Rolling MENA 2014 (Middle East)

Some kind of progress seems to be happening at the Vienna talks, though it's worth noting that none of the Syrian factions are directly involved in talks:

https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/665569712957468672

Kerry apparently says there's broad consensus on a road-map towards UN-monitored elections / ceasefire.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a39727/paris-attacks-middle-eastern-oligarchies/

Charles Pierce goes back to the discussion re how ISIS is funded with this 2010 reference:

In 2010, thanks to WikiLeaks, we learned that the State Department, under the direction of then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, knew full well where the money for foreign terrorism came from.

I was doing some quick googling over the weekend and saw that most 2015 articles focus on ISIS getting money from oil fields that ISIS directly controls. Are random rich Sunnis in Quatar, Kuwait, and Saudia Arabia still funding ISIS? Plus, isn't stopping this funding a little tougher than Pierce lets on, or is he right that the West is so comfortable with these countries that we won't take serious action on this issue?

apparently the US is also the biggest market for the stolen art that Daesh sells, but I don't have a link to confirm

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/19/world/middleeast/isis-finances.html?_r=0

The Islamic State takes in more than $1 million per day in extortion and taxation. Salaries of Iraqi government employees are taxed up to 50 percent, adding up to at least $300 million last year; companies may have their contracts and revenue taxed up to 20 percent. As other revenue streams have stalled, like banks and oil, the Islamic State has adjusted these rates to make taxation a larger portion of its income.

According to everything we've learned from the Mission: Impossible movies, taking out some rich Saudis, Kuwaitis and Qataris who fund ISIS should be a simple matter of overcoming the reversal at the end of the second act.

Exactly, that's it!

Hollande is expected to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin and President Obama next week to discuss the campaign against the Islamic State and urge the formation of a “grand coalition” against the group.

In Paris, however, Secretary of State John F. Kerry gave a cooler assessment of moves toward closer Western-led military coordination with Moscow. First, Kerry insisted, a cease-fire in Syria’s more than four-year civil war must take root and various sides must find some common ground.

A Russian French coalition...

France's earlier effort in Mali had some success, but there are still problems there

Today, parts of Mali’s central and northern territories remain a menacing no-go zone where just last week, Reuters reported that government troops said they had killed Islamic jihadists suspected of attacks in the region. An invisible line, running along the Niger River, has torn the country in two as it struggles to rebuild a common identity.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/arts/design/african-biennale-of-photography-returns-to-mali-amid-unrest.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

― curmudgeon, Monday, November 16, 2015 4:29 AM (Y

Shoigu busted out the cruise missiles for the Kogalymavia announcement.

Partnership still looks a long way off but I'd expect a lot more intel sharing.

Russian intel supposedly suggests that an airport employee planted plastic explosives on the Kogalymavia plane.

ISIS has said that they had been planning to bomb a plane at Sharm-el-Sheikh for a while and initially thought it was going to be a member of the US-led coalition bombing Syria (idk who flys direct out of there and is involved atm - Turkey, maybe) but switched to Russia late on.

Only a political solution that finally incorporates Sunnis into Iraq, he said, will work.

He is Robert S. Ford, a former American ambassador to Syria and now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute.

Is there any sign that the Iraqi government is doing this, or any way that anyone is encouraging it?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/19/world/middleeast/in-rise-of-isis-no-single-missed-key-but-many-strands-of-blame.html?rref=collection%2Fnewseventcollection%2Fattacks-in-paris&contentCollection=world&action=click&module=NextInCollection®ion=Footer&pgtype=article

Others offer answers and more possible problems with those answers

The answer is simple...or maybe not

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/world/middleeast/envisioning-how-global-powers-can-smash-isis.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

“The answer is simple: To beat ISIS, you need the enlistment of the Sunni forces that won’t happen as long as Assad remains in power in Damascus,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The shortest and most effective way to deal with ISIS is for the United States and Russia to come to an agreement about the removal of Assad, and they will get support from others. Then the Sunni forces, the rebels, can deal with ISIS on the ground.”

....

Eradicating the group militarily from the territory it controls could come with another cost.

“Thousands of angry young men who were manning checkpoints and policing the streets of I.S. will be freed up to commit terrorism instead,” said Mr. Berger, the Brookings scholar. “The result will probably be a wave of terrorism the likes of which the world has never seen.”

probably, but then again maybe not.

when has the intelligence community ever been wrong?

x-post--that Berger statement about the IS folks manning checkpoints suddenly committing waves of terrorism seems like it could be wrong (they may not be former Baathists or jail-hardened jihadists)

yeah that seems like a questionable theory for a bunch of reasons, one being that terrorism takes resources and not just people, another being that a person willing to be a tax collector may not be equally willing to strap himself with explosives, another being that territorial control in itself enables recruitment.

http://i.imgur.com/ajKC27t.jpg

came in the mail today. ominous.

lol

lol @ totally misleading url:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/irans-uranium-stockpile-grown-u-n-nuclear-agency-161549311.html

one of my sister-in-law's seminary teachers was killed in today's knife attacks :(

dear god. i'm sorry.

hfs sorry to hear that mordy

Yeah, that's awful, Mordy.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/five-dead-palestinian-attacks-tel-aviv-west-bank-israel-n466416

Terrible.

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/mali-hotel-assault-survivor-heard-attackers-talking-english-n466941

Reports of 27 dead, including a Belgian diplomat.

A 17-y-o girl from my neighbourhood has just become the first person jailed in the UK for trying to go to fight against ISIS.

fight against?

For Kurdish forces I would assume.

unrelated interesting read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/magazine/the-doomsday-scam.html

xp, yep.

And yet I saw some City of London banker type being interviewed recently having come back from fighting for the Kurds... he wasn't a Kurd though.

I would guess that she tried to join a group aligned with the PKK rather than the YPG but they work together and there's not much difference on the ground.

https://theintercept.com/2015/11/19/as-france-bombs-isis-civilians-are-caught-in-the-middle/

The U.S. military also claimed a new first in its war on ISIS this week, employing warplanes to attack hundreds of trucks smuggling crude oil on behalf of the terrorist organization on Monday. According to the New York Times, the campaign, dubbed Tidal Wave II, was planned before the attacks in Paris as part of an escalating effort to disrupt the flow of tens of millions of dollars ISIS generates monthly through the production and sale of oil. To avoid killing civilians, the Times reported, U.S. forces had previously held off on directly targeting tanker trucks involved in the Islamic State’s illicit oil trade.

“To reduce the risk of harming civilians, two F-15 warplanes dropped leaflets about an hour before the attack warning drivers to abandon their vehicles, and strafing runs were conducted to reinforce the message,” the paper noted in its description of Monday’s strikes, adding that a U.S. official said “there were no immediate reports of civilian casualties.”

The UN Security Council has unanimously voted to fuck up ISIS. What difference this will make is open to question as I can't really see a ground invasion happening any time soon but it does at least offer some legal cover and make it harder for opponents of bombing to argue on that front.

Doug Henwood had a good guest on ISIS:
http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Radio.html

Some of what he said was surprising to me, both for a Doug Henwood guest and just inasmuch as I haven't heard anyone else make some of these points about ISIS.

from curmudgeon’s post above,

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/18/world/middleeast/envisioning-how-global-powers-can-smash-isis.html?action=click&contentCollection=Middle%20East&module=RelatedCoverage®ion=Marginalia&pgtype=article

“The answer is simple: To beat ISIS, you need the enlistment of the Sunni forces that won’t happen as long as Assad remains in power in Damascus,” said Ehud Yaari, an Israel-based fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “The shortest and most effective way to deal with ISIS is for the United States and Russia to come to an agreement about the removal of Assad, and they will get support from others. Then the Sunni forces, the rebels, can deal with ISIS on the ground.”

on the other hand, according to emile simpson, http://foreignpolicy.com/2015/11/20/syria-assad-isis-paris-russia/

The fate of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the litmus test of this proposition: He’s a murderous butcher, but only his ground forces can realistically retake much of the ISIS-controlled territory. They haven’t been able to until now, because Western and Gulf states have backed a kaleidoscopic variety of rebels seeking to oust Assad, tying down much of the Syrian military. The fact that much of the territory lost by the Assad regime has wound up in the hands of ISIS and hard-line Islamists has created a climate of moral relativism, where neither Assad nor ISIS make for an attractive option. But this moral relativism has led to inaction and tragedy. Call it the Hamlet non-strategy.

But the Paris attacks will impose a cold strategic clarity. Whatever the objective threat, the West cannot tolerate the humiliation of terrorist attacks from an enemy that, so far, it has merely sought (and failed) to contain. For all the self-congratulatory talk of “historic” progress at the recent diplomatic talks in Vienna, a “political solution” cannot fix the problem of ISIS and hard-line Islamists — for neither Washington nor Moscow would ever accept a negotiated peace with them. The territory they hold must be cleared and held by infantry. But whose infantry? The Kurds can retake only so much ground, given their limited resources and lack of desire to expand substantially beyond ethnically Kurdish areas. Non-Kurdish rebels are small in number and fragmented. And in many cases their “moderate” credentials are dubious, at best.

That leaves the West, Russia, or the Assad regime and its Iranian proxies. There’s no chance the United States, France, or NATO wants to hold ground on its own, or back Assad. So scratch the first option from that shortlist. Handing the moral and military quagmire over to the Russians — who will, in turn, back the Syrian Army — begins to seem like the only option.

dunno

It's Sunni areas, so giving it over to Assad or Iran...

i know :/
extremely barbed (& ugly) problem/dilemma
would much prefer experts quoted in nytimes article to be correct, for multiple reasons (& multiple consequences down the line)-- & for that to be feasible strategy (politically, militarily, etc)
find view #1 persuasive, yet find view #2 plausible too
(what do i know)
& things may have devolved to the point that the better strategy is not really an option at this time (or there's no longer time)
since russia is major player now, don't know who decides anyway
other than events

cf which way hollande moves on question of assad

http://www.politico.eu/article/france-russia-at-odds-over-assad-role-isil-syria/

Hollande earlier this week signaled a shift in his long-standing position that Assad should go before any solution could be found to the Syrian crisis.

While the Syrian president’s ouster is still the ultimate goal, he said Monday, France’s top priority is now the fight against ISIL. The next day the Russian president agreed to intensify his air force’s strikes against ISIL positions, and instructed his generals to consider the French as “allies” in the fight against the Islamic State.

Turkey just shot down a jet that was flying near its border with Syria. The plane crashed on the Syrian side.

This is going to get ugly whoever it belonged to, but the assumption people seem to be going with at the moment is Russia.

Unless it was Syrian in which case ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Guardian live-blogging it:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/24/russian-jet-downed-by-turkish-planes-near-syrian-border-live-updates

Plane was Russian and the decision to shoot it down was made personally by the Turkish PM. It looks like the pilots ejected.

Russia says the plane was in Syrian airspace for the duration of the flight.

Uh oh.

You can say that again.

According to CNNTurk reporting from the border town of Yayladagi, one of the Russian pilots is in the hands of Turkmen opposition fighters, while they are still looking for the second pilot on the ground, writes Constanze Letsch.

Local media also say that Russian helicopters are searching for the two fighter jet pilots, but that Turkmen forces prevent them from landing.

CNN Turk later reported one of the pilots was found dead.

Unverified footage claimed to show the pilots body, according to analyst Eliot Higgins who monitors the conflict in Syria on social media.

this'll be bad

now it may be OK for teachers to start talking to kids about WW3

Both pilots are dead. Even if the jets were briefly in Turkish territory, the decision to shoot them down is incomprehensible in terms of Turkish-Russian relations. Putin has called Turkey an "accomplice to terrorism".

Nato are calling an Extraordinary Meeting at 5pm Brussels time. Could this really escalate into a war?

No NATO plane had shot down a Russian jet in 63 years before today.

I don't think it'll escalate beyond diplomatic repercussions, though.

this makes me realise how little i know about nato. are there mechanics in place whereby nato can reprimand turkey? is it likely? i can imagine the rest of nato might be tempted to put some distance between themselves and their increasingly terrible ally