Category Archives: Foreign Affairs

Britain, European Union, Foreign Affairs, Government, Iraq, Islamic State, Middle East, Military, Politics, United States

Britain supports the Kurds in northern Iraq…

IRAQ

BRITAIN is set to provide anti-tank weapons, night vision googles, radar and body armour to Kurdish forces in northern Iraq who are battling Islamic State jihadists.

The region’s fighters say they will ask the UK for specific equipment after Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond said a request for weapons and other equipment would be ‘considered favourably’.

An emergency meeting of EU ministers has condemned the ‘atrocities and abuses’ against religious minorities – such as the Yazidis – and backed the arming of Kurdish forces.

RAF Chinooks sent by Britain to the region are already ferrying weapons supplied by other countries, including France, to Kurds in the city of Irbil. It is here where British and US Special Forces are helping plan an offensive against the IS militants.

Map of Iraq and surrounding areas highlighting IS advances and aid-drop points.

Map of Iraq and surrounding areas highlighting IS advances and aid-drop points.

They are also providing training in the use of the newly supplied weapons, including ‘Milan’ anti-tank missiles and Belgian-made machine guns.

Kurdish fighters would like the UK to provide Javelin anti-tank missiles, mortars, heavy-calibre machine guns and sniper rifles as well as body armour, infrared night vision googles and helmets. They may also be given a portable radar called MSTAR used to locate incoming fire and enemy positions.

Britain had previously said it would only ferry weapons to the Kurds, not supply them. The change of stance could risk drawing the UK back into Iraq’s conflict.

The weapons supply and training are in addition to the RAF Tornados, Hercules transport planes, and other support vehicles and troops already in the region.

The chancellor of the Kurdish region’s security council, Masrour Barzani, said he welcomed the ‘British decision to supply us with the effective weapons that we’ve been asking for’.

The British Government insists that tackling the dire humanitarian situation in Iraq remains the UK’s top priority.

A Downing Street spokesman, said: ‘Ensuring that Kurdish forces are able to counter IS advances is also vital. We have made clear that we will consider any requests from the Iraq or Kurdistan Regional Government favourably.’

No 10 highlighted the plight of the Dahuk region in northern Iraq where 450,000 displaced people are taking shelter – a 50 per cent increase in the area’s population. Farhad Atushi, the governor of Dahuk, said the US and UK are ‘politically and ethically responsible for helping Iraq’.

Mr Atushi has also warned of the threat of ‘genocide’, adding: ‘We have hundreds of thousands (of refugees). We’re going to face an international humanitarian catastrophe because many of those are children who are going to die.’

Former Lib Dem leader Lord Ashdown also welcomed the Government’s decision as he warned that conflicts in Iraq and Syria would result in redrawing Middle Eastern borders.

He said the Kurds could act as a ‘northern bulwark’ against the advancing IS, but added: ‘We are acting as handmaidens to Kurdish independence, with implications for Turkey, which is why you have to have a wider strategy.’

Lord Ashdown continued: ‘It really is time we joined the dots. Instead of having a series of plans for a series of humanitarian catastrophes, we need to have an integrated strategy for containing a widening war.’

Mr Hammond has hailed the announcement that Iraq’s prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was relinquishing his post, calling on his replacement Haider al-Abadi to form an inclusive government.

It is hoped Mr al-Abadi will be better placed to unite Iraqis in fighting back against IS militants.

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Foreign Affairs, Government, Iraq, Middle East, Politics, United States

Events in Iraq have forced a reluctant West to act…

IRAQ

Intro: The West’s decision to act in Iraq is one based on the threats posed by the Islamic State. Its intervention is not based on nation-building, as was the original aim in 2003, but to stop the proliferation of evil by the terrorists and in protecting religious minorities

The advances being made by the Islamic State in Iraq, formerly ISIS, is a tragedy for those religious minorities unfortunate enough to be standing in their way. Among those fleeing are the Yazidis, believers in an ancient religion who have survived countless attempts before in being wiped out. Their religion has been maintained and kept alive through oral history, passed down through the ages by Talkers who memorise the text of a holy book they believe was stolen by the British.

The Yazidis are men and women of flesh and blood fleeing for safe protection. Far from being anthropological curiosities they are hiding in and around the region of Mount Sinjar, in desperate need of attention as many are dying of hunger and thirst. Tens of thousands have fled their homes in the face of death threats from the Islamic State if they fail to convert to Islam.

The lack of a powerful lobby and representation for religious minorities has led to the West becoming strangely reticent about what is happening in Iraq. One maybe inclined to perceive that their cause is simply not fashionable; the anecdotal evidence is perhaps proof enough. For instance, prior to the Iraq war there were around 1.5 million Christians domiciled – amongst them Chaldeans, Syro-Catholics, Syro-Orthodox, Assyrians from the East, Catholic and Orthodox Armenians. Today, the number is just 400,000 and is predicted to shrink further. After sacking Mosul, in which the church bells were silenced for the first time in 1,600 years, the Islamic State then conquered Qaraqosh, Iraq’s largest Christian town, and imposed its medieval caliphate and sharia law on those who suddenly find themselves its subjects.

Many Westerners may struggle to conceive, too, that Christians in several Muslim countries have similarly become an oppressed minority. Many are being slaughtered, overlooked by the West out of ignorance or awkwardness. The mess is bloody and terrible none the less.

Another possible explanation is that the West simply does not want to think about Iraq. After squandering and plundering so much treasure there – both in terms of financial resources expended and human lives sacrificed – politicians would rather draw a line under the whole subject. But to do so is to negate responsibility for a crisis that the West helped create the conditions for. What is happening in Iraq today is directly connected and linked to its recent history.

When it comes to foreign affairs, the West is often caught looking the wrong way. The situation in Ukraine was allowed to fester until the shooting down of flight MH17. Hundreds of thousands of Syrians died before the West even considered action and then backed off. With minds now understandably drawn to Gaza, the risk of missing a catastrophe occurring in the east is self-evident.

No one will doubt the complexity of the situation, and there will be no appetite for a direct military response involving air strikes. But by talking seriously about what is happening in Iraq would be a start. There has to now be recognition of the threatening menace posed by the Islamic State both to the minorities of that region and, should they secure a power base, to the West and the wider world.

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Such barbarism occurring in the 21st century is hard to conceive given that expression of religious freedom is a right that all should enjoy. The Islamic State, however, represents the flowering of a grim fundamentalism that is willing and able to go to appalling lengths to achieve its aims. Its objectives pose a threat not only to the vulnerable religious minorities in the north, but also to the Iraqi government, the stability of the Middle East region and the security of the entire world. The Islamic State has created a crisis that demands a response.

Suddenly the West is prepared to act by doing something. The United States has begun a military campaign designed to prevent the hardliners from advancing much further and to coordinate the provision of humanitarian aid and support to those many tens of thousands of internally displaced refugees. Britain has announced that it will support America with surveillance and refuelling assistance, and will help with aid drops from the air.

Although there will be a degree of reluctance by the West in ‘returning to Iraq’, given all that has happened since the 2003 invasion, it is precisely because the West played a significant role in creating the circumstances in which the Islamic state has flourished, that it now feels there is a responsibility to act. With a mix of too much action in Iraq and, arguably, too little in Syria, the terrorists found easy shelter and incubation. The Islamic State bridges both Iraq and Syria.

America and Britain are not engaging in anything remotely connected to nation-building, as was the original aim in 2003. The plan is simply to halt the advance of the Islamic State and to protect those threatened by it. It is felicitous, too, that the US shoulders the burden of the airstrikes while Britain provides logistical support. This is a clear example of the Atlantic alliance’s traditional arrangement, one in which we offer intelligence and support to our American partner in the cause of international law and order.

This is a mission which will have to be approached with due care and caution and every political and diplomatic avenue should be explored. Sometimes events do move fast to a point where action is necessary. As far as the Islamic State is concerned, that point is the ghastly threat it poses to the fleeing innocents of Iraq and the future of their country. Such evil has to be confronted.

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Foreign Affairs, Israel, Middle East, Palestine, United Nations, United States

The cynical invasion of Gaza by Israel…

GAZA

Intro: Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade

With the Israeli armed forces having kicked off the latest episode in a 66-year-old conflict, the brutality and cynicism of its actions suggests resolution is further away than ever.

Israel’s ground invasion of Gaza, which began last Thursday, becomes its fourth such war on the Palestinian strip in the past decade. Following its withdrawal from the densely populated enclave in 2005, Israel sent its troops back in 2006 and 2008. In 2012, the offensive was confined to surgical air strikes and a campaign of bombing. In each case, the reason for acting was the same: to halt rocket and missile attacks into Israel by Hamas, the militant Palestinian group that largely controls Gaza. Hamas refuses to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

Each time, the sequence of events has become choreographed into one that is utterly and depressingly predictable. Israel responds disproportionately, always inflicting far greater casualties than it suffers. As international accusations and condemnations of Israeli overreaction multiply, a ceasefire eventually happens, either declared unilaterally by the Israeli government or brokered through a third party, most likely Egypt and/or the United States. In the interim, some Hamas leaders will be targeted and killed, and some rocket launch sites and underground tunnels from Gaza into Israel will be destroyed.

In reality, though, nothing is ever likely to change. More arm shipments will flow into Gaza, new Hamas leaders will emerge, and new tunnels will be dug. When equipped and replenished enough the Palestinian militants will once again fire off its rockets, and Israel will ready itself as it will feel compelled to act in light of the provocation and threats it faces. All the while, as the root causes of the conflict remain untackled, the prospects of a final settlement grow ever dimmer.

The new level of fighting may well lead to a new Palestinian intifada. Israel, protected by its barrier wall – declared illegal by the International Criminal Court – from potential terrorist attacks and by its robust Iron Dome anti-missile system from Hamas rockets, seems less interested than ever in a two-state deal. Far from being concerned about the plight of Palestinians and their livelihoods, Israel simply ignores them, pressing ahead with its settlement building programmes on territory that would be part of any future Palestinian state.

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A ground invasion of Gaza, however brief, was always likely to signal an intensification of the Israeli response to the more than 900 rockets which have fallen into Israeli territory over the past 10 days. Fears exist for a much greater troop deployment in the coming days. Some 40,000 Israeli reservists have already been mobilised. But that will only work to fuel Palestinian resistance and intensify retaliatory rocket strikes that now reach much further than within a 25 mile radius of Gaza.

It is these rocket attacks that the Israeli government is determined to stop. For so long as they continue, Israel’s shelling of targets within Gaza will go on. Inevitably, this puts further civilian lives at risk. Without the strongest foreign diplomatic intervention the bloody cycle of tit-for-tat rocket and bombing attacks seems likely to endure. There are no signs of the current hostilities ending any time soon. The latest outbreak in violence is still young by comparison with previous offensives. Exchanges during the outbreak in 2011-12, for instance, lasted 22 days.

The day after Israel launched its current air offensive in Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a rare press conference in which he was brutally blunt about the danger he believes the state of Israel to be in. He made clear he could never countenance a fully sovereign Palestinian state in the West Bank. Mr Netanyahu’s world-view is that Israel is standing almost alone on the frontline against a rising tide of vicious Islamic radicalism. He insists that the rest of the as-yet free world does its best not to notice the march of extremism. Such indifference says nothing of how western intelligence services are battling against the odds to keep their citizens safe or at the outrage following the recent air disaster over the skies of eastern Ukraine.

Mr Netanyahu has also indicted that he considers the current American diplomatic team led by John Kerry as naïve. Netanyahu made plain that ‘no international pressure will prevent us from acting with all force against a terrorist organisation that seeks to destroy us’.

Operation Protective Edge will thus go on until ‘guaranteed calm’ was restored to Israel. A prerequisite for that, it seems, is a cessation of Palestinian rocket and missile attacks.

Either the Israeli offensive in Gaza will go on until Hamas has exhausted its supplies of air-to-ground missiles (the scale of which, this time around, has been astonishing) or international pressure is brought to bear. Despite Mr Netanyahu’s rhetoric, Israel well knows it only has a narrow window for further military force before international opinion swings heavily against it.

For diplomatic intervention to be effective it needs to come from the top, as well as being co-ordinated with pressure from Western leaders as a matter of urgency. An approach centred on de-escalating the current rocket exchanges should be the priority before any other progress can be made in securing a more lasting truce.

 

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