Monday, August 5, 2013

Syria's war splits nation into 3 distinct regions

FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012 file photo, Syrian rebel fighter Tawfiq Hassan, 23, a former butcher, poses for a picture, after returning from fighting against Syrian army forces in Aleppo, at a rebel headquarters in Marea on the outskirts of Aleppo city, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)

FILE - In this Sunday, Aug. 26, 2012 file photo, Syrian rebel fighter Tawfiq Hassan, 23, a former butcher, poses for a picture, after returning from fighting against Syrian army forces in Aleppo, at a rebel headquarters in Marea on the outskirts of Aleppo city, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)

FILE - In this Wednesday, Dec. 12, 2012 file photo, Syrians wait outside a bakery shop to buy beard in Maaret Misreen, near Idlib, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Muhammed Muheisen, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 20, 2012 file photo, a wounded woman still in shock leaves Dar El Shifa hospital in Aleppo, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Manu Brabo, File)

FILE - In this Thursday, Nov. 29, 2012 file photo, night falls on a Syrian rebel-controlled area as destroyed buildings, including Dar Al-Shifa hospital, are seen on Sa'ar street after airstrikes targeted the area last week, killing dozens in Aleppo, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Narciso Contreras, File)

FILE - In this Sunday, July 14, 2013 file photo, Syrian soldiers cheer after battling with rebels during a tour for journalists organized by the Syrian Information Ministry in the Damascus suburb of Jobar, Syria. More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system. (AP Photo/Bassem Tellawi, File)

(AP) ? More than two years into Syria's civil war, the once highly-centralized authoritarian state has effectively split into three distinct parts, each boasting its own flags, security agencies and judicial system.

In each area, religious, ideological and turf power struggles are under way and battle lines tend to ebb and flow, making it impossible to predict exactly what Syria could look like once the combatants lay down their arms. But the longer the bloody conflict drags on, analysts says, the more difficult it will be to piece together a coherent Syrian state from the wreckage.

"There is no doubt that as a distinct single entity, Syria has ceased to exist," said Charles Lister, an analyst at IHS Jane's Terrorism and Insurgency Center. "Considering the sheer scale of its territorial losses in some areas of the country, Syria no longer functions as a single all-encompassing unitarily-governed state."

The geographic dividing lines that have emerged over the past two years and effectively cleft the nation in three remain fluid, but the general outlines can be traced on a map.

The regime holds a firm grip on a corridor running from the southern border with Jordan, through the capital Damascus and up to the Mediterranean coast, where a large portion of the population belongs to President Bashar Assad's Alawite sect. The rebels, who are primarily drawn from Syria's Sunni Muslim majority, control a chunk of territory that spans parts of Idlib and Aleppo provinces in the north and stretches along the Euphrates river to the porous Iraqi border in the east. Tucked into the far northeastern corner, meanwhile, Syria's Kurdish minority enjoys semi-autonomy.

Those contours provide the big picture view. The view from the ground, however, is slightly muddied.

While Sunni rebels control large swathes of Syria's rural regions in the north, the government still controls provincial capitals there, with the exception of Raqqa city and parts of Aleppo city. The regime also still retains some military bases and checkpoints in the overwhelmingly rebel-held countryside, but those are besieged and isolated and supplies for troops are air-dropped by helicopters or planes.

Moreover, the opposition movement itself is far from monolithic, and there have been increasing outbursts of infighting between al-Qaida affiliated extremists and moderate rebel groups, as well as between Kurds and rebels of a radical Islamic bent. That violence holds the potential to escalate into a full-blown war among armed opposition factions.

The Assad regime has made headway in recent months in the strategic heartland of Homs, clawing back territory long-held by rebel fighters. Those gains have helped the government secure its grip on Damascus and the pathway to the coast. They also have reinforced opposition accusations that Assad's military is driving out local Sunni communities to try to carve out a breakaway Alawite enclave that could become a refuge for the community if the regime falls.

For now, Assad's overstretched and war-weary troops appear unable to regain the vast territories they have lost to rebels and jihadists who now control oil wells and other key resources such as dams and electricity plants in the north and east. Black al-Qaida flags that carry the Muslim declaration of the faith now fly over many areas there, as a way to mark their turf distinctly from the three-starred green, black and white flag flown by the various rebel brigades that make up the loose-knit, Western-backed Free Syrian Army.

In the north, fighter brigades have set up judicial councils known as Shariah courts that dispense their own version of justice based on Islamic law, including in some cases, executions of captured regime soldiers and supporters.

In the northeast, Kurdish flags now flutter proudly over buildings after the country's largest minority carved out a once unthinkable degree of independence. Kurds, who make up more than 10 percent of Syria's 22 million people, were long oppressed under Baathist rule. Now, they have created their own police forces, even their own license plates, and have been exuberantly going public with their language and culture. Schoolchildren are now taught Kurdish, something banned for years under the Assad family's rule.

"While there are shifts in momentum on the battlefield, Bashar Assad, in our view, will never rule all of Syria again," Jay Carney, the White House spokesman, told reporters in Washington last month.

The comments appeared to leave open the possibility that while Assad has lost control over large parts of the country, he may well be able to hang on and even expand his core territory in the future.

This view has been reinforced recently with steady regime gains in and around the capital Damascus, and in Homs province, a strategic linchpin linking Damascus with predominantly regime strongholds on the Mediterranean coast. Homs is a crossroads, and if the regime were to secure its hold on the city ? where a few rebel-held neighborhoods are holding out ? it would put it in a stronger position to strike out at the opposition-held axis running through the middle of the country.

Already, the government has been successful in clearing key routes leading to the Alawite community's heartlands of Tartus and Latakia, which have been largely spared the fighting in other parts of the country.

Recent visitors to Tartus speak of beaches dotted with swimmers and night clubs packed with revelers.

"It's like stepping into another world, completely sealed off from the rest of the country," said one Syrian in Beirut, who recently arrived from the Syrian coast and spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.

Despite the geographic split into three regions, none of the sides can speak of confidently retaining the terrain they control.

Northern Latakia, for instance, has a notable presence of Islamic extremists, while in the capital, Damascenes live in constant fear of a repeat of the so-called "Damascus Volcano," when rebels briefly overran several neighborhoods in an assault in the summer of 2012. Mortars launched from rebel-held pockets around the capital constantly crash into the city, killing and wounding people.

In rebel held areas, regime warplanes swoop down at random, dropping bombs over targets that often kill civilians instead. The rebels have proved they are able to strike back despite significant advances by the military that have bolstered the confidence of the regime.

Rebels on Thursday sent a wave of rockets slamming into regime strongholds in Homs, triggering a succession of massive explosions in a weapons depot that killed at least 40 people and wounded dozens, according to opposition groups and residents.

The conflict has laid waste to the country's cities, shattered its economy and killed more than 100,000 people since March 2011. The bloodshed also has fanned sectarian hatreds, and many fear that the divisions now entrenched in a country where Alawites, Sunnis, Shiites, Druse and Christians coexisted for centuries will make it hard in the future for people to reconnect as citizens of a single nation.

Syria's partition into mini-states is an ominous scenario for a country that sits along the Middle East's most turbulent fault lines. Any attempt to create an official breakaway state could trigger a wave of sectarian killings and have dangerous repercussions in a region where many religious, ethnic and tribal communities have separatist aspirations.

Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi author and columnist, argued in a recent article that at least one of Syria's neighbors will benefit if the dividing lines harden.

"It is an ideal solution for Israel which will benefit from Syria's division into three weak rival states that will never again represent a strategic threat for Israel," he wrote in an article that appeared in the pan Arab Al Hayat newspaper Saturday.

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/cae69a7523db45408eeb2b3a98c0c9c5/Article_2013-08-04-ML-Syria-Breaking-Apart/id-fe6ad92f17774c4bac5254332ca8417d

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Miami Mercenaries: International Security Business Is Booming in South Florida

The cops lay motionless and silent on the sand ? two ink stains on an already bruise-black night. Through night-vision goggles, they surveilled the concrete skeleton of a building in the distance. Covered in graffiti, it rose like a crumbling tombstone against the desolate Mexican desert. Behind broken windows flitted the menacing outlines of men with assault rifles.

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The pair of policemen failed to notice the shadows gathering around them. In an instant, they were surrounded. One cop bolted into the darkness, scrambling through the scrubland toward safety. The other wasn't as lucky. The men with balaclavas and AR-15s tied him up, blindfolded him, and dragged him inside.

They held the terrified cop upside down over a pit full of rats and feces. Then they began pouring water over his face and demanding answers. "What are the names and addresses of your commanding officers?" one of the captors yelled as the cop fought the liquid filling his lungs. "Tell us the names!"

A month later, footage of the torture session exploded on Mexican television. But unlike countless previous films, which showed drug cartels murdering their rivals on camera, this video sparked international outrage because the torturers weren't narcos. They were fellow cops.

"They Are Teaching Police... to Torture!" screamed the headline of one national newspaper as human rights organizations lined up to protest. It didn't matter that the footage was from a training course for which all the police officers had volunteered. Politicians called for criminal charges. The chief of police for the city of Le?n was sacked.

But the brunt of the backlash fell on the white man giving orders onscreen. With the country already gripped by anti-gringo sentiment after George W. Bush handed over $1.5 billion to fight a bloody drug war, Mexicans were outraged that the mysterious man barking orders worked for a private American security firm called Risks Inc. Stranger still, the company was headquartered in Miami.

In hindsight, the Dade connection shouldn't have been so surprising. In the decade since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Miami has quietly sprouted more private security companies than anywhere else in the nation. As America waged wars overseas, a cottage industry of guns for hire sprouted in South Florida, which is now headquarters for nearly twice as many security companies as Washington, D.C., by one measure. Camouflaged by parties and palm trees and close to troubled hot spots in the Caribbean and Latin America, Miami is a boomtown for mercenaries.

New Times spent two months inside this strange and secretive world and discovered that Risks Inc., which is run by an ex-soldier who was once thrown in jail for desertion, is actually the most transparent of the area's stockpile of security companies. Miami is also home to a former CIA spook whose legion of mercenaries in the Middle East has made him a multimillionaire. And then there's the celebrity-wooing Afghan insider accused of funneling a fortune of American tax dollars to the Taliban.

When National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the government's warrantless wiretapping, he also exposed the immense power that private companies wield over American and international affairs. They run our jails, read our emails, and increasingly fight our wars. Unbeknownst to most Miamians, their city is a central hub in this lucrative but loosely regulated industry.

"The state's monopoly on the use of mass, organized violence is slowly being frittered away by reliance on the private sector," says investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. "They are not motivated by patriotism [but] by profit. So what's to stop any of these companies from simply flipping and going to the highest bidder?"


"What's the easiest way to clear a building?" a man asks in a British whine. A dandyish lock of hair flops down his forehead. An untucked black dress shirt betrays a hint of a potbelly. He could be mistaken for a soccer dad if it weren't for the gun in his hand.

"Blow it up, burn it down, clear it out, yeah?" he tells his audience. "A lot of that SWAT stuff doesn't work... Is it going to work in Colombia? No, because people shoot back."

Meet Andrew "Orlando" Wilson: former British soldier, Miami-based mercenary, and the mystery man barking orders in the infamous Mexican torture videos.

Five years after the fiasco in Le?n, Wilson is still teaching people how to fight. Oftentimes it's cops or federal agents looking to sharpen their skills. Today, however, his students are doctors from Jackson Memorial Hospital learning the basics of self-defense. Standing inside a Doral warehouse that has been converted into a firing range, they clutch imitation Glock BB guns uncertainly, like children with expensive new toys. Suddenly, Wilson spots a gun muzzle wandering.

"Keep that gun pointed at me, not over there," he tells a jittery pediatrician. "I'm used to having them aimed at me."

He's not joking. Since he first strapped on a gun as a skinny young soldier, Wilson has spent his life seeking out ? and skirting ? danger. His trajectory from the British armed forces to hired gun is par for the course among private security contractors in Miami.

Source: http://www.browardpalmbeach.com/2013-08-01/news/miami-mercenaries-international-security-business-is-booming-in-south-florida/

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Sunday, August 4, 2013

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How fractured is the GOP? - KRAUTHAMMER

WASHINGTON -- A combination of early presidential maneuvering and internal policy debate is feeding yet another iteration of that media perennial: the great Republican crackup. This time it's tea party insurgents versus get-along establishment fogies fighting principally over two things: (a) national security and (b) Obamacare.

(a) National security

Gov. Chris Christie recently challenged Sen. Rand Paul over his opposition to the National Security Agency metadata program. Paul has also tangled with Sen. John McCain and other internationalists over drone warfare, democracy promotion and, more generally, intervention abroad.

So what else is new? The return of the most venerable strain of conservative foreign policy -- isolationism -- was utterly predictable. GOP isolationists dominated until Pearl Harbor and then acquiesced to an activist internationalism during the Cold War because of a fierce detestation of communism.

With communism gone, the conservative coalition should have fractured long ago. This was delayed by 9/11 and the rise of radical Islam. But now, 12 years into that era -- after Afghanistan and Iraq, after drone wars and the NSA revelations -- the natural tension between isolationist and internationalist tendencies has resurfaced.

In fact, both parties are internally split on domestic surveillance, as reflected in the very close recent House vote on curbing the NSA. This is not civil war. It's a healthy debate that helps recalibrate the delicate line between safety and security as conditions (threat level and surveillance technology, for example) change.

The more fundamental GOP divide is over foreign aid and other manifestations of our role as the world's leading power. The Paulites, pining for the splendid isolation of the 19th century, want to leave the world alone on the assumption that it will then leave us alone.

Which rests on the further assumption that international stability -- open sea lanes, free commerce, relative tranquility -- come naturally, like the air we breathe. If only that were true. Unfortunately, stability is not a matter of grace. It comes about only by Great Power exertion.

In the 19th century, that meant the British navy, behind whose protection America thrived. Today, alas, Britannia rules no waves. World order is maintained by American power and American will. Take that away and you don't get tranquility. You get chaos.

That's the Christie/McCain position. They figure that America doesn't need two parties of retreat. Paul's views, more measured and moderate than his fringy father's, are still in the minority among conservatives, but gathering strength. Which is why Christie's stroke -- defending and thus seizing the party's more traditional internationalist consensus -- was a signal moment in the run-up to the 2016 campaign. The battle lines are drawn. Continued...

(b) Obamacare

The other battle is about defunding Obamacare. Led by Sens. Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, the GOP insurgents are threatening to shut down the government on Oct. 1 if the stopgap funding bill contains money for Obamacare.

This is nuts. The president will never sign a bill defunding the singular achievement of his presidency. Especially when he has control of the Senate. Especially when, though a narrow majority (51 percent) of Americans disapprove of Obamacare, only 36 percent favor repeal. President Obama so knows he'll win any shutdown showdown that he's practically goading the Republicans into trying.

Never make a threat on which you are not prepared to deliver. Every fiscal showdown has redounded against the Republicans. The first, in 1995, effectively marked the end of the Gingrich revolution. The latest, last December, led to a last-minute Republican cave that humiliated the GOP and did nothing to stop the tax hike it so strongly opposed.

Those who fancy themselves tea party patriots fighting a sold-out cocktail-swilling establishment are demanding yet another cliff dive as a show of principle and manliness.

But there's no principle at stake here. This is about tactics. If I thought this would work, I would support it. But I don't fancy suicide. It has a tendency to be fatal.

As for manliness, the real question here is sanity. Nothing could better revive the fortunes of a failing, flailing, fading Democratic administration than a government shutdown where the president is portrayed as standing up to the GOP on honoring our debts and paying our soldiers in the field.

How many times must we learn the lesson? You can't govern from one house of Congress. You need to win back the Senate and then the presidency. Shutting down the government is the worst possible way to get there. Indeed, it's Obama's fondest hope for a Democratic revival.

Charles Krauthammer's email address is letters@charleskrauthammer.com.

Source: http://www.theoaklandpress.com/articles/2013/08/02/opinion/doc51fa9997c547f573503415.txt

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Terror threat: Senator cites increased 'chatter'

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Russia's July Oil Output Falls, Seasonal Factors Blamed

Reuters

MOSCOW, Aug 2 (Reuters) ? Oil output from Russia, the world's biggest producer, fell 1 percent in July from the month before, hit by lower production at Gazprom and a drop in output from projects with foreign partners, data from the Energy Ministry showed.

The decline could be a worrying sign for Russia, as it needs to grow production to maintain its share of supplies to Europe and ramp up output to China.

Despite the fall, Russian output was still above Saudi Arabia's 9.65 million barrels per day (bpd).

The decline in production to 10.43 million bpd in July from a post-Soviet high of 10.53 million bpd in June, was mainly due to seasonal factors, with a 17 percent fall in condensate production by Gazprom, analysts said.

Condensate, which can be transformed into gasoline or diesel among other products and is usually extracted along with natural gas, accounts for around 4 percent of Russia's total oil output. Natural gas production falls in the summer due to weak demand.

"In July 2012, there was the same result - a decrease of 10 percent (in Gazprom's condensate output)," said Andrey Polischuk, an analyst with Raiffeisen bank.

Another reason for the fall might be that several units at Gazprom's Surgut gas condensate stabilisation plant were under maintenance in July, the Energy Ministry's data showed.


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