General Yahya Rahim Safavi / Getty Images
A top Iranian military leader warned on Monday that Iran is plotting strikes outside of its own borders and will even go “beyond the seas” to carry out attacks on those it perceives as enemies, statements that further highlight Iran’s clandestine operations inside the United States and in Europe. Continue reading
American unreliability is forcing nations to look elsewhere for support.
The Middle East is undergoing its most consequential transition since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1917. Failure of the Arab Spring has resuscitated the jihadist claim that only violence can produce change in a region that’s stagnant politically and economically. Continue reading
Please see the source for the video.
A Chaldean Catholic priest who was kidnapped and tortured by Islamic militants a decade ago in Iraq said Tuesday in Washington that while the American invasion of his country in 2003 was a “big mistake,” President Obama’s decision to withdraw American troops in 2011 was “a bigger mistake.”
After Obama ignored his generals’ recommendations and pulled the last U.S. troops out of Iraq, the president boasted that “we’re leaving behind a sovereign, stable and self-reliant Iraq… This is an extraordinary achievement, nearly nine years in the making.”
But Fr. Douglas Bazi, a priest at the Mar Elias Catholic Church in the Chaldean Diocese of Erbil, pointed out that the U.S. troop withdrawal was a catastrophe for the indigenous Christian population of Iraq, which numbered 2 million before 2003.
“Now there are less than 200,000,” he said. Continue reading
Germany removes the last restraints on its use of the armed forces, while its defense minister declares that there will be “no taboos”.
The year 1993 pivotal for the German military. Germany established its armed forces in 1956, but memories of two world wars meant that they were restricted to defensive operations within nato territory.
In 1991, this slowly began to change. Thirty German soldiers deployed in Baghdad, Iraq, to help with airlift operations. The same year, 150 medics were sent with a United Nations mission to Cambodia.
The first substantial foreign mission came in 1993, with over 2,000 military personnel deploying to Somalia as UN peacekeepers. The same year, German soldiers joined in aerial operations over Yugoslavia.
The world had no problems with these operations. In fact, the UN and United States desperately wanted the German army to do more, but to many Germans, this was too much. Germany’s main left-wing party, the Social Democratic Party (spd), and the free market Free Democratic Party (fdp) complained to the German Constitutional Court that these deployments violated Germany’s Basic Law—its constitution. Continue reading
Should Turkey decide that the Kurdistan Workers’ Party – seen now by Ankara as an additional arm of Assad’s forces – threatens its national security, it may decide to invade its neighbor.
Will the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) drag Turkey into a war in Syria? The Turkish media has emphasized the declaration by the PKK’s de facto leader Murat Karayilan that “If Turkey intervenes against our people in western Kurdistan, the area will turn into a battlezone.”
Western Kurdistan is the name the Kurds call eastern Syria, inhabited by more than two million Kurds. Turkey now blames Syria for using the PKK as an additional arm, allowing members of the organization to roam freely in its territory with weapons and permitting them to carry out terror acts in Turkish territory. Should Turkey decide that the operations of PKK members threaten its national security, it may decide to invade Syria under the justification of preventing terror, rather than aiding the rebels against Assad’s crackdown. Such a decision could become the turning point the Syrian rebels are hoping for – a foreign military intervention in their country.
Full article: Turkey blames Syria for supporting Kurdish rebels, inches closer to military action (Haaretz)
Global Geopolitics 