Category Archives: Terrorism

Britain, Defence, Government, Islamic State, Military, Politics, Terrorism

RAF drone strikes on IS Britons

MILITARY

reaper

Reaper: An RAF UAV killed two Islamic State terrorists in Syria back in August

Intro: Ministers must be more open and transparent about drones.

DEFENCE officials have been urged to come clean and reveal the full details about covert RAF drone strikes against British jihadists.

It came as a former commander of British forces in Afghanistan claimed it was “cowardly” not to publish information about UK jihadists killed while fighting overseas for Islamic State.

Colonel Richard Kemp said: ‘British citizens who have gone out there have become the enemy. Their death is something Parliament should be informed about unless there are security reasons.’

See also: Drones and the unproven efficacy of these weapons…

He argued there were a ‘number of benefits’ of informing Parliament, adding: ‘It shows IS are not supermen. It could well, in some cases, act as a deterrent because British forces will know that if they go there is a very good chance of us killing them.’

There is now a mounting backlash after it was revealed that drone pilots at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire and others flying jets had killed British jihadists in the Middle East but neither Parliament nor the public were informed.

A cross-party group of MPs and peers, including former director of public prosecutions Lord Macdonald, wrote to the Prime Minister urging the Government to publish the identity of Britons killed in RAF strikes.

The co-chairman of the group, Kirsten Oswald MP (SNP), said recent revelations that the RAF was ticking off a ‘kill list’ that included UK jihadists were ‘deeply concerning’.

Commons leader David Lidington faced calls to allow an urgent parliamentary debate on the existence of the list, which includes high-value British targets.

Defending the Government, he told MPs Britons tempted to join militant groups must know they risk losing their lives.

Miss Oswald, the SNP’s armed forces spokesperson, urged the Government to reveal how many UK citizens have been targeted.

She later added that there were ‘many questions unanswered’.

‘If the UK Government is conducting an operation designed to “take out” UK citizens without parliamentary scrutiny or public awareness, that is clearly unacceptable,’ she said.

Mr Lidington replied in the Commons: ‘The Defence Secretary has been very clear that we and the coalition against Daesh (IS) will pursue people who are a threat to our security and to the safety of British citizens wherever those people may come from.

‘We act, as always in our military operations, within the law, but the message to anybody tempted to join Daesh must be that they do so at great risk to themselves.’

David Cameron stunned MPs 18 months ago when he disclosed that a British drone had killed a jihadist in Syria who was plotting an atrocity in the UK. Shortly afterwards, Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon said Britain would not hesitate to carry out more drone strikes against jihadists plotting ‘armed attacks on our streets’.

That December, MPs voted in favour of the UK joining a coalition of nations carrying out airstrikes on IS targets in Syria.

Since then the RAF has been tasked with taking out UK jihadists plotting attacks in Britain and other high-value targets. Parliament has not been informed of the British deaths.

Labour MP John Woodcock, formerly a member of the defence select committee, said the British jihadists were a ‘legitimate target of our armed forces’, but added: ‘The Government needs to be upfront about what is happening.’

Members of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Drones, including Lord Macdonald, has now written a letter to Theresa May demanding details of UK jihadists bombed by RAF fighter jets.

Admiral Lord West, former head of the Royal Navy, said: ‘If someone from Britain breaks the law, if they get killed, then so be it. They are dead men walking.

‘If there is a policy of extrajudicial killings, that does need to be talked about. If we happen to kill them because we are targeting infrastructure, that is different.’

However, Sir Michael Graydon, a former head of the RAF, said releasing details of Britons killed would be a ‘golden opportunity’ for claims by ‘crooked liberal lawyers’.

The Ministry of Defence said: ‘The UK is committed to the defeat of Daesh and publishes regular updates on airstrikes conducted by the RAF.’

OPINION

We should have no sympathy at all with Britons who joined Islamic State in Syria or Iraq who find themselves on the end of a deadly drone attack.

Anyone who allies themselves with this barbaric group is a traitor, an enemy to our way of life and a threat to this country. They deserve everything they get.

Nor should we join in the hand-wringing at the very idea of using remote-controlled planes operated from thousands of miles away. Is a drone strike really more barbaric than any other weapon of war?

No, our principal concern, following the revelation that the military is using targeted assassinations against jihadis on a ‘kill list’, is the distinct lack of transparency with which it is being operated.

Yes, David Cameron told Parliament in 2015 that two Britons had been killed in a drone strike. But since then the programme has been carried on in secret.

Defence Secretary Sir Michael Fallon would lose nothing by encouraging more openness about this new form of warfare.

Standard
Afghanistan, Britain, Government, Iraq, Politics, Society, Terrorism

A dangerous world means Britain cannot retreat

afghan

Greater economic development and democratic consolidation are key to stability.

Intro: The world is, and always has been, a dangerous place. We should not hide from those dangers

The British Defence Secretary, Sir Michael Fallon, recently spoke candidly about the condition of Afghanistan and the possible continuing consequences for Britain. Sir Michael deserves credit for raising the issue so openly. The country remains a base for international terrorists who mean us harm, he said. He also suggested that the ‘collapse’ of the fragile state could send millions of young Afghan men west in a new phase of European migration that would inevitably affect the UK.

Such a premonition paints a grim picture, but all the more so because it comes more than 15 years after British troops were sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks of 2001 on the US.

The military mission, at first, was to render ineffective an international terrorist group that meant us harm; yet, today, al-Qaeda under various Arabic guises and splinter groups remain operably active. Later, the British mission shifted to one of nation-building and the reinforcement of Afghanistan’s fragile and desperate government. It was done so to avoid precisely the sort of collapse that Sir Michael now refers too.

To some, the lack of significant progress in Afghanistan will be proof that Western military interventions in poor and unstable countries are doomed to fail. Iraq, and more recently Libya, the nexus of why Europe is facing unmitigated levels of migration, might equally be cited as additional evidence for that case. What is clear is that all three interventions have been flawed, suffering from a lack of political leadership and, in some cases, extremely poor military planning.

To those who believe Britain has no inalienable right to remake the world, Theresa May’s professed scepticism about wars of liberal intervention will be a welcome shift in approach when it comes to foreign policy. Yet, healthy doubt about military adventurism does not necessarily mean a British retreat from the world.

The defence secretary’s words and rhetoric are a stark reminder, whether we like it or not, that the consequences of previous Western interventions continue to this day.

They must be dealt with, not ignored. We should indeed go on working to support a democratic government in Afghanistan, including the aiding of its security forces if needed.

In Iraq, where government forces are pushing back Islamic militants in Mosul, has shown that with continued Western backing, local military units can take responsibility for securing their country.

Britain’s role in Afghanistan must continue, and may have to expand by putting boots back on the ground there. If that means spending more on defence, for the security and stability of the West, so be it. The world is, and always has been, a dangerous place. We should not hide from those dangers.

Standard
Britain, Donald Trump, European Union, Society, Terrorism, United States

America’s travel ban

UNITED STATES

donald-trump-executive-order

President Donald Trump’s executive order brought a 120-day suspension to America’s refugee program, and an indefinite end to its intake of Syrian refugees.

President Donald Trump has insisted that the U.S. would have been inundated by “bad dudes” if he had given any warning of his clampdown on visitors from terror-hit Muslim countries.

Mr Trump’s administration faces growing protests at home and abroad for closing the country to people from seven largely Muslim countries.

The abruptness of the executive order, which even the US Department of Homeland Security wasn’t warned about, has caused widespread chaos and confusion, with travellers left stranded at airports across the globe.

Mr Trump has, however, defended his decision and the way it was implemented. ‘If the ban were announced with a one-week notice, the “bad” would rush into our country during that week,’ he said on social media site Twitter.

The order, banning refugees from Syria and imposing a 90-day stop on most people from Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Sudan, Somalia and Yemen from entering the US, has prompted protests across America and provoked strong condemnation from many world leaders.

Even Barack Obama broke with the tradition that former presidents do not criticise their successor to say he ‘fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.’

Mr Obama said he was ‘heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities around the country’, saying it was ‘what we expect to see when American values are at stake’.

trump-tweet

The US President justifies his travel ban and uses social media site Twitter to disseminate his message.

Amid reports that customs and immigration officials struggled to interpret the new rules, Mr Trump instead blamed the chaos at US airports on a Delta Airlines computer outage and the presence of protesters.

He added: ‘Only 109 people out of 325,000 people were detained and instead held for questioning.’

Mr Trump, who has also signed a new executive order to cut back on business red tape, insists that the travel ban and new vetting procedures will be very good for national security. He said: ‘We had to make the move some day, and we decided to make the move.’

Mr Trump was unrepentant as he said there was ‘nothing nice about searching for terrorists before they can enter our country’, telling sceptics to ‘study the world’.

Despite the British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson insisting that British passport holders will escape the ban, the exemption doesn’t appear to have protected all UK citizens.

Lukman Faily, for instance, a former Iraqi ambassador to the US and a British passport holder after spending 20 years in the UK, planned to travel to Washington for a conference on fighting Islamic State.

Trump supporters claim he was badly served by inexperienced advisers who pushed the order through without consulting government departments on how to enforce it.

Blame has chiefly fallen on Stephen Miller, his 31-year-old former speech writer and now Mr Trump’s White House policy adviser.

Mr Miller has argued that the imposition of the ban has been an ‘efficient, orderly, enormously successful challenge’ to a ‘failed orthodoxy’ and was bound to attract protests. He has refused to say whether the US was soon planning to add other countries, such as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, to the list.

Amid claims his order may breach the US constitution by targeting people on the basis of their religion, Mr Trump has insisted his travel ban is not anti-Muslim.

But German chancellor Angela Merkel said the fight against terrorism ‘does not in any way justify putting groups of certain people under general suspicion’.

And Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s Brexit negotiator, accused Mr Trump of working with far-Right groups on the continent to engineer the EU’s disintegration. He identified President Trump as one of three threats to the EU, along with radicalised political Islam and Vladimir Putin.

Standard