What radicalised the Boston bombers — inside Dagestan, the stronghold of Russia’s Islamist insurgency

The search for what radicalised the Boston bombers may lead to a Muslim republic in Russia’s war-torn southern underbelly, reports Tom Parfitt

.Zubeidat and AnzorTsarnaev, pictured, have just learned of the death of Tamerlan and are facing up to the fact that Dzhokhar could soon meet the same fate

Tom Parfitt in Makhachkala, Dagestan

The Telegraph

As US police in Boston hunted fugitive bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev on Friday, the sound of grief and despair spilled from a doorway in this ramshackle town on Russia’s Caspian coast.

The desperate cries came from the home of the young man’s parents, Anzor and Zubeidat Tsarnaev. The couple had just learned of the death of their 26-year-old son, Tamerlan – and were facing up to the fact that Dzhokhar, 19, could soon meet the same fate.

“I feel so sorry for the boys’ parents,” said shopkeeper Larisa, who works in a tiny grocery store across from the parents’ home. “They are ordinary, law-abiding people. Anzor is sick: all he buys is bananas and kefir (a yoghurt drink). When they heard the news about what happened with their sons in America, they were weeping and wailing. Their door was open and I could hear it across the street.”

Here in the republic of Dagestan, the heart of Russia’s Islamist insurgency, violent death is never far away – hundreds perish every year in bombings and shoutouts. But that does nothing to lessen the anguish the moment it visits.

This time, the men concerned met their fate far from their North Caucasus roots, apparently fighting the same jihad which drives their compatriots here in southern Russia’s rebel belt, the string of Muslim republics where Islamist guerrillas are fighting Moscow’s rule.

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Makhachkala, charmless and poor, is a hotspot in this grinding war.

^{Apartment block where Tamerlan lived in the summer of 2012 (Dmitry Beliakov for the Telegraph)}

The parents of the Tsarnaev brothers inhabit a steel-doored flat on a dusty back street, between a dentist’s and a small, shuttered shop which Anzor Tsarnaev had renovated in order to lease it out.

Nobody answered the door on Saturday and neighbours said the couple had been seen leaving the premises the previous evening, bidding farewell to relatives or friends, and driving away in a car.

A local reporter said she had spoken briefly by telephone to Zubeidat, who told her she had left to stay with relatives in neighbouring Chechnya in order to escape media attention. Anzor Tsarnaev was seen briefly in a car near his home but refused to talk, although some reports suggested he had said he wanted to go to the United States to find out what was happening with his surviving son.

^{Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Julia Malakie)}

On the other side of the street at the Makhachkala address, the grocery store was selling bread, confectionery, dried fish and beer. “I know the family well,” said Larisa, who was serving behind the counter.

“Tamerlan came here to Dagestan last summer to visit his parents and he was in my shop several times. He was a handsome, well-built man, very polite. I remember it was hot and he was wearing rubber galoshes because he was helping his father put down new paving in front of the shop.”

Larisa said Tamerlan Tsarnaev had travelled to Dagestan without his American wife and their child, or his younger brother, Dkhokhar, who was captured alive in the United States late on Friday. Tamerlan said prayers, Larisa added, but was not excessively religious.

Dagestan, a swath of steppe rising to a high mountain plateau criss-crossed by gorges, is today the most violent of Russia’s Caucasus republics. Islamist fighters live in camps in patches of forest or in safe houses, some of those safe houses in remote stone villages and some in large cities like Makhachkala. They clash frequently with police and state security forces.

“The family had nothing to do with the Wahhabis,” said Vyacheslav Kazakevich, 36, a neighbour, referring to the conservative Muslims who are linked to the insurgency. “Anzor is a hard worker who does favours for people. He owns a perfume shop and he wanted to open another one here.”

^{Schoolchildren at the School Number One of Makhachkala (Dmitry Beliakov for the Telegraph)}

Across the city at its School Number One, director Magomed Davudov said that Dkhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, as well as their two sisters, had studied there from September 2001 to March 2002, after the family arrived in Dagestan from Kyrgyzstan, where there is a Chechen community left over after the mass deportation by Joseph Stalin of the Chechen nation to Central Asia in 1944. They then left for the United States.

“They were young children then and I have only positive memories of them and their mother,” he said. “We noticed nothing negative on those children’s faces. Now I don’t only condemn what they did, I think they do not have human faces. We are deeply sorry that this terror was wrought and we express our condolences to the whole of the United States.”

^{Magomed Davudov (Dmitry Beliakov for the Telegraph)}

While even bright young students are known to end up joining Dagestan’s jihadis – and the age of guerrillas is getting younger and younger – Mr Davudov said he was unaware of any teenagers from his school “going to the forest” – a euphemism for joining the insurgency.

The brothers had, besides, “grown up in American conditions,” he said. The director gave The Sunday Telegraph a tour of the 1900 brick-faced original wing of school, where the Tsarnaev brothers spent several months of their young lives. First year pupils – as Dzhokhar was in 2001 when he joined the school a few weeks after the September 11 attacks – sat in well-scrubbed classrooms at low green desks, reading and – in one – singing a song to their teacher. Pot plants were spaced on the window sills and there was an air of peace.

Asked by the director what things they should never do, a six-year-old girl replied brightly: “You should never kill someone, and you should look after nature.”

Mr Davudov said: “We look at all children the same. But any parent, any teacher must be against what these brothers went on to do.”

High-ranking general in the Syrian army defects

A Syrian boy waves the Syrian revolutionary flag during a celebration to commemorate the second anniversary of the Syrian revolution, in Amman, Jordan, Friday, March, 15,  2013. Around a thousand Syrians gathered in front of the Syrian embassy, and chanted slogans against Assad, and the Baath regime that has ruled Syria for the last 40 years. (AP Photo/Mohammad Hannon)

By BEN HUBBARD | Associated Press

BEIRUT (AP) — A high-ranking general in the Syrian army defected on Saturday with the help of rebels and said morale is low among those still fighting for President Bashar Assad as the civil war enters its third year.

Maj. Gen. Mohammed Ezz al-Din Khalouf told Al-Arabiya TV that many of those still with Assad’s regime have lost faith in it.

“It not an issue of belief or practicing one’s role,” he said. “It’s for appearance’s sake, to present an image to the international community from the regime that it pulls together all parts of Syrian society under this regime.”

Activist videos posted online Saturday showed Khalouf sitting with a rebel fighter after his defection and riding in a car to what the video said was the Jordanian border.

The video said he was Chief of Staff for the army branch that deals with supplies and fuel.

While widespread defections from the Syrian army have sapped it of much of its manpower during the two-year-old anti-Assad uprising, high-level defections have been rare.

The Syrian government did not comment on the defection.

Still, cracks continue to spread slowly through Assad’s regime as rebel forces slowly expand their areas of control in the country and put increasing pressure on the capital, Damascus.

Also Saturday, Human Rights Watch said Syria’s government is expanding its use of widely banned cluster bombs.

The New York-based rights group said Syrian forces have dropped at least 156 cluster bombs in 119 locations across the country in the past six months, causing mounting civilian casualties. The report said two strikes in the past two weeks killed 11 civilians, including two women and five children.

The regime denied using cluster bombs, which open in flight, scattering smaller bomblets and have been banned in many countries. They pose a threat to civilians long afterward since many don’t explode immediately.

Human Rights Watch said it based its findings on field investigations and analysis of more than 450 amateur videos.

A senior Syrian government official on Saturday rejected the report, saying many amateur videos were suspect. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make official statements to the media.

The fighting in Syria has killed some 70,000 people and displaced 4 million of the country’s 22 million people, according to U.N. estimates.

The conflict remains deadlocked, despite recent military gains by the rebels.

In new violence, rebels detonated a powerful car bomb with more than two tons of explosives outside a high-rise building in the eastern city of Deir el-Zour, setting off clashes with regime troops, state TV and activists said.

On Saturday, rebels in Deir el-Zour detonated a car rigged with more than two tons of explosives next to the tallest building in the city, known as the Insurance Building, state TV said.

State TV says rebels entered the building after the blast but were pushed out by government forces. No casualties were reported in the blast, but the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said four fighters were killed in subsequent clashes with regime troops.

Regime forces also shelled several areas of the city, the activist group said.

In an amateur video said to be showing Deir el-Zour, heavy gunfire was heard in the background and a cloud of smoke was visible.

The blast came a day after Syrians marked the second anniversary of the start of their uprising against President Bashar Assad. The rebellion began with largely peaceful protests, but when the regime cracked down on demonstrators, the unrest evolved into an insurgency and then a civil war.

In recent months, the Assad regime has escalated airstrikes and artillery attacks on rebel-held areas in the north and east of the country, rights groups have said.

The Observatory also said at least 12 rebel fighters were killed in clashes near a cement factory in the northern city of Aleppo, and five people were killed when a shell exploded in the Damascus neighborhood of Qaboun.

Also Saturday, the head of Syria’s leading opposition group issued an anniversary message to Syrians, saying that the uprising has “has taken a long time.”

The opposition recognizes March 15, 2011 as the start of the uprising.

In a video posted on his Facebook page, Mouaz al-Khatib, head of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, congratulated the town of Yabrud, north of Damascus, for creating a civil council to run its affairs.

“Our people are great, our people are civilized and they don’t need gangs to rule them,” al-Khatib said, sitting in front of a Syrian flag and cracking a rare smile. “They just need to breathe a little bit of the air of freedom and they’ll create as they have created in all places.”

All videos appeared authentic and corresponded with other reporting by The Associated Press.

___

Associated Press writer Albert Aji in Damascus, Syria, contributed to this report.

http://news.yahoo.com/high-ranking-s
yrian-general-defects-army-174227684.html

War Continues as Syrian President Assad Says “I have to live in Syria and die in Syria” — Red Cross Says It Can Not Cope With The Human Tragedy

BEIRUT, Lebanon — With battles flaring from the north to the south of his country, President Bashar al-Assad was quoted on Thursday as warning outside powers not to intervene militarily, saying the price of an invasion would be “more than the world can afford.”

By Hania Mourtada  and Alan Cowell
The New York Times

He also indicated that he would not heed Western proposals to leave Syria.

“I am not a puppet. I was not made by the West to go to the West or to any other country,” he said. “I am Syrian, I was made in Syria, I have to live in Syria and die in Syria.”

A transcript of excerpts from an interview with Mr. Assad was posted in English on the Russia Today television news channel’s Web site on Thursday in advance of the conversation’s broadcast on Friday.

Mr. Assad’s defiance — familiar throughout the months of uprising that have turned to civil war affecting all of Syria’s major cities — came a day after the regional consequences of the fighting seemed to assume ever more ominous tones.

For the first time on Wednesday, Turkey, a NATO member, publicly raised the idea of stationing Patriot missile batteries along its southern border with Syria. The move would effectively create a no-flight zone that could help safeguard refugees and give rebel fighters a portion of Syrian territory without fear of airstrikes by Syrian forces.

Patriot in action

Within Syria, insurgents escalated attacks on targets within earshot of Mr. Assad’s Damascus palace on Wednesday, killing a prominent judge with a car bomb and lobbing mortar shells at a neighborhood that houses central government offices and a military airfield. The assassination of the judge, reported by the official news agency, SANA, was the second high-profile killing of a top Assad loyalist in the Syrian capital this week and added to the impression of an intensifying insurgency in the 20-month-old conflict.

It was not clear when Russia Today recorded the interview with Mr. Assad, who was shown speaking to an interviewer, Sophie Shevardnadze, sitting in a high-backed chair against the background of a carved wooden doorway.

Asked about possible armed intervention, Mr. Assad said: “We are the last stronghold of secularism and stability in the region and coexistence, let’s say, it will have a domino effect that will affect the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific and you know the implication on the rest of the world.”

He said he did not believe the West planned to intervene “but if they do so, nobody can tell what is next,” Mr. Assad said. The price of an “invasion if it happened is going to be more than the whole world can afford,” he said, without elaborating.

The interview coincided with efforts in Doha, Qatar, to unify the fragmented opposition seeking Mr. Assad’s overthrow. It also came two days after Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain suggested that Mr. Assad could be given safe passage out of Syria as part of a peace settlement.

On Thursday, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which tracks the fighting, said clashes erupted between rebel and government forces in the northern town of Ras al-Ain along the 550-mile border with Turkey.

The rebels had infiltrated the town from two directions and, after hours of fighting, government forces stormed the town and killed 10 insurgents in a battle for the security headquarters in Ras al-Ain. Turkey’s semiofficial Anatolian News Agency said two Turkish civilians were injured by stray rounds from the fighting, prompting the Turkish military to send reinforcements to the area.

Anti-government activists also reported fighting in the southern city of Daraa, where the uprising began with peaceful demonstrations in March, 2011. Government troops were said to be shelling southern neighborhoods of Damascus, the capital, while, in the Old City, troops broke into homes to search for opponents.

Hania Mourtada reported from Beirut, Lebanon, and Alan Cowell from London.

Related:

ANKARA, (Reuters) – Turkish President Abdullah Gul confirmed on Thursday that Ankara was in talks with NATO about deploying a defence system on its soil to counter a potential missile threat from Syria. NATO-member Turkey has already bolstered its own military presence along the 910-km (560-mile) border with Syria….

new: Red Cross says it cannot cope with Syria emergency – BBC News

new: In Syria, siege is test for new rebel order – Reuters India

Turkey searches Armenian aid plane bound for Syria – AFP

Diplomatic sources told Reuters the Geneva-based ICRC, the only international agency deploying aid workers in Syria, has said it can no longer cope with the “human tragedy.”  Photo: EPA

****************************

Associated Press

BEIRUT—Syrian President Bashar al-Assad vowed defiantly to “live and die” in Syria, saying in an interview broadcast Thursday that he will never flee his country despite the 19-month-old uprising against him.

The broadcast comes two days after British Prime Minister David Cameron suggested Mr. Assad could be allowed safe passage out of the country if that would guarantee an end to the civil war, which activists estimate has killed more than 36,000 people.

“I am not a puppet, I was not made by the West for me to go to the West or any other country,” Assad, 47, said in the interview with the English-language Russia Today TV. He spoke in English and excerpts of the interview were posted on the station’s website Thursday with an Arabic voice-over.

“I am Syrian, I am made in Syria, and I will live and die in Syria,” he said.

Mr. Assad also warned against foreign military intervention at a time when the West is taking steps to boost the opposition.

“I don’t think the West is headed in this direction. But if it does, nobody can predict the consequences,” he told the station. The full interview will be broadcast on Friday, the station said.

The excerpts show Mr. Assad casually talking and later walking with RT’s reporter outside a house, wearing a gray suit and tie. It wasn’t clear where the interview took place.

The uprising against Mr. Assad’s regime began as mostly peaceful protests in March last year but quickly morphed into a civil war. The fighting has taken on grim sectarian tones, with the predominantly Sunni rebels fighting government forces. Mr. Assad’s regime is dominated by minority Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

On Wednesday, Britain’s Mr. Cameron announced his country will deal directly with Syrian rebel military leaders. He spoke during a trip to visit Syrian refugees in Jordan. Previously, Britain and the U.S. have acknowledged contacts only with exile groups and political opposition figures—some connected to rebel forces—inside Syria.

He called on the U.S. to join his country in doing more to shape the Syrian opposition into a coherent force, saying the re-election of President Barack Obama is an opportunity for the world to take stronger action to end the deadlocked civil war.

Washington has been pressing for a new, more unified opposition leadership that will minimize the role of exiles and better represent those risking their lives on the front lines. The initiative was being discussed Thursday at an opposition conference in the Qatari capital of Doha.

The meeting was attended by the foreign ministers of Qatar and Turkey, both leading backers of the Syrian rebels, as well as Western diplomats and Arab League chief Nabil Elaraby. On the table is a proposal to set up a new leadership team that would become the conduit for international support to rebel-held areas in Syria. The U.S. has suggested that the main group in exile, the Syrian National Council, can no longer claim a key leadership role and must make way for those representing activists inside Syria.

Under the plan, the SNC would receive only 15 of 50 seats in the new group and effectively be sidelined. The author of the plan, Syrian dissident Riad Seif, SNC leaders and other opposition groups were meeting in a Doha hotel to try to hammer out an agreement.

Further down the road, the international community hopes for negotiations on a political transition between the opposition and those in the Assad regime who weren’t involved in bloodshed and corruption. The opposition has agreed to such talks, in principle, but said it could take many more months of a war of attrition before Mr. Assad is ready to leave Syria.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, whose government has remained one of Syria’s most loyal and powerful allies, criticized the West for supporting the opposition, saying foreign powers should try to force both sides to stop fighting. Russia has shielded Damascus from strong international action at the U.N. Security Council.

He said Moscow wouldn’t support any resolution that would threaten the Syrian regime with sanctions. The remarks were posted on his ministry’s website Thursday.

“If their priority is, figuratively speaking, Assad’s head, the supporters of such approach must realize that the price for that will be lives of the Syrians, not their own lives,” Mr. Lavrov said. “Bashar Assad isn’t going anywhere and will never leave, no matter what they say. He can’t be persuaded to take that step.”

Mr. Assad has rarely appeared in public since the revolt began in March 2011. Last month, state TV showed him attending prayers for the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha in Al-Afram Mosque in the Al-Muhajireen district of Damascus, sitting on the floor and praying.

In several televised speeches this year, Assad has blamed the uprising on a foreign plot to destroy Syria and accused rebels of being mercenaries of the West and Gulf countries Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

The daily death toll in the civil war has been averaging 100 people or more recently, killed in clashes between rebels and troops, and in artillery shelling and regime airstrikes on rebel-held areas.

At least 104 people were killed in fighting Wednesday, according to the Britain-based activist group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. Most casualties—31 people—were killed in the fighting between rebels and government troops in the suburbs of Damascus as the rebels made a new push into the capital, said Rami Abdul-Rahman, the Observatory’s chief.

The Observatory said it has received reports of fresh fighting in the Damascus suburbs and in the neighborhood of Souseh in the capital on Thursday. It also said there were heavy clashes in northern Idlib province and in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city which has been a major front in the civil war since the summer.

Regime forces also battled opposition fighters trying to take control of a region in the far northeastern corner of the country, Turkey’s state-run agency reported. Two people in the Turkish border town of Ceylanpinar were wounded by stray bullets from the fighting.

The clashes broke out in the town of Ras al-Ayn in al-Hasaka province in northeastern Syria, a few hundred meters from Ceylanpinar, the Anadolu Agency said.

The mayor for Ceylanpinar told the Associated Press that the rebels had taken over the border crossing of Ras al-Ayn on Thursday. Ismail Aslan said in a phone interview that the rebel flag was flying on a building across the Turkish border. However, fierce fighting between rebels and government troops continued around what Mr. Aslan said was an “intelligence building” on the Syrian side of the border where the regime troops had retreated to.

Around 5,000 Syrians from Ras al-Ayn crossed into Ceylanpinar on Thursday to escape the fighting and at least 14 Syrians were being treated for injuries in hospitals around the region, Mr. Aslan said.

More than 111,000 Syrians are being sheltered in refugee camps in Turkey.

Turkish authorities also inspected the cargo of a Syria-bound plane from Armenia to make sure it wasn’t carrying military equipment.

In Geneva, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Peter Maurer, said the downward spiral in violence since the summer makes it impossible for the organization to cope with some of Syria’s humanitarian needs. He also said there has been no “major progress” on gaining better access to prisoners.

Al-Qaida On Rebound In Iraq

BAGHDAD (AP) – Al-Qaida is rebuilding in Iraq and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation’s western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say.

By QASSIM ABDUL-ZAHRA and LARA JAKES

Iraq has seen a jump in al-Qaida attacks over the last 10 weeks, and officials believe most of the fighters are former prisoners who have either escaped from jail or were released by Iraqi authorities for lack of evidence after the U.S. military withdrawal last December. Many are said to be Saudi or from Sunni-dominated Gulf states.

During the war and its aftermath, U.S. forces, joined by allied Sunni groups and later by Iraqi counterterror forces, managed to beat back al-Qaida’s Iraqi branch.

But now, Iraqi and U.S. officials say, the insurgent group has more than doubled in numbers from a year ago – from about 1,000 to 2,500 fighters. And it is carrying out an average of 140 attacks each week across Iraq, up from 75 attacks each week earlier this year, according to Pentagon data.

“AQI is coming back,” U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a Republican from South Carolina, declared in an interview last month while visiting Baghdad.

Lindsey Graham

The new growth of al-Qaida in Iraq, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq, is not entirely unexpected. Last November, the top U.S. military official in Iraq, Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, predicted “turbulence” ahead for Iraq’s security forces. But he doubted Iraq would return to the days of widespread fighting between Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents, including al-Qaida, that brought the Islamic country to the brink of civil war.

While there’s no sign of Iraq headed back toward sectarian warfare – mostly because Shiite militias are not retaliating to their deadly attacks – al-Qaida’s revival is terrifying to ordinary Iraqis.

Generally, the militant group does not does not launch attacks or otherwise operate beyond Iraq’s borders. For years, it has targeted Shiite pilgrims, security forces, officials in the Shiite-led government and – until it left – the U.S. military. On Tuesday, a series of bombings and drive-by shootings killed six people, including three soldiers and a judge, in Baghdad and the former al-Qaida strongholds of Mosul and Tal Afar in northern Iraq.

In this photo file taken on Friday, July 20, 2012, blindfolded and handcuffed suspected al-Qaida members are guarded by Iraqi army soldiers in an Iraqi army base in Hillah, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Qaida is slowly resurging in Iraq, and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation’s western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani File)

Each round of bombings and shootings the terror group unleashes across the country, sometimes killing dozens on a single day, fuels simmering public resentment toward the government, which has unable to curb the violence. And the rise of Sunni extremists who aim to overthrow a Shiite-linked government in neighboring Syria has brought a new level of anxiety to Iraqis who fear the same thing could happen in Baghdad.

“Nobody here believes the government’s claims that al-Qaida is weak and living its last days in Iraq,” said Fuad Ali, 41, a Shiite who works for the government.

“Al-Qaida is much stronger than what the Iraqi officials are imagining,” Ali said. “The terrorist group is able to launch big attacks and free its members from Iraqi prisons, and this indicates that al-Qaida is stronger than our security forces. The government has failed to stop the increasing number of victims who were killed since the start of this year.”

In the vast desert of western Iraq near the Syrian border, security forces have discovered the remnants of recent insurgent training camps, said Lt. Gen. Ali Ghaidan, commander of the army’s ground forces. An army raid last month on Iraq’s sprawling al-Jazeera region, which spans three provinces, found a 10-tent campsite littered with thousands of bullet shell casings, Ghaidan told The Associated Press in an interview.

“This indicates that this place has been used as a shooting range to train terrorists,” said Ghaidan, one of the highest ranking officials in the Iraqi army.

Two DVDs found in the al-Jazeera raid show mounted anti-aircraft machine guns. Forty gunmen shout “God is great” at a shooting range that a subtitle locates in Iraq’s western Anbar province. Separate footage shows pickup trucks with Anbar license plates. The AP obtained copies of two DVDs, which Iraqi officials believe were filmed in the first three months of this year.

“Al-Qaida leaders decided that al-Jazeera is the best area to train their fighters because it is very hard for security forces to reach it,” said Shiite lawmaker Hakim al-Zamili, who sits on parliament’s security and defense committee and has been briefed on the camps.

Intelligence indicates as many as 2,500 al-Qaida fighters are now living in five training camps in the al-Jazeera area, according to two other senior Iraqi security officials. The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information, estimated that only 700 al-Qaida fighters were in Iraq when U.S. troops withdrew. Six months earlier, in June 2011, U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told the U.S. Senate that 1,000 al-Qaida remained in Iraq.

Earlier this summer, al-Qaida in Iraq launched a campaign dubbed “Breaking the Walls,” which aimed at retaking strongholds from which it was driven by the American military. Sabah al-Nuaman, spokesman for the government’s counterterror services, acknowledged that Iraqi forces have struggled to contain al-Qaida since the U.S. military’s departure.

Iraqi and U.S. officials agree that Iraqi forces have improved their ability to gain terrorism intelligence from informants and prisoners. But they still struggle to intercept technical communications like al-Qaida’s cell phone calls, radio signals and Internet messages – one of the methods used by the U.S. military.

“The Iraqi efforts to combat terrorists groups have been negatively affected by the U.S. pullout, but we are trying our best to compensate and develop our own capabilities,” al-Nuaman said.

The U.S. withdrew its military as required under a 2008 security agreement negotiated during the White House administration of then-President George W. Bush.

President Barack Obama considered leaving several thousand troops in Iraq past the 2011 withdrawal deadline. But negotiations disintegrated last fall when Baghdad refused to extend legal immunities to any U.S. combat troops remaining in Iraq, meaning they could have been prosecuted for defending themselves if under attack.

Republicans blame Obama, a Democrat, for failing to push Baghdad harder or to find a compromise that would have let U.S. troops remain in Iraq as a safeguard against al-Qaida and deteriorating Mideast stability. On Monday, GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney accused the White House of wasting gains the U.S. made in Iraq.

There now are about 260 active-duty troops and civilian Defense Department employees who have diplomatic immunity to remain in Iraq to train security forces on military equipment that Baghdad bought from the United States. Among them are 28 U.S. special operations forces who have been training Iraqi counterterror soldiers in the capital. But the money for their posts runs out at the end of the year unless Congress agrees to restore their funding.

The two senior Iraqi security officials said al-Qaida fighters have been easily moving between Iraq and Syria in recent months to help Sunni rebels overthrow Syrian President Bashar Assad, whose Alawite religious sect is an offshoot of Shiite Islam. And in Anbar province, some fighters linked to al-Qaida have regrouped under the name of the Free Iraqi Army – an attempt to align themselves with the rebels’ Free Syrian Army.

Anbar tribal sheikh Hamid al-Hayes, a retired security official who helped U.S. forces fight al-Qaida in Anbar at the height of the insurgency, said the Free Iraqi Army is recruiting fighters and planning to overthrow the Shiite-led government in Baghdad. “They want to mimic the Syrian revolution,” he said. Al-Nauman, the counterterror spokesman, denied that and said the group is merely a subset of al-Qaida fighters who adopted the new name to “attract the support of the Iraqi Sunnis by making use of the strife going on in Syria.”

Al-Qaida in Iraq for years had a hot-and-cold relationship with the global terror network’s leadership. It was the Syrian civil war, now in its 19th month, that prompted global al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri last February to embrace the Iraqi insurgency in hopes of recruiting fighters and support against Assad.

Before that, in 2007, Zawahri and Osama bin Laden distanced themselves from the Iraqi militants for killing civilians instead of only targeting the U.S. military and other Western targets. Now, there’s little doubt that Zawahri’s appeal to al-Qaida in Iraq bolstered its legitimacy and injected confidence into the insurgency just as the U.S. troops left.

—

Associated Press Writer Sameer N. Yacoub in Baghdad contributed to this report. Follow Lara Jakes on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/larajakesAP

In this file photo taken on Friday, July 20, 2012, blindfolded and handcuffed suspected al-Qaida members are led away to detention centers in an Iraqi army base in Hillah, about 60 miles (95 kilometers) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Al-Qaida is slowly resurging in Iraq, and has set up training camps for insurgents in the nation’s western deserts as the extremist group seizes on regional instability and government security failures to regain strength, officials say. (AP Photo/Alaa al-Marjani File)

Taliban mock US as Afghan war enters 12th year

AFP - America’s longest war entered its 12th year Sunday, with the anniversary marked by a Taliban statement claiming that NATO forces are “fleeing Afghanistan” in “humiliation and disgrace”.

The US led the invasion on October 7, 2001 to topple the Taliban government for harbouring Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The Taliban were quickly routed, but launched an insurgency that grew in strength over the years until NATO had some 130,000 troops from 50 countries defending the Western-backed government of President Hamid Karzai.

A US soldier patrols in the area of Ahmadzi village in Muhammad Agah, Logar Province, Afghanistan on October 6. America’s longest war entered its 12th year Sunday, with the anniversary marked by a Taliban statement claiming that NATO forces are “fleeing Afghanistan” in “humiliation and disgrace”.

The troops have now begun pulling out and all foreign combat forces will be gone by the end of 2014 according to a withdrawal schedule agreed by the US and NATO.

“With the help of Allah, the valiant Afghans under the Jihadi leadership of Islamic Emirate defeated the military might and numerous strategies of America and NATO alliance,” the Taliban said in a statement Sunday.

“And now after eleven years of unceasing terror, tyranny, crimes and savagery, they are fleeing Afghanistan with such humiliation and disgrace that they are struggling to provide an explanation”.

A total of 3,199 NATO soldiers have been killed in the war, more than 2,000 of them Americans. Most deaths occurred in the past five years as Taliban attacks escalated, according to icasualties.com.

This year, official statistics showed that deaths in the Afghan security forces are running five times higher than those for NATO, as the Afghans take on increasing responsibilities before the Western withdrawal.

The US and NATO say Afghan forces will be capable of taking over the fight against the Taliban after 2014, but many analysts predict a bloody new multi-factional civil war.

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February 14, 2009

The 10-year occupation left a million Afghans dead and the country in ruins

As Russia marks the 20th anniversary of its withdrawal from Afghanistan, officials in Moscow are warning that US and Nato-led forces are making exactly the same mistakes as the Soviet Union made when it invaded the country in 1979.

The BBC’s Richard Galpin has been speaking to experts and veterans, who remember the withdrawal after 10 years of occupation as a traumatic and humiliating experience.

Lt Gen Ruslan Aushev, a Hero of the Soviet Union, sports a moustache that hangs over his mouth like a heavy velvet curtain.

But from the dark morass emerge words of precision and directness that befit a much-decorated commander of the Soviet military venture in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

“We were there for 10 years and we lost more than 14,000 soldiers, but what was the result? Nothing,” he tells me as we sit in his office on one of central Moscow’s most fashionable streets.

“[After the Soviet withdrawal] there was a second civil war and then the Taleban appeared. We wanted to bring peace and stability to Afghanistan, but in fact everything got worse,” he adds.

Such frank admissions of failure are common amongst the Russian veterans who are attending a series of commemorative events this weekend, exactly 20 years after the last Soviet troops left Afghanistan.

Experts say the Soviet government under Leonid Brezhnev had assumed their invasion in December 1979 would bring rapid results, stabilising the fledgling communist government in Kabul and thus ensuring the loyalty of an important neighbouring country at the height of the Cold War.

But instead of being able to leave within six months, the Soviet forces became bogged down in a protracted conflict with a tough and well-armed guerrilla force which received massive assistance from the West and the Muslim world.

Some of the Mujahideen, as the loosely-aligned groups of rebels became known, were radical Islamists for whom the fight against the godless communists was a jihad.

And crucially, the rebels enjoyed the support of the population.

Bitter experience

Now just 20 years later, the Russians are looking with astonishment at the way the US and Nato-led forces are waging their war in Afghanistan.

The view from Moscow is that the Western forces have learned nothing from the bitter experience of the Soviet Union.

Instead, they are falling into exactly the same trap.

One prime example is the current plan by the US to send tens of thousands of extra troops.

“Doubling their forces won’t lead to a solution on the ground,” says Col Oleg Kulakov, who served twice in Afghanistan and is now a lecturer and historian in Moscow.

“The conflict cannot be solved by military means, it’s an illusion,” he adds.

“No-one can reach any political goal in Afghanistan relying on military force. Frankly speaking, they are doomed to repeat our mistakes.”

Parallels

There are many striking parallels.

Once again, invading foreign forces in Afghanistan are trying to stabilise a foreigner-friendly government.

Once again, they are facing a rebellion by Islamist militants who just happen to have a different generic name this time, “the Taleban”.

Once again, the rebellion is growing in strength and has increasing support from the population as the occupation drags on inflicting a mounting number of civilian casualties.

Sir Roderick Braithwaite a former British ambassador to Moscow, fears that the US and Nato-led intervention in Afghanistan could prove to be as disastrous as that of the Soviet Union.

“We went in with a limited objective to start with, but like the Russians hoping that they could build socialism in Afghanistan, we hoped we could build democracy,” he says.

“We haven’t got enough troops there to dominate the territory and we have a government in Kabul whose authority barely runs inside the capital, let alone outside it.”

As in the 1980s, foreign forces are facing a rebellion by Islamist militants

“We have no long-term strategy and unlike the Russians we have been there for eight years without even beginning to plan to leave,” he adds.

But other experts are not quite so apocalyptic.

“The mission now is quite different from the Soviet war,” says Gregory Feifer, who has just written a book on the Soviet experience in Afghanistan.

“Crucially even seven years into the occupation, there a critical mass of Afghans who still want the mission to succeed… there is still a small window of opportunity left.”

Assad controls only 30 percent of Syria: former PM

AMMAN (Reuters) – Former Syrian prime minister Riyad Hijab said on Tuesday that President Bashar al-Assad’s government is falling apart and controls only 30 percent of the country.

In his first public appearance since defecting to the opposition,Hijab told a news conference in Jordan that the government’s spirits were low after struggling for 17 months to crush the revolt against Assad’s rule.

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi | Reuters

“I tell you out of my experience and the position I occupied that the regime is collapsing, morally, materially and economically. Militarily it is crumbling as it no longer occupies more than 30 percent of Syrian territory,” he said.

Above: Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad welcomes new Prime Minister Wael al-Halki (R) before a meeting in Damascus in this handout photo distributed by Syrian News Agency (SANA) August 11, 2012. Assad appointed Health Minister Halki as prime minister on August 9, 2012, after the defection earlier this week of Prime Minister Riyad Hijab. Halki, born in 1964, is from the southern province of Deraa where the uprising against four decades of Assad family rule erupted. REUTERS/SANA/Handout

Hijab did not elaborate on that assertion, and took no questions from reporters.

It has been hard to independently determine the extent of territory in rebel hands as much of the fighting has occurred in outlying towns and rural areas and media access to Syria is restricted. But Assad has lost swathes of territory along Syria’s northern and eastern border and fighting has weakened his hold on larger cities such as Aleppo and Homs.

Hijab added: “Oh devoted revolutionaries, your revolution has become a model of effort and sacrifice for the sake of freedom and dignity.”

Members of Free Syrian Army fighters holding their weapons and opposition flags are pictured at Sermada near Idlib August 12, 2012. Picture taken August 12, 2012. REUTERS/Shaam

Hijab, who like much of the opposition comes from Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority, was not part of Assad’s inner circle. But as prime minister and the most senior civilian official to defect, his departure dealt a symbolic blow to the government, which is dominated by Assad’s minority Alawite sect.

His defection along with that of Syria’s ambassador to Iraq, both tribal figures from Deir al-Zor, boosted opposition morale but the military reality on the ground has not changed, with aerial and ground bombardment keeping rebels in check.

Hijab urged officers in the military to defect and join the opposition. He also called on rebels to work harder to unify their fractious ranks.

“Oh men of the Free Syrian Army, unify your ranks as all hopes hang on you, you are the best fighters of this world,” said Hijab, who took no questions from reporters.

Syrian authorities said they had dismissed Hijab before he fled, but he told the news conference in Amman that he resigned and defected to the opposition, referring to the Assad government as an “enemy of God”.

“It is my duty to wash my hands of this corrupt regime,” he said.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Terror Attacks On The Rise in Iraq: What Has America Learned About Intervention? Applicable to Syria?

Bomb attacks across Iraq killed more than 100 people Monday, prompting fears that extremist groups could be making a comeback just months after the withdrawal of U.S. forces from the country. Analysts say the long shadow of the Iraq war and its aftermath are coloring the debate over intervening in Syria.

Workers clear rubble and twisted metal after a bomb attack in the town of Taji, north of Baghdad on Monday.  The town’s Sunni community was one of the worst hit with more than 40 people killed, as bomb blasts struck 19 towns and cities across the country.

By Henry Ridgwell
Voice Of America

The scenes of death and destruction are reminiscent of the darkest days of the Iraqi insurgency.

​​Last week the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq declared a new offensive was underway.

Recent intelligence backs this up, says Shiraz Maher of the International Center For The Study Of Radicalization at Kings College London.

“Certainly from the Internet forums and what we can see of al-Qaida discussing amongst themselves, they really never considered themselves to have gone away as a force,” Maher said. “With the departure of American troops at the end of last year, now seems to be a moment when they are regrouping and re-emerging as a force.”

​​
Violence in Iraq has been increasing steadily in recent weeks. In June at least 237 people were killed making it one of the bloodiest months since the U.S. withdrawal.

Shiraz Maher explains some of the motive.

“Even now al-Qaida in Iraq continues to target civil institutions in Iraq because it regards them principally as continuing to further a Western agenda,” he said. “And, of course, we’re just at the start of Ramadan which is traditionally a peak time for al-Qaida attacks, particularly in Iraq.”

The ongoing violence in Iraq has its roots in the rule of Saddam Hussein, says Nadim Shehadi of independent policy institute Chatham House.

“We allowed Saddam Hussein to massacre the Kurds, the Shias in the south, the Marsh Arabs… a lot of the sectarianism and the extremism that we see in Iraq is the product of that period before,” he explained.

Shehadi says the West’s experience in Iraq is influencing the debate on intervention in Syria.

“The lesson they’ve learned is that if you take out the dictator then the country falls apart,” he said. “And I think this is the wrong lesson to take because what made the transition in Iraq difficult is what happened before the invasion.”

Shehadi argues that the government crackdown on the Syrian uprising is stoking sectarianism and extremism.

“When we take the lid off, this is what we will find. Even though intervention has its costs, non-intervention, especially now in Syria, will also incur a lot of costs and these are costs we will have to face when the regime ultimately falls,” he said.

That cost, says analysts, could be a prolonged sectarian conflict in Syria and even neighboring Lebanon, fanned by extremist groups like al-Qaida.

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