in pakistan today - shiite target

I'm reading Lawrence Wright's "Thirteen Days in September" now (about the Camp David negotiations) -- Mordy (or anyone else) have you read it? Thoughts? So far it seems very pop history in style, and maybe indulges in some speculation about motivations, but very good nonetheless.

this is the one that just came out last year? wright is an engaging writer, but i haven't read it yet

yeah that one. friend lent it to me, I enjoy his writing a lot (have read Going Clear and a lot of his New Yorker work).

Jordan pilot hostage Moaz al-Kasasbeh 'burned alive'

ISIS hijacking UN aid to Syria, slapping their logo on it

all these hostage murders... what do they think they're achieving, exactly? so far, no one meets their demands, they kill the guys in a brutal fashion, rinse and repeat. I guess it keeps them in the headlines/furthers their notoriety but it seems kind of pointless from a tactical standpoint. If anything it just sharpens the resolution of their opponents, I would think.

helps w/ recruitment i'd guess

saddened to live in a world where that's a successful recruiting tactic

In this case, it is

The horrific hostage murder strategy is probably subject to the law of diminishing returns by now. But it is interesting to note that beheading individual westerners gave them greater attention and notoriety in the USA than when they were massacring hundreds of locals as they captured cities in Syria and Iraq.

idk what's interesting about that we have a long history of not giving a fuck about people who are not US citizens

I think you'll find that mindset is not exclusive to the US.

i can't believe ppl care more about ppl from their country than ppl not from their country - this is surely unique to the US

lol xp

The release of the video has prompted Jordan to announce it will execute all prisoners convicted of association with ISIS 'within hours'. This includes Sajida al-Rishawi - the female failed suicide bomber whom ISIS had originally demanded Jordan release in exchange for Kasasbeh.

Within an hour of the video's publication, Jordan reportedly moved five ISIS-linked prisoners to a jail in the south of the country which is usually used for state executions.

it obviously sharpens the battle lines, but I'm not sure this is really to ISIS's tactical advantage. at some point they're going to have made an awful lot of enemies, too many for them to realistically overcome or deal with.

i mean that's what i'd think but isn't the conventional [left?] wisdom about this kind of thing that provoking attacks helps them bc it helps recruitment and lends them credibility?

is that what this is, a provocation tactic...? ie they are expecting either the west or other enemies to overreact and bomb some innocents and thereby come off looking even worse than ISIS? (afaict this is not really happening)

No I don't think it's that at all

The hostage killings were one of the reasons public sentiment kind of got behind US involvement. Their problem is that there don't seem to be that many civilians in the areas they're operating, for obvious reasons, so it's not particularly challenging for the bombers to wipe out the convoys of dozens of jeeps racing across arid desert.

Without the new videos, the biggest news would be about how badly they got rinsed by the Kurds and Americans in Kobani.

theres nothing ive seen that is particularly enlightening wrt the motivic elements and psychopathology of the new iteration of jihad as distinct from the prior lot

the pilot was always going to die, a hundred other insurgent groups islamic or otherwise would have done the thing, it's really only the burning alive part and the mma promo styled .flv of it that is different and disturbing

among other things this is a statelet being run by people with an average age and educational level probably lower than that of an american mma fan