China Launches New Freight Train Link to Moscow

The railway authorities in Xinjiang said the additional cargo train service linking the region’s capital Urumqi with Moscow would contribute to the economic development of the autonomous region, which is seen as a “core area” of the Silk Road economic belt, Xinhua news agency reported.

Since March 2014, Xinjiang has opened cargo train service to Kazakhstan, Georgia, Iran, Turkey and also Chelyabinsk in Russia.

By the second half of the year, more than three cargo trains will run between Xinjiang and the destinations in Russia and also central and western Asia per week.

Isis could obtain nuclear weapon from Pakistan, warns India

India’s defence minister has voiced concern that the radical Islamist group Isis could obtain a nuclear weapon from “states like Pakistan”.

Rao Inderjit Singh made the comments on the sidelines of the Shangri-La regional security conference in Singapore, Bloomberg has reported.

‘Proxy wars’ caused Iraq unrest

Essentially, an American forces reduction in Iraq created a power vacuum which Iran has happily attempted to fill in its quest for capturing the entire Middle East. Not wanting it to go unchecked and taking notice of the USA’s neglect, Saudi Arabia has stepped into the fray. Iran from the beginning has engineered the chaos and has now offered a pre-chosen solution in reaching out to America in ‘restabilizing’ Iraq. Iraq is now taking the bait by accepting Iranian troops and soon we will likely see an Iranian-dominated Middle East — without an American presence. You can also thank Russia (and China) for empowering Iran to begin with and making it what it is today, starting with the Iranian revolution.

Baghdad/ Berlin: While German  foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier warned on Sunday that the bloody conflict in Iraq could quickly spin into a regional “proxy war”, former  spokesperson for the US defence department J.D. Gordon said that the renewed violence is actually a “proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the Iranians which is now spilled over into Iraq and there will be a lot more violence in the months, years to come.”

“The Islamist radicals are being funded by the Saudis, Gulf states. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki did not include the Sunnis in the power-sharing agreement like he should have, so there a lot of Sunnis who are upset,” Mr Gordon was quoted as saying by Fox News.

China’s New Silk Road Must Pass Through Middle East

JERUSALEM — Three hundred kilometers by high-speed rail between the cities of Eilat and Ashdod, connecting the Red Sea coast to the Mediterranean: They call it the “Red-Med” Project.

Financed by Beijing and launched from Jerusalem, China has revealed its strategy for “West Asia” — the term that the China Shipping Container Lines company uses to delineate the area of operations between Hormuz, Suez and Haifa.

The use of the term West Asia rather than Middle East is no accident — this gives precedence to the size of the economic link with China rather than the ever troublesome geopolitics of the region.