US and Russia plan Joint Air Command to hit Terrorists in Syria

By Juan Cole | Sep. 10, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The Pentagon isn’t going to be happy about this.

Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced an agreement on a Syria plan between the US and Russia late on Friday, which they said the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad had agreed to.

The agreement seems to have the main ingredients I talked about last Saturday:

1. Syrian Air Force stops bombing cities, including Aleppo and Homs

2. Humanitarian aid allowed to reach millions of civilians

3. Russia will also stop its bombing campaign on all groups except Daesh (ISIS, ISIL)

4. Once these steps have been taken, the US will join Russia in bombing positions of the Army of Syrian Conquest (Jabhat al-Nusra), whose leader is loyal to al-Qaeda

What is now elaborated and a little unexpected is that if the agreement holds for a week, the US has agreed to establish a joint Air Force operations center to coordinate air strikes on Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) and on al-Qaeda in Syria (the Army of Syrian Conquest [ASC] or the Nusra Front).

As I noted last Saturday, a lot of officers in the US military do not like the idea at all of coordinating with Russia, and feel that Russia has taken advantage of past ceasefires to advance its interests and those of al-Assad on the ground.

Air Force Chief of Staff General David L. Goldfein has complained bitterly that Russian pilots in Syria have been reckless and endangered the American pilots. But Gen. Goldfein is just going to have to spend some time doing joint planning with the commander of Russian Aerospace Forces, Colonel General Viktor Bondarev.

With regard to broken ceasefires, to be fair, Russia holds that US-backed fundamentalist guerrilla groups have often broken past cease-fires and actually joined in with al-Qaeda to attack Russia and its allies and to grab up new territory.

One implication of the agreement is that the 30 or so CIA-vetted rebel groups, mostly Muslim Brotherhood, to which the US has funneled money and arms through Saudi Arabia, are being forced to break their alliance of convenience with Abu Muhammad al-Julani, who has pledged allegiance to 9/11 mastermind Ayman al-Zawahiri, and who leads ASC/ Nusra. Since both Russia and the US will be bombing the positions of al-Julani’s ASC/ Nusra Front, the remnants of the Free Syrian Army and other rebel groups such as

If the rebels keep their battlefield alliance with it, they’ll be bombed alongside the al-Qaeda affiliate.

(Why the US is supporting allies, even allies of convenience, of al-Qaeda 15 years after 9/11 I’ll never understand; apparently you’d have to ask John Brennan at the CIA).

In return for joint US-Russian air action against Daesh and al-Qaeda, Russia agreed to a kind of no-fly zone in Syria– there are areas of Russo-American air dominance where the Syrian regime’s planes will not be allowed to fly. Hence Damascus won’t be able to send down barrel bombs on rebel-held areas at will anymore.

Moreover, the regime will have to let food and supplies into besieged urban quarters. Al-Assad and his henchmen have been starving rebel groups out and forcing them to relocate.

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Posted in Featured,Russia,Syria,US Foreign Policy | 11 Responses | Print |

Nearly 500 more US Troops sent to Iraq for Mosul Attack in advance of Election Day

By Juan Cole | Sep. 9, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Stars and Stripes is reporting that the number of US troops in Iraq has risen from 4,000 to 4,460 in preparation for the Iraqi government campaign against Mosul.

The WSJ reported that the government of Iraqi prime minister Haydar al-Abadi wants to begin the campaign in October.

Mosul was a city of 2 million in its metropolitan area before Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) took it in June of 2014, and mostly Sunni Arab. It is probably now only 1 million, held by about 4,000 Daesh fighters. Originally the terrorist organization was able to take Mosul because local groups like the Naqshbandi Sufi order cum resistance guerrilla group welcomed Daesh into the city. Some reports speak of a city-wide uprising against the then Iraqi army, which helped to chase them out of the city. But by now everyone in Mosul hates Daesh and the population will likely welcome the Iraqi army as liberators. This is so even though many Sunni Iraqis view the Iraqi government as a Shiite preserve and see the Iraqi military as having been sectarianized by former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Meanwhile, Athil al-Nujayfi, the titular governor of Ninewah Province (in which Mosul is located), engaged the prime minister Haydar al-Ibadi in a spirited debate, over the participation of the Shiite militias in the taking of Mosul. Al-Abadi is said to be committed to deploying them, but Sunni Arabs often feel that they have carried out reprisal attacks on Sunnis and fear them..

President Obama reconstituted the Iraq Command of the US military after the fall of most of Sunni Iraq to Daesh fighters in summer of 2014. Many of the personnel are on secure bases in Baghdad, but US trainers and support troops have gotten permission from the Pentagon to get pretty close to the front in order to help the Iraqi military.

If Mosul falls before Election Day in the US, it will undermine a key talking point of the Republican Right, i.e. that Obama is weak on terrorism. (Why they say this is anyone’s guess. Obama has authorized enormously more drone strikes than any other country in the world, and killed Bin Laden. Obama’s counter-terrorism strategies could be questioned on human rights grounds, but not on the grounds that they are a sign of weakness.)

The Democrats will suddenly be the party that defeated Daesh/ ISIL. This is kind of an October surprise of the sort that campaign managers dream of.

It seems a little unlikely that PM al-Abadi cares about US electoral problems. He has his own reasons for wanting to roll up al-Qaeda in Iraq quickly. But his timetable could play into Hillary Clinton’s hands.

Posted in Featured,political Islam | 13 Responses | Print |

Clinton: No US ground troops in Iraq, Syria; Trump: Steal Iraqi Oil

By Juan Cole | Sep. 8, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The NBC Candidates Forum continued the shameful corporate coverage of the Great American Meltdown that is our election season. That season has given us a Faux Cable News that runs clips of only one side and pays out hush money to cover up how its blonde anchors were not so much hired as trafficked; a CNN that has hired a paid employee of the candidate as a consultant and analyst; and networks that won’t mention climate change or carbon emissions the same way they won’t mention labor unions. They aren’t even trying to do journalism any more– cable “news” is mostly infotainment as a placeholder between ads for toilet paper. I can’t bear to watch it most of the time and just read the news on the Web. If I have to watch t.v. I turn on local news (often does a better job on national stories too) or Alarabiya and Aljazeera, which for all their faults do actually have real news (and their faults cancel out one another). I can always get the transcript for the cable news shows; reading it is faster and less painful than having to watch.

The NBC Forum didn’t really challenge either candidate on implausible statements, but on the whole engaged in a lot of badgering of Hillary Clinton while letting Donald Trump get away with outright misstatements of the facts and tossing him a lot of softballs.

The big Middle East questions for Clinton came from military personnel and veterans and concerned Iraq and Syria. She also got an Iran question.

QUESTION: Secretary Clinton, as an Army veteran, a commander-in- chief’s to empathize with servicemembers and their families is important to me. The ability to truly understand implications and consequences of your decisions, actions, or inactions. How will you determine when and where to deploy troops directly into harm’s way, especially to combat ISIS?

LAUER: As briefly as you can.

CLINTON: We have to defeat ISIS. That is my highest counterterrorism goal. And we’ve got to do it with air power. We’ve got to do it with much more support for the Arabs and the Kurds who will fight on the ground against ISIS. We have to squeeze them by continuing to support the Iraqi military. They’ve taken back Ramadi, Fallujah. They’ve got to hold them. They’ve got to now get into Mosul.

We’re going to work to make sure that they have the support — they have special forces, as you know, they have enablers, they have surveillance, intelligence, reconnaissance help.

They are not going to get ground troops. We are not putting ground troops into Iraq ever again. And we’re not putting ground troops into Syria. We’re going to defeat ISIS without committing American ground troops. So those are the kinds of decisions we have to make on a case-by-case basis.

So that’s the headline: Hillary Clinton pledges no ground troops in Iraq or Syria. She doesn’t seem to understand that President Obama has recreated the Iraq Command and has 4,000 or so troops there. There are 250 embedded with the far-left Kurdish YPG in northeast Syria. So is she saying she would pull those troops out? Or that they aren’t ground troops?

Plus she started by saying she will defeat ISIL (though it may be already defeated territorially before she ever gets into office). She says she will defeat it from the air and give support to the Iraqi Army.

From the point of view of military strategy, nothing she said makes any sense. You can’t defeat a guerrilla group from the air. So far no force on the ground has been willing to go after ISIL in its Syrian lair, al-Raqqa. How would she change all that?

As for supporting the Iraqi army, it collapsed in 2014 and only one really good brigade has been retrained and shown effectiveness. None of the cities she mentioned it taking would have fallen to it without extensive help from Shiite militias, many of which are tight with Iran. So if she is going to intervene from the air, she is going to have to support pro-Iranian irregulars, not just the Iraqi army.

Nor is it clear that the Iraqi Army and its Shiite auxiliaries can truly defeat Daesh/ ISIL. Yes, they can take territory. But a lot of Sunni Arabs are frustrated with the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad and they are not going to be less frustrated if they feel they have traded Daesh rule for Shiite militia rule.

Iraqi Shiites have a profound blind spot to their own sectarianism, having occupied the space of “the national” in Iraq and claimed it for themselves. They are in denial about how much the Sunni Arabs collaborated with Daesh to get away from Shiite rule. While it is true that many Sunni Arabs were happy to be rescued from Daesh by the Iraqi Army, it is not clear that any of the promises of Baghdad to put money into cities like Ramadi and Fallujah will be honored.

As for Iran, she stood by the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that pledges Iran only to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

“LAUER: Do you think they’re playing us?

CLINTON: On the nuclear issue, no. I think we have enough insight into what they’re doing to be able to say we have to distrust but verify. What I am focused on is all the other malicious activities of the Iranians — ballistic missiles, support for terrorists, being involved in Syria, Yemen, and other places, supporting Hezbollah, Hamas.

But here’s the difference, Matt. I would rather as president be dealing with Iran on all of those issues without having to worry as much about their racing for a nuclear weapon. So we have made the world safer; we just have to make sure it’s enforced.

It is not clear to me what terrorists she thinks Iran is supporting. Hezbollah doesn’t function as a terrorist organization but as the national guard for Shiite-majority south Lebanon. Israel annexed south Lebanon in 1982 after launching a brutal war of aggression that may have left 90,000 dead. Hizbullah grew up as a resistance movement to that aggression and that occupation, both of which the United States government tacitly supported. We all know exactly what Israelis would do if someone tried to occupy 10% of Israel as it is now constituted. So why call Lebanese who resist occupation ‘terrorists’? Except, if you rather like the idea of Israel occupying neighboring Arabs?

As for Hamas, Iran and it haven’t had good relations since Hamas broke with Tehran to support the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (they bet on the wrong horse). Besides, demonizing Hamas is silly. The Gaza Strip is a large outdoor concentration camp kept that way by the Israelis and the inmates under such conditions are likely to stage prison riots from time to time. End the occupation, Hamas might go away. There wasn’t any Hamas in Gaza to speak of anyway until the Israelis themselves covertly built it up in the 1980s as an alternative to the secular PLO.

The Iranians are not involved in any meaningful way in Yemen, which is beset by internal struggles between the deposed president Ali Abdullah Saleh (an Arab nationalist that Mrs. Clinton used to support) and his vice president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, with the Saudis having come in on the side of the latter (they used to support Saleh). True, Saleh has allied with a Zaidi militia, the Houthis, but Zaidism is a completely different kind of Shiism than in Iran and Iran is not a big player in Yemen. Saudi Arabia, which is indiscriminately bombing civilian infrastructure in Yemen like bridges and hospitals, is the meddling party, not Iran. Over a hundred thousand residents of the capital, Sanaa, demonstrated recently against the Saudis. Not even one was an Iranian.

It is truly scary that this is Clinton’s take on Yemen.

As for Syria, I also criticize Iran for propping up the genocidal al-Assad regime. But the forces backed by the Saudis in conjunction with the US CIA are just as bad; some of them are worse.

And besides, we just decided that she needs pro-Iranian Shiite militias if she is going to have someone to give close air support to in the fight against Daesh.

These talking points on Iran may as well have been written for Clinton jointly by Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia’s King Salman. They bear no resemblance to an American grand strategy that would make sense for American interests.

So I don’t think she has a realistic way of intervening effectively in the Middle East (air power is useless in these kinds of struggles), and I fear she is so biased against Iran that she will end up de facto undermining the JCPOA and thence alienating the only effective set of potential regional allies against Daesh.

She also doesn’t say what she will do when air power fails to defeat Daesh.

As for The Donald, I don’t know if there is a lot of point in analyzing what he says, since he will say the opposite things tomorrow.

On Middle East issues, Trump said:

“President Obama took over, likewise, it was a disaster. It was actually somewhat stable. I don’t think could ever be very stable to where we should have never gone into in the first place.

But he came in. He said when we go out — and he took everybody out. And really, ISIS was formed. This was a terrible decision. And frankly, we never even got a shot. And if you really look at the aftermath of Iraq, Iran is going to be taking over Iraq. They’ve been doing it. And it’s not a pretty picture.

The — and I think you know — because you’ve been watching me I think for a long time — I’ve always said, shouldn’t be there, but if we’re going to get out, take the oil. If we would have taken the oil, you wouldn’t have ISIS, because ISIS formed with the power and the wealth of that oil.

LAUER: How were we going to take the oil? How were we going to do that?

TRUMP: Just we would leave a certain group behind and you would take various sections where they have the oil. They have — people don’t know this about Iraq, but they have among the largest oil reserves in the world, in the entire world.”

Iraq was not stable in 2011; it was being regularly blown up by terrorists. Obama’s withdrawal of US troops did not destabilize it. That had already happened. There was no way for US troops to stay there since the Iraqi parliament would not vote them immunity from prosecution in Iraqi courts.

Trump’s ridiculous suggestion that the US should have found a way to steal Iraq’s petroleum, apparently by establishing a mercenary force at the Rumayla fields near Basra, is so preposterous that even Matt Lauer timidly and briefly questioned it.

The proposition that if the US had in fact managed to steal Iraq’s petroleum fields for itself that would have calmed the country down and prevented the rise of ISIL is so absurd that there are no words to describe how absurd it is. It is actually more absurd than any of Sarah Palin’s word salads.

It is like a presidential candidate saying that we’d have much better relations with Norway, and that country would be more stable, if the United States hired local mercenaries to occupy its oil fields and siphon of their profits to US banks. (Sounds properly absurd when you put it in the context of white people, doesn’t it?)

Then there was this:

“TRUMP: Hey, Matt, again, she made a mistake on Libya. She made a terrible mistake on Libya. And the next thing, I mean, not only did she make the mistake, but then they complicated the mistake by having no management once they bombed you know what out of Gadhafi. I mean, she made a terrible mistake on Libya. And part of it was the management aftereffect. I think that we have great management talents, great management skills. “

Trump supported the Libyan intervention at the time. In fact, he was outraged before the intervention that there hadn’t been one according to Politifact:

“”I can’t believe what our country is doing,” Trump said, according to a BuzzFeed transcript. “Gaddafi in Libya is killing thousands of people, nobody knows how bad it is, and we’re sitting around we have soldiers all have the Middle East, and we’re not bringing them in to stop this horrible carnage and that’s what it is: It’s a carnage.”

Matt Laurer didn’t challenge any of Trump’s lies about his past positions, and his journalistic reputation suffered badly for it last night.

Trump also said that Russia wants to defeat Daesh/ ISIL as badly as the US does and there should be more cooperation between the two. But in fact, Daesh doesn’t pose that big a danger to the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad, since it is out in the eastern desert. So Russia is not in fact that interested in it, since it is in Syria to prop up al-Assad. Russia wants to destroy the Syrian Army of Conquest or Nusra Front, the leader of which is an al-Qaeda operative. The US complains that the fundamentalist militias vetted by the CIA are cooperating too closely with al-Qaeda for it to be possible to separate the two out in bombing raids. Actually I’d say that if the militias you support are so intertwined with al-Qaeda that they’d get hit if al-Qaeda was bombed, then you haven’t done a very good job of vetting.

Then Trump went on to heap praise on Vladimir Putin and to call him a better leader than President Obama. He kept saying Putin had called Trump “brilliant,” which he didn’t (not sure if praise from an old KGB operator is high praise or just manipulative).

Lauer was criticized for letting Trump get away without answering any substantial questions about his Middle East policy.

It was a low, wretched performance, by the network and both candidates, full of fluff and posturing and Alice in Wonderland statements of policy along with an almost complete derogation of authority by the anchors. It marked a low point in our national discourse about world politics.

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Posted in Democratic Party,Featured,Iraq,Libya,Republican Party,Syria | 23 Responses | Print |

Saudi Bigot-in-Chief Declares Iranian Shiites “Not Muslim”

By Juan Cole | Sep. 7, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

`Abd al-Aziz Al Shaikh, the chief jurisconsult or mufti for the interpretation of Muslim law in Saudi Arabia, said Wednesday that Iranian Shiites are not Muslims.

This statement is a huge step back from the limited progress Saudi had made under the previous king, Abdullah, toward being a more inclusive country.

It is also a violation of the 2005 Amman Message crafted by a large number of Sunni and Shiite leaders to combat the social ill of takfir or summary excommunication of some Muslims by others.

Al Shaikh was responding to the demand by Iran’s clerical Leader, Ali Khamenei (a Shiite) that the Muslim world establish a commission to look into replacing the Saudi administration of the pilgrimage with a more efficient and accountable body. Iranians still smart from the massive stampede in 2015 that left hundreds dead, a large number of whom were Iranians.

Al Shaikh said, “This matter is not surprising coming from those people. We have to understand that they are not Muslims. They are descendants of Zoroastrians. Their enmity with the Muslims is an old affair, especially toward the Sunnis.”

Ironically, in the 18th century Wahhabis were the ones denouncing the Sunnis and attacking the Sunni Ottoman Empire. Through the centuries the Wahhabis have gradually asserted that they are Sunnis themselves. But they did not start out that way.

The foreign minister of Iran, Mohammad Javad Zarif, replied to the mufti on twitter, saying sardonically that it is certainly true that the Islam of Iranians and indeed of most Muslims does not resemble that of Saudi Arabian Wahhabis:

Indeed; no resemblance between Islam of Iranians & most Muslims & bigoted extremism that Wahhabi top cleric & Saudi terror masters preach.

— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) September 6, 2016

But calling the Saudis “terror masters” isn’t fair, and feeds into a widespread prejudice against Wahhabis, most of whom are not terrorists and most of whom don’t support terrorism (in opinion polling, the Saudi public identifies terrorism as one of the biggest challenges facing their country).

The fact is, most countries support some terrorist group or another as part of their statecraft (consider the Reagan administration’s alliance with the Mujahidin and al-Qaeda against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in the 1980s), and Iran would do better to challenge this unhelpful discourse in international affairs than to join in the game.

Admittedly, Saudi Arabia’s “Unitarian” form of Islam, founded in the 18th century by Muhammad ibn `Abd al-Wahhab and popularly known as “Wahhabism,” is one of the more intolerant strands of the religion. In the past, its adherents excommunicated the sultan of the Ottoman Empire and mounted a rebellion against him (sort of like Protestants excommunicating the Holy Roman Emperor). The Saudi Wahhabi tradition is also peculiar in its patriarchy, oppressing women and declining to even let them drive. (But note that Qatar is also Wahhabi and does not have the same policies, so it isn’t just the religious tradition).

One of the challenges to what I have called the “Wahhabi myth,” the stereotyping of Wahhabism as promoting terrorism, is that it isn’t good social science. Many Sunnis influenced by Wahhabism, the Salafis, check out of politics and are quietists. The Salafis in Egypt have been a force in parliamentary politics in the past 5 years. The Saudi citizen population is probably 20 million, and almost none of them are terrorists.

From an outsider’s point of view, Saudi Wahhabism is certainly a much more intolerant tradition than Sunnis; but there have been intolerant Sunnis and Sunni movements (e.g. the Almohads).

That is, Wahhabism is not a static essence but has a history. In the reign of King Abdullah (r. 2005-2015 but the real ruler from the mid-1990s), small attempts were made to reform the Wahhabi tradition. That king founded a university of science and technology that has a mixed-gender student body. He reached out to the 12% of the population, mainly in the Eastern Province, who are Shiites, and effected a reconciliation with some of their previously dissident leaders. These Saudi Shiites were allowed to become powerful through local elections on municipal councils in largely Shiite cities such as Qatif. Shiite rituals were allowed in public in wholly Shiite neighborhoods. At the national level, King Abdullah appointed two Shiites to his 150-member appointive National Consultative Council, the embryo of the future Saudi parliament. He brought the former dissident Shiite cleric Shaikh Safar to Riyadh for a joint t.v. appearance with a Wahhabi cleric (a first).

In King Salman’s reign, all these (admittedly minor) forms of ecumenism have been undone and the kingdom’s rhetoric against Iran and Shiites has ratcheted up, recalling the old Wahhabi intolerance of the 19th century. The recent apogee of this turn to intolerance was the execution of dissident Shiite cleric Shaikh Nimr last winter (see video below).

The mufti’s pronouncements, which painted Iranians as crypto-Zoroastrians, reflected Arab nationalist themes more than religious ones. Iranians are not Arabs, speaking Persian, an Indo-European language. One of the subtexts of this sort of claim is that Arabs are echt Muslims, since Islam originated in the Arabian Peninsula.

But most Arabs at the time Islam began were pagan worshipers of north Arabian deities like Allat and al-`Uzza, or were Christians (the Banu Ghassan in Syria) or Jews (most Yemenis). What is the difference between these backgrounds to becoming Muslim and Zoroastrianism?

Moreover, Iranians were central to the development of the Sunni tradition and most did not become Shiites until the Safavid reformation of the 1500s and 1600s. That is, Iranians were Sunnis for hundreds of years and it is not clear that historical Sunnism would look at all the same without their contributions. Remember that Wahhabism began as a rejection of Sunnism and involved violent attacks on Sunni authorities.

Twentieth-century Muslim reformers often aimed at taqrib or bringing Sunnis and Shiites closer in an ecumenical spirit.

In some ways those efforts culminated in the Amman Message of 2005, which said,

“They specifically recognized the validity of all 8 legal schools of Sunni, Shi’a and Ibadi Islam; of traditional Islamic Theology (Ash’arism); of Islamic Mysticism (Sufism), and of true Salafi thought, and came to a precise definition of who is a Muslim.

Based upon this definition they forbade takfir (declarations of apostasy) between Muslims.

Based upon the legal schools they set forth the subjective and objective preconditions for the issuing of fatwas [jurisprudential rulings], thereby exposing ignorant and illegitimate edicts in the name of Islam.”

In the end, the mufti’s name-calling is just juvenile, like kindergarten taunts. The difference is that his sentiment at this time of terrorists and guerrilla movements could get Shiites killed. As I survey history from the vantage of my 60s, I am increasingly convinced that most of the wars and violence in world history have been fueled by immature behavior. Immature is a better word for it than ‘childish.’ Some children are well-behaved.

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Posted in Featured,Iran,Saudi Arabia,Shiites,Wahhabis | 22 Responses | Print |

Saudis Should Not Run Hajj Pilgrimage: Iran

By Juan Cole | Sep. 6, 2016 |

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TeleSur | – –

Pilgrims from Iran will be unable to attend hajj, which starts on Sept. 11 this year after talks between the two countries on arrangements broke down in May.

Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei renewed criticism of Saudi Arabia over how it runs the hajj after a crush last year killed hundreds of pilgrims, and suggested Muslim countries think about ending Riyadh’s control of the annual pilgrimage.

“Because of these (Saudi) rulers’ oppressive behavior toward God’s guests (pilgrims), the world of Islam must fundamentally reconsider the management of the two holy places and the issue of hajj,” Khamenei said in a message carried by his website and Iran’s state media.

“They must not let those rulers escape responsibility for the crimes they have caused throughout the world of Islam,” Khamenei said, listing Saudi Arabia’s involvement in conflicts in areas including Iraq, Yemen and Syria on the side of forces Iran opposes.

Custodian of Islam’s most revered places in Mecca and Medina, Saudi Arabia stakes its reputation on organizing hajj, one of the five pillars of Islam which every able-bodied Muslim who can afford to is obliged to undertake at least once.

Its prestige was damaged by the 2015 disaster, in which Riyadh said 769 pilgrims were killed – the highest hajj death toll since a crush in 1990. Counts of fatalities by countries who repatriated bodies showed that over 2,000 people may have died in the crush, more than 400 of them Iranians.

Iran, Saudi Arabia’s main regional rival, blamed the disaster on organizers’ incompetence. Pilgrims from Iran will be unable to attend hajj, which starts on Sept. 11, this year after talks between the two countries on arrangements broke down in May.

An official Saudi inquiry has yet to be published, but authorities suggested at the time some pilgrims ignored crowd control rules.

Via TeleSur

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Posted in Iran,Islam,Saudi Arabia | 2 Responses | Print |

With Defeat Looming, ISIL haunts Syria with 6 Bombings, Killing 53

By Juan Cole | Sep. 6, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) is still acting like a military organization, but it has always mixed military with terrorist tactics. On Monday it slid toward the terrorist side of the spectrum, setting off 6 coordinated bombings that left over four dozen people dead. It mainly targeted, however, military personnel and infrastructure, suggesting that despite the organization’s recent severe battlefield setbacks, it is still engaged in a mainly military strategy. As it is rolled up, expect to see it hit more civilian, soft targets.

The bombings included a large blast at Tartus that damaged an important bridge. Russia leases a naval base at Tartus, and the road from there allows Russia to resupply the Syrian government troops down south in Aleppo. Trying to knock out a major bridge and to block traffic between the northwest ports and the southern capital is aimed at weakening the regime and hurting its Russian backers. Most of the dead were killed (35) in the Tartus bombing, with 48 wounded.

Another bombing hit the al-Zahra quarter of downtown Homs, which is garrisoned by the Syrian Arab Army, killing 4 security personnel. The Syrian regime had expelled fundamentalist militias, including Daesh and al-Qaeda elements, from this central place. Homs is crucial to the al-Assad regime’s logistics, since it is on the route from the ports of Latakia and Tartous to the capital.

In Saboura, 20 km west of Damascus on the outskirts of the capital, a bombing killed one person. The regime has been consolidating control over the capital and its hinterland in recent weeks, and Daesh is pushing back against any feeling of security in Damascus.

Daesh also hit a non-regime target, its deadly Kurdish enemy in al-Hasakah, with a bombing that left 6 security men and two civilians dead. The YPG militia of the Kurds has denied Daesh half of its base province, al-Raqqa, and has helped close off the terrorist organization’s smuggling routes to Turkey, having taken Manbij away from it last month. North of Manbij at Jarabulus, Turkey has sent in tanks and given support to fundamentalist rebel groups that despise Daesh. Its leadership may have felt the need for this wave of bombings to hurt its enemies militarily but also to announce that it is hardly finished as a force.

Another Daesh attack took place in the northeast Kurdish city of Qamishli.

Daesh claimed responsibility for the wave of bombings in a communique and also published details of the biographies of the suicide bombers. It said that it hit regime and Kurdish targets, likely in a bid to shore up its bona fides with the Sunni Arab opposition, which sees Daesh as a wretched combination of brutal and ineffective against the regime.

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Posted in Featured,Islamic State of Iraq and Syria,Syria | 5 Responses | Print |

Top 5 Ways Green Energy is already Helping American Workers

By Juan Cole | Sep. 5, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

As we celebrate American workers (I prefer to honor workers today rather than the abstract “labor”), let’s remember where their future lies. And that is, in part, in the renewable energy sector.

“Solar Energy in the United States: A Decade of Record Growth”

The rapid growth of wind, solar and other renewables in the United States is already having a significant impact on the work force. But, as Jigar Shah laments, many journalists and others are clueless about this fast-changing landscape, stuck in a past in which coal miners are the real workers.

We geezers grew up on Lava soap commercials, featuring workers who got their hands really dirty, I mean below the epidermis dirty, deep in the cuticles dirty, from manning up and doing manly work. Back in the 50s somebody considered that maybe Lava was limiting its market this way, so they added a bit about how the soap was mild enough for the little lady and the kid, too. But we all knew that only one kind of person needed Lava soap. And that kind of person, the geezers now editing the mass media seem to be convinced, didn’t have the time of day for science fiction daydreams like solar energy.

But in fact there are three times as many workers in the solar industry in the US as there are working in coal mines. And, it seems clear that coal is not the future, and coal miners need government programs to retrain them for other fields, including green energy installation and maintenance. In other words, solar and wind are not chimeras, hollow dreams of beardless idealist environmentalists blogging in their mother’s basement. They are real-world, massive industries that are employing more and more American workers, even as employment in the hydrocarbon sector has been dropping.

The people who can’t imagine this transformation are kind of like the 1899 newspaper editor who doubted there was a future for the noisy, smelly automobile because it would scare the horses.

So here are the facts [pdf], ma’am, for the hard-nosed Joe Friday types still brought to you by Lava soap.

1. Renewable energy employment in the US grew by 6% in 2015 to reach 769,000. A reminder: there are only 74,931 coal miners in the country, about a tenth the number that work in the renewables sector. Renewable energy workers form about 0.5 % of the US work force. But note that the sector is expanding much faster than the general growth rate of the economy and will become more and more important in coming years.

2. In particular, solar employment grew 22% in 2015, to reach 209,000. In other words, this sector grew 12 times as fast as the job market in general. And, 24% of these jobs were held by women, up from 19% in 2013– a bigger share than in oil and gas employment. Over half of these jobs are in the installation of solar panels. About 15% are in panel manufacturing. About 66% of solar jobs were in residential installation, while a little over a fifth were in utility-scale installation and maintenance. A sixth of these jobs were in the commercial sector (go, IKEA!) Remember that only 187,000 or so workers are employed in oil and gas extraction.

Let me just underline that the Chinese may well get ahead of us in the area of manufacturing inexpensive and efficient solar panels, since they are putting billions into R&D in this area. If so, the outcome will be a huge opportunity cost for American workers, since that 15% who work in manufacturing could be a much larger proportion.

3. Wind energy jobs grew 21% in 2015 with 88,000 jobs total in that industry. The US now has 8.6 gigawatts of wind power installed. Note that about a third of Iowa’s electricity, e.g. now comes from wind. The International Renewable Energy writes, ” Manufacturing factories employed 21,000 people; construction, project development and transportation accounted for 38,000 jobs, and operation and maintenance for 29,000 jobs

4. Among the best green jobs in the coming decade will be in wind energy fabrication, green farming, forestry, solar panel installation, green building, and conservation biology. Doing any of these jobs will no doubt require washing up at the end of the day with Lava soap.

5. I was giving 2015 statistics above. But 2016 is looking even better. Already since the beginning of this year, the wind energy industry has added 88,000 jobs! Texas leads in such jobs, with 24,000 wind power workers. By 2030, which isn’t far off and isn’t science fiction, the industry estimates that it will have 380,000 well-paying jobs nationally.

One final point. The fuel for solar and wind is free. At some point in the next 50 years, installation will be done or inexpensive, and the fuel will be gratis. The average worker will likely experience the equivalent of a 6% raise as a result. Inexpensive green energy will put money in all our pockets, instead of Saudi Arabia pickpocketing us for expensive and polluting petroleum.

So here’s to the future of the American worker, a green and prosperous future!

Posted in Environment,Featured,Green Energy,Solar Energy,wind energy,women,workers | 16 Responses | Print |

Syria: Can Russia & US Broker a new Cease-Fire?

By Juan Cole | Sep. 4, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

Stars and Stripes reports that US Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov may be very near a new US-Russian deal on Syria.

The key elements are reported to be:

1. Syrian Air Force stops bombing cities, including Aleppo and Homs

2. Humanitarian aid allowed to reach millions of civilians

3. Russia will also stop its bombing campaign on all groups except Daesh (ISIS, ISIL)

4. Once these steps have been taken, the US will join Russia in bombing positions of the Army of Syrian Conquest (Jabhat al-Nusra), whose leader is loyal to al-Qaeda

Although skeptics were scathing about this plan, it appears as I write that it may be announced imminently.

This is Lavrov’s own take at a news conference in Tokyo, from the Russian Foreign Ministry web site:

Question: How do you assess the current situation in Syria? How much longer can the Russian Aerospace Forces’ operation in Syria last?

Sergey Lavrov: The question is not how long the operation may last. We are fighting against terrorism, working to create a truly universal antiterrorism front, as President Putin proposed at last year’s session of the UN General Assembly.

For several weeks now, in conjunction with the United States, as two co-chairs of the ISSG, as two countries that are effectively engaging terrorist targets in Syria, we have been conducting intensive consultations to develop a single plan of action based on the coordination of antiterrorist efforts.

This was the focus of my meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry on August 26 in Geneva, as well as of our numerous telephone conversations. This issue began to be addressed in a substantive way after Mr Kerry visited Moscow on July 15 and was received by President Putin.

Daily and weekly contacts between the Russian and US militaries and special services continue in order to develop such a plan. We expect this work to be finished in the near future. Practically all components of this task are already clear.

Mutual understanding has been reached on most issues. The most important thing, however, is that none of our agreements with the Americans on practical actions and the coordination of operations against terrorists and the coordination of Aerospace Forces operations with the USAF and the US-led coalition will be implemented unless our US partners fulfill the promise they made a long time ago to separate opposition groups working with the United States from terrorists, primarily Jabhat al-Nusra.

Many groups, which the Americans deem to be acceptable for negotiations, have effectively teamed up with Jabhat al-Nusra (or whatever it is called now). Jabhat al-Nusra is using them to avoid being attacked.

This situation cannot go on forever. To reiterate, the resolution of this major problem is crucial for the implementation of plans for an antiterrorist operation that have already been largely coordinated between us and the Americans.

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs website in English 0800 gmt 3 Sep 16″

From the beginning, Russian intervention in Syria has been more about defeating the Nusra Front than about destroying Daesh, though Moscow wants to end both. Daesh hasn’t been a mortal threat to Damascus and opportunistically for the most part avoids fighting the Syrian Arab Army. The Nusra Front led the other fundamentalist militias into a conquest of Idlib Province, from which it could threaten the key port of Latakia and the Alawite population there. Had Nusra and its allies taken Latakia they could have cut Damascus off from resupply and could have ethnically cleansed the 2 million Alawites there, who are the backbone of the regime. Game over. So Russia came in to destroy Nusra (which is linked through al-Qaeda to Chechen and Central Asian terrorist groups that anyway threaten Moscow).

And Russia is making no deal that holds Nusra/ al-Qaeda harmless. It has to be destroyed, from Moscow’s point of view, or the other negotiations and arrangements would just prolong the struggle.

Turkey’s intervention on the side of the fundamentalist militias probably worries Russia and may help convince Moscow to try to freeze positions before, as a side effect, the Nusra Front can gather strength.

The US in Syria, or at least the CIA, seems to be soft on al-Qaeda, probably because of a realization that the other fundamentalist militias don’t amount to much without it.

For its part, apparently the Pentagon is grumpy about having to work with Russia at all and doesn’t trust it, feeling that Moscow used the last cease fire to hit US-backed rebels southwest of Aleppo in an attempt to cut off and starve out rebel-held East Aleppo. (If the Syrian regime could have taken back all of Aleppo, it would have been well on the way to simply winning outright).

Those policy figures who have as a priority the overthrow of al-Assad and are willing to wink at the prominent role of an al-Qaeda-lined group on the side of the fundamentalist rebels objected on two grounds. 1) the plan would not lead to regime change and 2) because for the US to cooperate with Russia and to target the Army of Syrian Conquest would alienate the remnants of the Free Syrian Army from the US.

Personally I think that if the relative success of last spring’s ceasefire could be replicated and civilians could get some relief, it would be well worth it. If the FSA doesn’t want to get bombed they should move away from al-Qaeda elements. And if they don’t like the US bombing al-Qaeda-linked groups, then they aren’t suitable allies to begin with.

The main thing is to convince the Russians that they and al-Assad can’t win outright and so ultimately some accommodation is going to have to be made with the Sunni Arab rural areas. On the other hand, the plan of the Gulf & the CIA to put the rural Sunni Arab fundamentalists in charge of the Christians, Alawites, Druze, Kurds and urban Sunni leftists is guaranteed to make the half of Syrians still not homeless into a new wave of refugees.

Better a ceasefire.

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Posted in Featured,Russia,Syria | 18 Responses | Print |

The Plague of Karimov’s Rule in Uzbekistan

By Juan Cole | Sep. 3, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

The death of Islam Karimov, the president for life of Uzbekistan who came to power in 1990 after the collapse of the Soviet empire had begun in 1989, has been confirmed. His stroke six days ago was a badly kept secret.

I saw a headline from CNN that America’s partner in counter-terrorism was gone and threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Karimov was only one dog-eaten uncle short of running a North Korea. His seedy police state deployed systematic torture. His repressive policies in the Ferghana Valley radicalized a generation of Uzbeks. Those forced out went on to destabilize Afghanistan, northern Pakistan and Syria. Karimov wasn’t a partner in counter-terrorism; he was a one-man terrorist-creation machine.

Most Uzbeks are conventionally religious in attitude but hardly fundamentalist or very observant (all those decades of determined Communist rule had an effect), and the men seem to like their vodka. A bigger proportion of the population tells pollsters they aren’t religious than is the case in the US.

Deniz Kandiyoti and I staged a conference in Tashkent in 1996 when we were with the Social Science Research Council, and I enjoyed visiting the country, in the archives of which I was interested, as a historian. The conference participants were very sharp and I learned a great deal from them. But there was a tenseness to the proceedings, since it was clear that some of the scholars were nervous about how far they could go in their analyses without having someone report them to the secret police. As an intellectual, I could tell it was a place where I had no future.

Karimov took the US and the UK for a ride after 9/11, reporting to them that his political opposition, whom he arrested and tortured (sometimes to death) was all al-Qaeda.

Former UK ambassador Craig Murray lost his career because he tried to tell Tony Blair about Karimov’s torture and the counter-terrorism fraud.

I remember reading in the early 1990s about the Birlik Party in Uzbekistan and seeing it tagged as Muslim fundamentalist. Then I looked into it and its members were trying to learn how to pray. (Uzbekistan is not fertile territory for piety). So, no. Karimov wasn’t a bulwark against Central Asian Muslim hordes of Gog and Magog.

In 1989, 44 percent of Uzbeks were under the poverty line. The most recent statistic I could find was 47%. The Uzbek economy has seen fairly strong growth in the past decade, mainly off relatively high prices for natural gas, but the extra income hasn’t exactly trickled down. Even with the growth, Karimov never generated many good jobs (it only takes so many people to export natural gas). As a result, ten percent of the labor force in this country of 30 million are working abroad– mainly in Russia but also in Kazakhstan.

The government is one of the more corrupt in the world, which has limited direct foreign investment. The closely guarded borders and currency restrictions also affect companies’ ability to repatriate profits.

There is little industry. The automobile factories are just places to assemble the car, with the parts made in South Korea or elsewhere, which limits profit margins.

With Uzbekistan mainly dependent on gold, cotton and natural gas, and given that energy prices are half what they were a couple of years ago, the country could face severe problems. The slowing of the Russian and Chinese economies is also a threat. China doesn’t need as much natural gas this year as it did last. And salaries for guest workers in Russia have plummeted and the number of available jobs for them has fallen.

A bright spot is that the population growth rate has fallen to below replacement levels, so GDP growth actually starts to mean something. But two decades ago the birthrate was high, which means that there are enormous numbers of young people hitting the job market every year, and the median age of the population is very young.

CNN is worried about Uzbekistan’s stability in the wake of Karimov’s death. But if it does go unstable, it won’t be because the strongman is gone, but because he put the country in the pressure cooker of a quarter century of repression. What could go wrong?

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Related video:

Channel 4 News: “Death in Uzbekistan”

Posted in Central Asia,Featured | 6 Responses | Print |

Top 8 Syrian-Americans whom we’d miss If Trump had Kept them out

By Juan Cole | Sep. 2, 2016 |

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By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – –

In his fiery speech demonizing immigrants to America on Wednesday night, Trump took a moment to deplore that the Obama administration has admitted 10,000 Syrian refugees in the past year (after admitting almost none after the crisis began in 2011). I talked here about why America has a moral responsibility to step up on admitting Syrian refugees. Turkey has taken 2.5 million, little Lebanon (population 4 million) has taken 1.2 million, and Germany and Sweden have been far more generous in recent years.

Here are 8 Americans with at least some Syrian ancestry who wouldn’t be here if Trumpism had kept their ancestors out:

1. Teri Hatcher, Bond Girl (Tomorrow Never Dies, 1997) and television actress (Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Desperate Housewives). Her mother, Esther (née Beshur), is of half Syrian ancestry, and worked as a computer programmer for Lockheed Martin.

2. Steve Jobs. His birth father, Abdulfattah Jandali, is from Homs in Syria. No Syrian immigrants, no Apple Computer (or maybe it would have gotten started in Homs instead).

3. Jerry Seinfeld. His mother, Betty (née Hosni; born 1914) is of Syrian descent. Her parents, Selim and Salha Hosni hailed from Aleppo.

4. Sam Yagan, CEO of Match.com, is the son of Al and Dr. Haifa Yagan of Syria. In 2013 he was listed by Time as one of the 100 most influential people.

5. Actress Shannon Elizabeth (Fadal) made a splash in films like American Pie. Her father is from Syria.

6. Director Moustapha Al Akkad (d. 2005) made the series of horror films, Halloween as well as Lion of the Desert. He hailed from Aleppo. He died at the hands of the predecessor of Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) in the Amman bombings of 2005.

7. Earnest A. Hamwi co-invented the ice cream cone. He produced his at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. He was selling zalabis, a Syrian pastry that resembles a waffle. The next stall over, selling ice cream, ran out of plates, so Hamwi offered “his wafer-like waffles in the shape of a cone, or cornucopia.” The other person credited with this invention is Italo Marchiony, who later claimed it slightly earlier in New York, who got the patent. But that we are eating zalabis is too good a story to forego.

8. She’s not a celebrity, but Syrian-American Ola Hadaya was just graduated from Wayne State University Medical School at 21 years of age. Syrian physicians serve Americans in the thousands.

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Posted in Featured,Immigration,Republican Party | 14 Responses | Print |