Atlantic Sentinel

Tag: Middle East and North Africa

  • Egypt’s War on Sunni Supremacism Goes to Libya

    From Reuters:

    Egyptian airstrikes destroyed twelve vehicles loaded with arms, ammunition and explosive material trying to cross the border from Libya, the army spokesman said on Tuesday.

    The airforce acted after hearing that “criminal elements” had gathered to try and cross the western boundary, the army statement said, without giving details on exactly where or when the strikes took place.

    Despite the paucity of the initial report, it’s clear the Abdul Fatah al-Sisi is trying to look like he’s getting revenge for attacks on Egyptian Christians by Sunni supremacists, who are trying the same old terror tricks of the 1990s to destabilize the regime. (more…)

  • Meet Mohammad bin Salman, the Last King of Saudi Arabia

    From Reuters:

    Mohammad bin Salman, 31, was appointed crown prince by his father King Salman on Wednesday, replacing his cousin who is 26 years his senior. This made the prince, who already oversaw defense and energy policy, the most powerful figure in the country by some stretch after the octogenarian monarch.

    Already more than a few have mentioned Mohammad bin Salman’s hawkish anti-Iran policies and his bold economic vision. But there’s more to the new crown prince of Saudi Arabia than that. He may be dynamic, comparatively worldly and supposedly forward-thinking, but the odds are we just met the last king of Saudi Arabia. (more…)

  • Chemical Weapons in Syria Would Cross Red Line: Macron

    France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, has warned that his country could strike unilaterally if more poison gas is used in the Syrian conflict.

    “If chemical weapons are used on the ground and we know how to find out their provenance, France will launch strikes to destroy the chemical weapons stocks,” he told European newspapers this week.

    Macron came to power last month by defeating the Russia-friendly Marine Le Pen in the presidential election. He won a parliamentary majority this month. (more…)

  • Why America and Russia Are Closer to Confrontation in Syria

    American F-35 fighter jets
    Four American F-35 Joint Strike Fighter fly over the amphibious assault ship USS America in the Pacific Ocean, November 20, 2016 (USN/Andy Wolfe)

    Russia has suspended a military hotline it maintained with the United States to avoid clashes in Syria and warned that it may shoot down any “flying objects” west of the River Euphrates.

    The escalation comes after an American fighter jet shot down a Syrian warplane on Sunday that was attacking rebel ground forces supported by the United States in the vicinity of the Tabqa Dam.

    The Western-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), a secular and largely Kurdish opposition group, has wrestled control of the dam and the nearby town of Tabqa from the self-proclaimed Islamic State after a months-long battle. American special forces were reportedly involved in one assault in January.

    It is unclear why the Syrians targeted the SDF. Bashar Assad’s regime has largely ignored rebels east of the Euphrates since the start of the uprising against him six years ago. (more…)

  • Trump Sells Qatar Warplanes After Accusing It of Funding Terrorists

    The American Defense Department has announced it selling $12 billion worth of F-15 fighter jets to Qatar, the same Persian Gulf country President Donald Trump recently accused of sponsoring terrorists.

    The timing is unlikely to be deliberate. Weapons deals usually take months or even years to negotiate. This one may have been in the works before Trump even became president.

    But the Pentagon could surely have delayed the announcement if it worried about sending mixed signals?

    Only two weeks ago, Trump claimed responsibility for the diplomatic isolation of Qatar after Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates broke off ties.

    “The time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding” of extremists, he said.

    Yet he is selling warplanes to the same country. (more…)

  • Trump and the Turks

    Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Donald Trump
    Presidents Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey and Donald Trump of the United States meet in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington DC, May 16 (Presidency of the Republic of Turkey)

    As Donald Trump returns from his first international tour as American president, one thing that stands out is, as usual, the difference between his and Barack Obama’s approach to diplomacy. Whereas Obama’s first Mideast destinations were Turkey and Iraq, Trump’s were Saudi Arabia and Israel, a country Obama did not even visit until his second term in office.

    Trump’s trip also included stops in Brussels, Sicily and the Vatican in Rome. Along with Saudi Arabia and Israel, these represent four of the five most significant allies of the United States within the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean region: Italy, Israel, the Saudis and the EU.

    The fifth ally, which appears to have been snubbed, is Turkey. The Turks were not honored with a stop during Trump’s first trip to the region, as they were during Obama’s.

    Turkey failing to make it onto Trump’s travel itinerary might seem to be of little significance, if it were not for the flurry of unpleasant events involving the Turks and Americans that have occured this same month. (more…)

  • Catalans, Kurds, Given No Other Choice, Announce Referendums

    Barcelona Spain
    View of the Palau Nacional from downtown Barcelona, Spain, December 29, 2013 (CucombreLibre)

    Both the Catalans and Iraq’s Kurds have announced independence referendums this week over the objections of their central governments.

    The two might seem a world away. Catalans have virtually no security concerns. The Kurds are waging a war on two fronts: one against Turkey to the north and another against the self-proclaimed Islamic State to the south.

    Yet they have things in common.

    Both are economic success stories. Catalonia has only 16 percent of Spain’s population yet accounts for a fifth of its economic output, giving it an economy the size of Denmark’s. Kurdistan has Iraq’s lowest poverty rates and, thanks to its oil reserves, is increasingly self-reliant.

    Both have desired more autonomy for years and both have been rebuffed by their national authorities, leaving them with little choice but to press for unrecognized votes on independence. (more…)

  • Bashar Assad’s Big Push to Recover His Eastern Border

    Bashar al-Assad hadn’t had control of his Iraqi frontier for years. It’s a major headache; it’s allowed Sunni rebels to supply themselves from Anbar, a favorable route for Gulf states hoping to keep the war going.

    It’s also allowed the Islamic State to slide supplies from its shrinking Iraqi domains to its shrunken Syrian ones.

    The Islamic State famously demolished the literal border wall between the two countries. That was right after they blitzed across it to capture Mosul in June 2014.

    Now Assad’s Iranian and Iraqi allies are hoping to rebuild the border and thereby secure the regime they’ve fought so hard to preserve.

    From Reuters:

    Syrian rebels say the United States and its allies are sending them more arms to try to fend off a new push into the southeast by Iran-backed militias aiming to open an overland supply route between Iraq and Syria.

    The stakes are high as Iran seeks to secure its influence from Tehran to Beirut in a “Shiite crescent” of Iranian influence through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, where Sunni Arab states have lost out in power struggles with Iran.

    The Iraqi-Syrian border already has a checkered history of security. It’s a long, sparse landscape full of Bedouin and smugglers used to crossing it at will. The Americans, for all their efforts, could not secure it during the occupation of Iraq from 2003-11. When the civil war began in Syria in 2011, it made sense that these wildlands would be some of the first to slip from government control. (more…)

  • Erdoğan Discovers Personality Doesn’t Trump Geopolitics

    Turkey still hopes the United States might reconsider their support for Kurdish rebels in Syria, but it doesn’t look like Donald Trump will change this policy from his predecessor, Barack Obama.

    If anything, the new president has doubled down, approving the delivery of more arms to Kurds who do battle with the self-proclaimed Islamic State.

    The Syrian Democratic Forces — a Kurdish-dominated, secular opposition group — recently wrestled control of the Tabqa Dam, Syria’s largest, from the caliphate. They are now less than fifty kilometers west of its capital, Raqqa.

    The United States and other Western countries count on the Kurds to chase the Islamists out of Syria.

    But Turkey fears that would enable them to proclaim a Kurdish republic on its southern frontier. The existence of an independent Kurdistan could then convince Turkey’s own Kurdish minority to secede, or at least demand autonomy. (more…)

  • Saudi Arabia’s Culture Wars Strain the Kingdom

    The Saudi stereotype is bleak. Environmental desolation is mirrored by a cultural desert. Religious police meander between buildings, looking for victims. Women hurry between shadows behind their male guardians. The strict interpretation of Najdi Islam dominates nearly every aspect of life. It is a quiet, bleak place, with the only civic engagement at the mosque, whose loudspeakers are the only music the kingdom ever hears.

    It’s stark and it sticks in the mind. It is, of course, not totally true.

    Saudi Arabia’s approximately twenty million citizens may be dominated by those who wish the kingdom to look like that; they’ve done a bang-up job controlling the kingdom’s image. Yet beneath the surface, discontent stirs. (more…)

  • What the Hell Just Happened to Turkey?

    And “to” seems the right word, because this was done to Turkey by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his political machine. International electoral monitors cite fraud; so too does the powerful Republican People’s Party. That hardly matters, it seems. Turkish election officials will not allow a recount.

    And so even if cheated, it is a victory for Erdoğan. It has been a long road for a critical Middle Eastern nation. The geopolitical trajectory of Turkey is now set. (more…)

  • Erdoğan Asks Turks to Jump Off a Cliff with Him

    Turks will be asked on Sunday if they trust Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to run the country on his own or want to preserve at least a pretense of democracy.

    Of course, that’s not how it’s put on the ballot paper. Nominally, Turks will be asked to approve or reject constitutional changes that would transform the country from a parliamentary into a presidential republic.

    With the compliance of his party men in the cabinet and parliament, Erdoğan has already turned what what used to be a ceremonial post into a de facto executive presidency.

    Should the referendum go his way, Erdoğan would also get the power to suspend parliament and appoint prosecutors and judges.

    The Council of Europe has called these proposals a “dangerous step backwards” for Turkish democracy. A presidential regime, as desired by Erdoğan, “lacks the necessary checks and balances to prevent it from becoming an authoritarian one,” according to the human-rights body.

    The Venice Commission, which is comprised of constitutional law experts, has similarly warned that the reforms would give the Turkish leader “unsupervised power” to appoint and dismiss high officials “on the basis of criteria determined by him alone.” (more…)

  • Syria Strikes Signal More Pro-Arab Policy Under Trump

    Friday’s missile strike against Syria came at a time when America is aligning more closely again with its traditional allies in the Middle East.

    Sunni-majority nations have long urged the United States to do more to topple Bashar al-Assad, who they see as a proxy for their nemesis, Iran.

    Barack Obama balked at becoming an instrument of the Arab states. But Matthew Yglesias writes for Vox that Donald Trump shares their worldview. (more…)

  • Donald Trump Is Now a Real American President

    “Real” is not the same as “good”. “Real” means he is finally coming to understand America as a geopolitical entity.

    America is not a sports team; it is not a business. It is not a hero or a villain in some movie. It is a nation state.

    Its state is vast, made up of millions of individuals who gather to accomplish titanic, slow-moving goals.

    Its nation is even bigger: hundreds of millions who only see the narrow incentives of their daily lives, piling up into the interests of a superpower. (more…)

  • Trump Strikes Syrian Base in Wake of Chemical Attack

    American cruiser Cowpens
    The American cruiser USS Cowpens fires a missile during an exercise in the Pacific Ocean, September 20, 2012 (USN/Paul Kelly)
    • American cruise missiles struck a Syrian air base near Homs early on Friday from which the United States said a chemical attack had been launched earlier in the week.
    • It was the first direct American military action against the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in six years.
    • President Donald Trump announced the attack from his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, where he was meeting with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping.
    • The Syrian army said six of its people were killed in the attack.
    • Russia, Assad’s ally, condemned the strike as an act of aggression. (more…)