January 31, 2013
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD and JODI RUDOREN
BEIRUT, Lebanon — Tensions over the Israeli airstrike on
Syrian territory appeared to increase on Thursday as Syria delivered a letter to
the United Nations declaring its right to self-defense and Israel’s action was
condemned not only by longstanding enemies, including Iran and Hezbollah, but
also by Russia.
Israeli officials remained silent about their airstrike in Syrian territory on
Wednesday, a tactic that experts said was part of a longstanding strategy to
give targeted countries face-saving opportunities to avoid worsening a conflict.
But Syria’s own confirmation of the attack may have undercut that effort.
“From the moment they chose to say Israel did something, it means someone has to
do something after that,” said Giora Eiland, a former national security adviser
in Israel and a longtime military leader. But other analysts said that Syria’s
overtaxed military was unlikely to retaliate and risk an Israeli onslaught that
could tip the balance in its fight against the 22-month Syrian uprising. They
also said Syria’s ally Hezbollah was loath to provoke conflict with Israel as it
sought to maintain domestic calm in neighboring Lebanon.
Syria’s ambassador to Lebanon declared that Syria had “the option and the
capacity to surprise in retaliation.” The Iranian deputy foreign minister warned
that the attack would have “grave consequences for Tel Aviv,” while the Russian
Foreign Ministry said the strike “blatantly violates the United Nations Charter
and is unacceptable and unjustified, whatever its motives.” Lebanon’s Foreign
Ministry also condemned the attack — as did some Syrian rebels, seeking to deny
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria a chance to rally support as a victim of
Israel.
Many questions swirled about the target, motivations and repercussions of the
Israeli attack, which Arab and Israeli analysts said demonstrated the rapid
changes in the region’s strategic picture as Mr. Assad’s government weakens —
including the possibility that Hezbollah, Syria or both were moving arms to
Lebanon, believing they would be more secure there than with Syria’s beleaguered
military, which faces intense attacks by rebels on major weapons installations.
American officials said Israel hit a convoy before dawn on Wednesday that was
ferrying sophisticated SA-17 antiaircraft missiles to Lebanon. The Syrians and
their allies said the target was a research facility in the Damascus suburb of
Jamraya.
It remained unclear Thursday whether there was one strike or two. Also unclear
was the research outpost’s possible role in weapons production or storage for
Syria or Hezbollah, the militant Lebanese Shiite organization that has long
battled with Israel and plays a leading role in the Lebanese government.
The Jamraya facility, several miles west of Damascus, produces both conventional
and chemical weapons, said Maj. Gen. Adnan Salo, a former head of the chemical
weapons unit in the Syrian Army who defected and is now in Turkey.
Hezbollah indirectly confirmed its military function in condemning the attack on
Arab and Muslim “military and technological capabilities.” That raised the
possibility that Israel targeted weapons manufacturing or development, in an
attack reminiscent of its 2007 assault on a Syrian nuclear reactor, a strike
Israeli never acknowledged.
But military analysts said that the Israeli jets’ flight pattern strongly
suggested a moving target, possibly a convoy near the center, and that the
Syrian government might have claimed the center was a target to garner sympathy.
Hitting a convoy made more sense, they said, particularly if Israel believed
that Hezbollah stood to acquire “game-changing” arms, including antiaircraft
weapons. Israeli leaders declared days before the strike that any transfer of
Syria’s extensive cache of sophisticated conventional or chemical weapons was a
“red line” that would prompt action.
Hezbollah — backed by Syria and Iran — wants to upgrade its arsenal in hopes of
changing the parameters for any future engagement with the powerful Israeli
military, and Israel is determined to stop it. And Hezbollah is perhaps even
more anxious to gird itself for future challenges to its primacy in Lebanon,
especially if a Sunni-led revolution triumphs next door in Syria.
But if weapons were targeted, analysts said, it is not even clear that they
belonged to Hezbollah. Arab and Israeli analysts said another possibility was
that Syria was simply aiming to move some weapons to Lebanon for safekeeping.
While there are risks for Hezbollah that accepting them could draw an Israeli
attack, said Emile Hokayem, a Bahrain-based analyst at the International
Institute for Strategic Studies, there is also an upside: “If Assad goes down,
they have the arms.”
Elias Hanna, a retired Lebanese general and professor at the American University
of Beirut, said that SA-17s made little sense for Hezbollah because they require
large launching systems that use radar and would be easy targets for Israel.
Syria, he said, needs SA-17s in case of international intervention in its civil
war.
Those suggestions comported with the account of a Syrian officer who said in a
recent interview that the heavily guarded military area around the Jamraya
research facility was used as a weapons transfer station to southern Lebanon and
Syria’s coastal government stronghold of Tartous for safekeeping, in convoys of
tractor-trailer trucks. (The officer said he had lost faith in the government
but hesitated to defect because he did not trust the rebels.)
The attack on Wednesday, in all its uncertainty, pointed to the larger changes
afoot in the region. Hezbollah may be looking at a future where it is without
Syria’s backing and has to defend itself against Sunnis resentful of its role in
the Syrian conflict. And Israel may find that its most dangerous foe is not
Hezbollah but jihadist Syrian rebel groups that are fragmented and difficult to
deter.
If Syria’s weapons end up with jihadist groups like Al Qaeda or its proxies,
that would be a global threat, said Boaz Ganor, executive director of the
International Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in
Herzliya, Israel. “If one organization will put their hands on this arsenal,
then it will change hands in no time and we’ll see it all over the world,” he
said.
Anne Barnard reported from Beirut,
and Jodi Rudoren from
Jerusalem.
Reporting was contributed by Irit Pazner Garshowitz
from
Jerusalem,
Ellen Barry from Moscow, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran,
January 30, 2013
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER and MICHAEL R. GORDON
JERUSALEM — Israeli warplanes carried out a strike deep inside
Syrian territory on Wednesday, American officials reported, saying they believed
the target was a convoy carrying sophisticated antiaircraft weaponry on the
outskirts of Damascus that was intended for the Hezbollah Shiite militia in
Lebanon.
The American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said Israel had
notified the United States about the attack, which the Syrian government
condemned as an act of “arrogance and aggression.” Israel’s move demonstrated
its determination to ensure that Hezbollah — its arch foe in the north — is
unable to take advantage of the chaos in Syria to bolster its arsenal
significantly.
The predawn strike was the first time in more than five years that Israel’s air
force had attacked a target in Syria. While there was no expectation that the
beleaguered Assad government had an interest in retaliating, the strike raised
concerns that the Syrian civil war had continued to spread beyond its border.
In a statement, the Syrian military denied that a convoy had been struck. It
said the attack had hit a scientific research facility in the Damascus suburbs
that was used to improve Syria’s defenses, and called the attack “a flagrant
breach of Syrian sovereignty and airspace.”
Israeli officials would not confirm the airstrike, a common tactic here. But it
came after days of intense security consultations with Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu regarding the possible movement of chemical and other weapons around
Syria, and warnings that Jerusalem would take action to thwart any possible
transfers to Hezbollah.
Thousands of Israelis have crowded gas-mask distribution centers over the last
two days. On Sunday, Israel deployed its Iron Dome missile defense system in the
north, near Haifa, which was heavily bombed during the 2006 war with Lebanon.
Syria and Israel are technically in a state of war but have long maintained an
uneasy peace along their decades-old armistice line. Israel has mostly watched
warily and tried to stay out of Syria’s raging civil war, fearful of provoking a
wider confrontation with Iran and Hezbollah. In November, however, after several
mortars fell on Israel’s side of the border, its tanks struck a Syrian artillery
unit.
Several analysts said that despite the increased tensions, they thought the
likelihood of retaliation for the airstrike was relatively low.
“It is necessary and correct to prepare for deterioration — that scenario
exists,” Danny Yatom, a former chief of the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence
agency, told Ynet, a news Web site. “But in my assessment, there will not be a
reaction, because neither Hezbollah nor the Syrians have an interest in
retaliating.”
Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, “is deep in his own troubles,” Mr. Yatom
said, “and Hezbollah is making a great effort to assist him, in parallel with
its efforts to obtain weapons, so they won’t want to broaden the circle of
fighting.”
In the United States, the State Department and Defense Department would not
comment on reports of the strike.
The episode illustrated how the escalating violence in Syria, which has already
killed more than 60,000, is drawing in neighboring states and threatening to
destabilize the region further.
Iran has firmly allied itself with Mr. Assad, sending personnel from its Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Quds Force to Syria and ferrying military equipment to
Syria through Iraqi airspace.
Hezbollah, which plays a decisive role in Lebanese politics and has supported
Mr. Assad during the uprising by providing training and logistical support to
his forces, has long relied on Syria as both a source of weapons and a conduit
for weapons flowing from Iran. Some analysts think Hezbollah may be trying to
stock up on weapons in case Mr. Assad falls and is replaced by a leadership that
is hostile to the militia.
One American official said the trucks targeted on Wednesday were believed to
have been carrying sophisticated SA-17 antiaircraft weapons. Hezbollah’s
possession of such weapons would be a serious worry for the Israeli government,
said Matthew Levitt, a former intelligence official who is at the Washington
Institute for Near East Policy.
“Israel is able to fly reconnaissance flights over Lebanon with impunity right
now,” Mr. Levitt said. “This could cut into its ability to conduct aerial
intelligence. The passing along of weapons to Hezbollah by the regime is a real
concern.”
While some analysts said the Assad government might be providing the weapons to
Hezbollah as a reward for its support, others were skeptical that Syria would
relinquish such a sophisticated system.
Hezbollah has boasted that it has replenished and increased its weapons stocks
since the 2006 war with Israel. During that war, Israeli bombardments destroyed
some of its arms, and other missiles were used in a barrage that killed Israelis
as far south as Haifa and that drove residents of northern Israel into shelters.
The Syrian statement, carried by state television, said an unidentified number
of Israeli jets flying below radar had hit the research facility in the Jimraya
district, killing two people and causing “huge material damage.” It cast the
attack as “another addition to the history of Israeli occupation, aggression and
criminality against Arabs and Muslims.”
“The Syrian government points out to the international community that this
Israeli arrogance and aggression is dangerous for Syrian sovereignty,” the
statement said, “and stresses that such criminal acts will not weaken Syria’s
role nor will discourage Syrians from continuing to support resistance movements
and just Arab causes, particularly the Palestinian issue.”
The Lebanese Army said in a statement on Wednesday that Israeli warplanes had
carried out two sorties, circling over Lebanon for hours on Tuesday and before
dawn on Wednesday, but made no mention of any attacks.
Israel has long maintained a policy of silence on pre-emptive military strikes.
In October, officials refused to discuss an accusation by Sudan that Israeli
airstrikes had destroyed a weapons factory in Khartoum, its capital. Israel also
never admitted to the bombing of a Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007; Syria kept
mum about that attack, too, and the ambiguity allowed the event to pass without
Damascus feeling pressure to retaliate.
Amnon Sofrin, a retired brigadier general and former Israeli intelligence
officer, told reporters here on Wednesday that Hezbollah, which is known to have
been storing some of its more advanced weapons in Syria, was now eager to move
everything it could to Lebanon. He said Israel was carefully watching for
convoys transferring weapons systems from Syria to Lebanon.
Israel has made it clear that if the Syrian government loses control over its
chemical weapons or transfers them to Hezbollah, Israel will feel compelled to
act. Avi Dichter, the minister for the home front, told Israel Radio on Tuesday
that options to prevent Syria from using or transferring the weapons included
deterrence and “attempts to hit the stockpiles.”
“Everything will have ramifications,” Mr. Dichter said. “The stockpiles are not
always in places where operative thinking is possible. It could be that hitting
the stockpiles will also mean hitting people. Israel has no intention of hitting
residents of Syria.”
Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem,
and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
Reporting was contributed by Anne Barnard, Hania Mourtada
nd Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; Eric Schmitt from
Washington;
January 29,
2013
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
CAIRO — As
three Egyptian cities defied President Mohamed Morsi’s attempt to quell the
anarchy spreading through their streets, the nation’s top general warned Tuesday
that the state itself was in danger of collapse if the feuding civilian leaders
could not agree on a solution to restore order.
Thousands of residents poured into the streets of the three cities, protesting a
9 p.m. curfew with another night of chants against Mr. Morsi and assaults on the
police.
The president appeared powerless to stop them: he had already granted the police
extralegal powers to enforce the curfew and then called out the army as well.
His allies in the Muslim Brotherhood and their opposition also proved
ineffectual in the face of the crisis, each retreating to their corners,
pointing fingers of blame.
The general’s warning punctuated a rash of violent protests across the country
that has dramatized the near-collapse of the government’s authority. With the
city of Port Said proclaiming its nominal independence, protesters demanded the
resignation of Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president, while people
across the country appeared convinced that taking to the streets in protests was
the only means to get redress for their grievances.
Just five months after Egypt’s president assumed power from the military, the
cascading crisis revealed the depth of the distrust for the central government
left by decades of autocracy, two years of convoluted transition and his own
acknowledged missteps in facing the opposition. With cities in open rebellion
and the police unable to tame crowds, the very fabric of society appears to be
coming undone.
The chaos has also for the first time touched pillars of the long-term health of
Egypt’s economy, already teetering after two years of turbulence since the
ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. While a heavy deployment of military troops
along the Suez Canal — a vital source of revenue — appeared to insulate it from
the strife in Port Said, Suez and Ismailia, the clashes near Tahrir Square in
Cairo spilled over for the first time into an armed assault on the historic
Semiramis InterContinental Hotel, sending tremors of fear through the vital
tourism sector.
With the stakes rising and no solution in sight, Gen. Abdul Fattah el-Sisi, the
defense minister, warned Egypt’s new Islamist leaders and their opponents that
“their disagreement on running the affairs of the country may lead to the
collapse of the state and threatens the future of the coming generations.”
“Political, economic, social and security challenges” require united action “by
all parties” to avoid “dire consequences that affect the steadiness and
stability of the homeland,” General Sisi said in an address to military cadets
that was later relayed as a public statement from his spokesman. And the acute
polarization of the civilian politics, he suggested, has now becoming a concern
of the military because “to affect the stability of the state institutions is a
dangerous matter that harms Egyptian national security.”
Coming just months after the military relinquished the power it seized at the
ouster of Mr. Mubarak, General Sisi’s rebuke to the civilian leaders inevitably
raised the possibility that the generals might once again step into civilian
politics. There was no indication of an imminent coup.
Analysts familiar with General Sisi’s thinking say that unlike his predecessors,
he wants to avoid any political entanglements. But the Egyptian military has
prided itself on its dual military and political role since Col. Gamal Abdel
Nasser’s coup more than six decades ago. And General Sisi insisted Tuesday that
it would remain “the solid mass and the backbone upon which rest the Egyptian
state’s pillars.”
With the army now caught between the president’s instructions to restore order
and the citizens’ refusal to comply, he said, the “armed forces are facing a
serious dilemma” as they seek to end the violence without “confronting citizens
and their right to protest.”
The attack on the Semiramis Hotel, between the American Embassy and the Nile in
one of the most heavily guarded neighborhoods of the city, showed how much
security had deteriorated. And it testified to the difficult task that the
civilian government faces in trying to rebuild public security and trust.
Capitalizing on the melee between protesters and the police outside the hotel
after about 2 a.m., at least a dozen armed men overpowered the guard at the
hotel’s door, looted the luxury stores in its mall and ransacked its lobby,
hotel staff members said. The assailants carried knives, pellet guns and one
semiautomatic weapon, a guard told Al Ahram Online, run by the state-owned news
media.
When the police failed to respond to calls for help, the hotel staff resorted to
Twitter, the favorite medium of the Egyptian revolt. “We are under attack!
Several thugs have entered the Semiramis! Send help!” the hotel’s Twitter
account blared in capital letters.
“Revolutionaries” from the protest outside helped drive out the attackers, said
Nabila Samak, the marketing manager who sent out the messages. The police
finally responded about an hour and a half after the attack began, she said. The
guests were relocated and the hotel closed.
Instead of taking a united stand in support of the law, Egypt’s political elite
bickered over who was to blame. On Monday, the main coalition of the opposition
refused to join a committee Mr. Morsi has created with the promise that it would
include opponents to review the government’s measures to stem the chaos and to
propose amendments to the Islamist-backed Constitution.
The president must “publicly admit his political responsibility for the Egyptian
blood that was shed,” Hamdeen Sabahi, a leftist former presidential candidate,
demanded at a news conference.
Mr. Morsi’s allies in the Muslim Brotherhood, meanwhile, charged that the
opposition leaders were looking for “political cover to justify the ongoing
violent crimes their members are committing, including attempted murder, arson,
burglary, sabotage and vandalism,” as Ahmed Diab, a leader of the Brotherhood’s
political party, said in a statement on Monday. “But they cannot so fast wash
their hands of the blood of Egyptians they shed in one way or another.”
In a news conference on Tuesday, Mr. Morsi’s spokesman echoed the Brotherhood’s
charges by pointedly demanding that the opposition “clearly condemn violence,
repudiate it and urge against taking part in it.”
Talaat Abdullah, the public prosecutor Mr. Morsi recently appointed, went a step
further, issuing warrants for the arrests of a spectral new activist group
calling itself the Black Bloc, which Brotherhood leaders have begun calling the
opposition’s “militia.”
The group’s only confirmed act is its debut in an online video posted just a
week ago depicting a group of masked figures. Declaring themselves part of a
worldwide “liberation” movement, they said they intended to counter the Muslim
Brotherhood, which it called “the regime of fascist tyranny.”
Since then, rumors have swirled about masked figures in protests and clashes who
may or may not be members of the Black Bloc. Masked men purporting to belong to
the group have given interviews denouncing the Brotherhood. But in a second
video posted on Monday by the same source the Black Bloc disavowed them. In a
bizarre twist, the video charged that the supposed spokesmen were in fact from
the Muslim Brotherhood, seeking to blame the group for unrest.
Without any public evidence that the group has done more than pose for a video,
the state news service reported Tuesday that an investigation by the prosecutor
had found the Black Bloc a terrorist group. What is more, the news service
reported, prosecutors ordered the arrest of not only its members but also of
anyone who would “participate in it in any form including wearing the costumes”
— outlawing, in effect, the wearing of a black mask.
Kareem Fahim
and Mayy El Sheikh contributed reporting from Cairo.
January 28,
2013
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH
PORT SAID,
Egypt — The police fired indiscriminately into the streets outside their
besieged station, a group of protesters arrived with a crate of gasoline bombs,
and others cheered a masked man on a motorcycle who arrived with a Kalashnikov.
The growing chaos along the vital canal zone showed little sign of abating on
Monday as President Mohamed Morsi called out the army to try to regain control
of three cities along the Suez Canal whose growing lawlessness is testing the
integrity of the Egyptian state.
In Port Said, street battles reached a bloody new peak with a death toll over
three days of at least 45, with at least five more protesters killed by bullet
wounds, hospital officials said.
President Morsi had already declared a monthlong state of emergency here and in
the other canal towns of Suez and Ismailia, applying a law that virtually
eliminates due process protections against abuse by the police. Angry crowds
burned tires and hurled rocks at the police. And the police, with little
training and less credibility, hunkered down behind barrages of tear gas,
birdshot and occasional bullets.
The sense that the state was unraveling may have been strongest here in Port
Said, where demonstrators have proclaimed their city an independent nation. But
in recent days, the unrest has risen in towns across the country and in Cairo as
well. In the capital on Monday, a mob of protesters managed to steal an armored
police vehicle, drive it to Tahrir Square and make it a bonfire.
After two years of torturous transition, Egyptians have watched with growing
anxiety as the erosion of the public trust in the government and a persistent
security vacuum have fostered a new temptation to resort to violence to resolve
disputes, said Michael Hanna, a researcher at the New York-based Century
Foundation who is now in Cairo. “There is a clear political crisis that has
eroded the moral authority of the state,” he said.
And the spectacular evaporation of the government’s authority here in Port Said
has put that crisis on vivid display, most conspicuously in the rejection of Mr.
Morsi’s declarations of the curfew and state of emergency.
As in Suez and Ismailia, tens of thousands of residents of Port Said poured into
the streets in defiance just as a 9 p.m. curfew was set to begin. Bursts of
gunfire echoed through the city for the next hours, and from 9 to 11 p.m.
hospital officials raised the death count to seven from two.
When two armored personnel carriers approached a funeral Monday morning for some
of the seven protesters killed the day before, a stone-throwing mob of thousands
quickly chased them away. And within a few hours, the demonstrators had resumed
their siege of a nearby police station, burning tires to create a smoke screen
to hide behind amid tear gas and gunfire.
Many in the city said they saw no alternative but to continue to stay in the
streets. They complained that the hated security police remained unchanged and
unaccountable even after President Hosni Mubarak was ousted two years ago.
Protesters saw no recourse in the justice system, which is also unchanged; they
dismissed the courts as politicized, especially after the acquittals of all
those accused of killing protesters during the revolution. Then came the death
sentences handed down Saturday to 21 Port Said soccer fans for their role in a
deadly brawl. The death sentences set off the current unrest in this city.
Nor, the people said, did they trust the political process that brought to power
Mr. Morsi and his Islamist allies in the Muslim Brotherhood. He had vowed to
usher in the rule of law as “a president for all Egyptians.” But in November, he
used a presidential decree to temporarily stifle potential legal objections so
that his Islamist allies could rush out a new Constitution. His authoritarian
move kicked off a sharp uptick in street violence leading to this weekend’s Port
Said clashes.
“Injustice beyond imagination,” one man outside the morning funeral said of Mr.
Morsi’s emergency decree, before he was drowned out by a crowd of others echoing
the sentiment.
“He declared a curfew, and we declare civil disobedience,” another man said.
“This doesn’t apply to Port Said because we don’t recognize him as our
president,” said a third. “He is the president of the Muslim Brotherhood only.”
Officials of the Muslim Brotherhood and its party could not be reached. The
group had recently moved offices because of security threats, and at the new
office, neighbors said Brotherhood officials had not appeared since the start of
the unrest.
As tens of thousands marched to the cemetery, many echoed the arguments of human
rights advocates that the one-month imposition of the emergency law and reliance
on the military would only aggravate the problem. The emergency law rolled back
legal procedures meant to protect individuals from excessive violence by the
police, while the reliance on soldiers to keep the peace further reduced
individual rights by sending any civilians arrested to military trials.
“It is stupid — he is repressing people for one more month!” one man argued to a
friend. “It will explode in his face. He should let people cool down.”
The police remained besieged in their burned-out stations, glimpsed only
occasionally crouching with their automatic rifles behind the low roof ledges.
When one showed his head over a police building as the funeral march passed,
voices in the crowd shouted that his appearance was a “provocation” and people
began hurling rocks. Others riding a pickup in the procession had stockpiled
homemade bombs for later use.
In a departure from most previous clashes around the Egyptian revolution, in
Port Said the police also faced armed assailants. Two were seen with handguns on
Monday around a siege of a police station, in addition to the man with the
Kalashnikov.
Earlier, a man accosted an Egyptian journalist working for The New York Times.
“If I see you taking pictures of protesters with weapons, I will kill you,” he
warned.
Defending their stations, the police fought back, and in Cairo they battled
their own commander, the interior minister.
Brotherhood leaders say Mr. Morsi has been afraid to name an outsider as
minister for fear of a police revolt, putting off any meaningful reform of the
Mubarak security services. But when Mr. Morsi recently tapped a veteran ministry
official, Mohamed Ibrahim, for the job, many in the security services complained
that even the appointment of one insider to replace another was undue
interference.
In a measure of the low level of the new government’s top-down control over the
security forces, officers even cursed and chased away their new interior
minister when he tried to attend a funeral on Friday for two members of the
security forces killed in the recent clashes.
“What do you mean we won’t be armed? We would be disarmed to die,” one shouted,
on a video recording of the event.
In an attempt to placate the rank and file, Mr. Ibrahim issued a statement to
police personnel sympathizing with the pressure the protests put on them. Later,
he promised them sophisticated weapons.
“That can only be a recipe for future bloodshed,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive
director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, which monitors police
abuses.
By turning to the military, Mr. Morsi signaled that he understood he could not
rely on the police to pacify the streets, Mr. Bahgat argued.
But it was far from clear that Mr. Morsi was fully in command of the military
either. The new Islamist-backed Constitution grants the general broad autonomy
within the Egyptian government in an apparent quid pro quo for turning over full
power to President Morsi in August. Mr. Morsi’s formal request for the military
to restore order was “not so much an instruction as a plea for support,” Mr.
Bahgat said.
It remains to be seen whether the military retains the credibility to quell the
protests. The soldiers stationed in Port Said did nothing to intervene as
clashes raged on in the streets hours after curfew Monday night.
Analysts close to the military say its officers are extremely reluctant to
engage in the kind of harsh crackdown that would damage its reputation with
Egyptians, preferring to rely on its presence alone.
Near the front lines of the clashes, residents debated whether they would
welcome a military takeover. “The military that was sent to Port Said is the
Muslim Brotherhood’s military,” said one man, dismissing its independence from
Mr. Morsi.
But others said they still had faith in the institution, if not in its top
generals. “In the military, the soldiers are our brothers,” said Khaled Samir
Abdullah, 25. Pointing to the police, he said, “those ones are merciless.”
January 27,
2013
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN and ANNE BARNARD
JERUSALEM —
At least one Iron Dome missile defense battery was deployed Sunday in northern
Israel amid reports of intense security consultations with Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu regarding Syria and the possibility of chemical weapons
falling into the hands of Islamist rebels or being transferred to the militant
group Hezbollah.
Silvan Shalom, a vice prime minister, described the movement of such weapons as
a “red line” that could lead to Israeli military action.
“If there will be a need, we will take action to prevent chemical weapons from
being transferred to Islamic terror organizations,” Mr. Shalom said on Army
Radio. “We are obligated to keep our eye on it at all times, in the event
chemical weapons fall into Hezbollah’s hands.”
A spokesman for the Israeli Defense Forces said that the deployment of the Iron
Dome in the north — where Israel borders Syria and Lebanon — was part of a
routine rotation around the country and “not related to any current situation
assessments.” But Israeli journalists suspected otherwise, noting that Mr.
Netanyahu had been in marathon meetings for several days with military and
intelligence chiefs and senior ministers, with unusual strictures on secrecy.
“Something is happening for sure,” said Ehud Yaari, a senior security analyst
with Israel’s Channel 2 News. “Even in Israel, which is usually tense, and the
normal nervousness that you have in this country, this is exceptional now.”
The intensifying focus on Syria here in Israel came as violence flared across
the border. Syrian government warplanes and artillery increased attacks on
rebels in the suburbs east and south of Damascus, fighting closed the highway to
the Dara’a in the south, and clashes continued in Homs Province, in central
Syria, and in the city of Deir al-Zour in the east, according to state news
media and antigovernment activists.
The fierce fighting and desperate living conditions have sent 30,000 Syrians
fleeing to Jordan in the past month, with thousands more entering Lebanon and
massing on the border with Turkey — accelerating a flow that now totals 650,000
people who have fled and another two million displaced inside the country. The
relief effort is underfinanced and overwhelmed, and the United Nations is
seeking increased international aid.
The chaos worsened ahead of meetings on the crisis scheduled for Monday, when
the main exile opposition group and its international backers are to convene in
Paris, and civilian opposition leaders, including some who oppose the use of
force, plan a conference in Geneva on building Syrian civil society.
President Obama, in an interview with The New Republic, signaled his continuing
doubts about getting involved in the Syrian crisis, suggesting no dramatic
change would be coming out of the meeting on Monday.
“In a situation like Syria, I have to ask, can we make a difference in that
situation?” Mr. Obama said. “Would a military intervention have an impact? How
would it affect our ability to support troops who are still in Afghanistan? What
would be the aftermath of our involvement on the ground? Could it trigger even
worse violence or the use of chemical weapons? What offers the best prospect of
a stable post-Assad regime?
“And how do I weigh tens of thousands who’ve been killed in Syria versus the
tens of thousands who are currently being killed in the Congo? Those are not
simple questions.”
More than 60,000 people have died in Syria’s nearly two-year-old conflict, but
international efforts to end the crisis appear stalled. The opposition is
divided, and Russia, the main backer of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, is
at loggerheads with the Syrian opposition’s Western and Arab supporters.
Russia’s prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, told CNN that Mr. Assad’s chances
of remaining in office seemed to be getting “smaller and smaller” with each
passing day, according to a transcript released by Mr. Medvedev’s office on
Sunday. But he reiterated Russia’s insistence that Mr. Assad’s ouster could not
be a precondition for talks, as the American-backed Syrian opposition leaders
have demanded.
Mr. Medvedev said the United States, Europe and regional powers must “sit the
parties down for negotiations, and not just demand that Assad go and then be
executed” like Libya’s ousted leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, “or be carried to
court sessions on a stretcher like Hosni Mubarak,” the deposed Egyptian
president.
If Mr. Assad is to step down, “this must be decided by the Syrian people,” he
said, “not Russia, not the United States, not any other country.”
Fighting edged into a new area of Damascus, the capital, according to activists,
who said rebels attacked a railway station in the district of Qadam, in the
city’s southwest. Video posted on the Internet showed gunmen walking near
buildings by a railroad track and black smoke that activists said was from an
airstrike. The claims were impossible to verify because of the government’s
restrictions on journalists inside Syria.
In Israel, Mr. Yaari, the television news analyst, said he had seen video and
other reports of activity by Jaba el Nusra, an Islamist rebel group, near the
“fences” of Sfira, which he described as a chemical weapons installation
southeast of Aleppo, Syria. He also said there was a “raging battle” between Mr.
Assad’s forces and the Free Syrian Army near another installation on the
southwestern outskirts of Damascus.
Israel is technically at war with Syria, though it has been a largely quiet
conflict since a cease-fire line was established after the 1973 war. The current
chaos in Syria has spilled across the border several times, with errant shells
landing in the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau that Israel seized from Syria
in 1967 and later annexed in a move that has not been internationally
recognized. Israel has filed several complaints with the United Nations, and in
November its tanks made a direct hit on Syrian artillery units after two
consecutive days of incoming mortar fire.
This month, Mr. Netanyahu announced plans to build a security fence along the
armistice line with Syria, similar to the one protecting its southern border
with Egypt.
But the chemical weapons have been the chief concern for Israeli officials. On
Sunday, the prime minister spoke of Syria in grave terms, linking it to Iran as
potential existential threats to Israel in the context of International
Holocaust Remembrance Day.
“We must look around us, at what is happening in Iran and its proxies and at
what is happening in other areas, with the deadly weapons in Syria, which is
increasingly coming apart,” Mr. Netanyahu said at the start of his weekly
cabinet meeting. “In the east, north and south, everything is in ferment, and we
must be prepared — strong and determined in the face of all possible
developments.”
January 27,
2013
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
PORT SAID,
Egypt — President Mohamed Morsi declared a state of emergency and a curfew in
three major cities on Sunday, as escalating violence in the streets threatened
his government and Egypt’s democracy.
By imposing a one-month state of emergency in Suez, Ismailia and here in Port
Said, where the police have lost all control, Mr. Morsi’s declaration chose to
use one of the most despised weapons of former President Hosni Mubarak’s
autocracy. Under Mubarak-era laws left in effect by the country’s new
Constitution, a state of emergency suspends the ordinary judicial process and
most civil rights. It gives the president and the police extraordinary powers.
Mr. Morsi, Egypt’s first freely elected president and a leader of the political
arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, took the step after four days of clashes in Cairo
and in cities around the country between the police and protesters denouncing
his government. Most of the protests were set off by the second anniversary of
the popular revolt that ousted Mr. Mubarak, which fell on Friday.
Here in Port Said, the trouble started over death sentences that a court imposed
on 21 local soccer fans for their role in a deadly riot. But after 30 people
died in clashes on Saturday — most of them shot by the police — the protesters
turned their ire on Mr. Morsi as well the court. Police officers crouching on
the roofs of their stations fired tear gas and live ammunition into attacking
mobs, and hospital officials said that on Sunday at least seven more people
died.
Tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Port Said on Sunday
demanding independence from the rest of Egypt. “The people want the state of
Port Said,” they chanted in anger at Cairo.
The emergency declaration covers the three cities and their surrounding
provinces, all on the economically vital Suez Canal. Mr. Morsi announced the
emergency measures in a stern, finger-waving speech on state television on
Sunday evening. He said he was acting “to stop the blood bath” and called the
violence in the streets “the counterrevolution itself.”
“There is no room for hesitation, so that everybody knows the institution of the
state is capable of protecting the citizens,” he said. “If I see that the
homeland and its children are in danger, I will be forced to do more than that.
For the sake of Egypt, I will.”
Mr. Morsi’s resort to the authoritarian measures of his predecessor appeared to
reflect mounting doubts about the viability of Egypt’s central government. After
decades of corruption, cronyism and brutality under Mr. Mubarak, Egyptians have
struggled to adjust to resolving their differences — whether over matters of
political ideology or crime and punishment — through peaceful democratic
channels.
“Why are we unable to sort out these disputes?” asked Moattaz Abdel-Fattah, a
political scientist and academic who was a member of the assembly that drafted
Egypt’s new Constitution. “How many times are we going to return to the state of
Egyptians killing Egyptians?” He added: “Hopefully, when you have a genuine
democratic machine, people will start to adapt culturally. But we need to do
something about our culture.”
Mr. Morsi’s speech did nothing to stop the violence in the streets. In Cairo,
fighting between protesters and the police and security forces escalated into
the night along the banks of the Nile near Tahrir Square. On a stage set up in
the square, liberal and leftist speakers demanded the repeal of the
Islamist-backed Constitution, which won approval in a referendum last month.
Young men huddled in tents making incendiary devices, while others set tires on
fire to block a main bridge across the Nile.
In Suez, a group calling itself the city’s youth coalition said it would hold
nightly protests against the curfew at the time it begins, 9 p.m. In Port Said,
crowds began to gather just before the declaration was set to take effect, at
midnight, for a new march in defiance.
“We will gather every night at 9 at Mariam’s mosque,” said Ahmed Mansour, a
doctor. “We will march all night long until morning.”
He added: “Morsi is an employee who works for us. He must do what suits us, and
this needs to be made clear.”
The death sentences handed down on Saturday to the 21 Port Said soccer fans
stemmed from a brawl with fans of a visiting Cairo team last year that left 74
people dead. At a funeral on Sunday for at least a dozen civilians killed in
clashes with the police on Saturday, angry Port Said residents called the
sentences a capitulation to the threats of violence from hard-core soccer fans
in Cairo if the Port Said defendants were acquitted. The mourners vowed to
escalate their own violence in response.
“They wanted to please Cairo and the people there, so they decided this verdict
at the expense of Port Said,” said Ayman Ali El Sayed Awad, 32, a street vendor
whose brother was killed on Saturday by a police bullet. “And just like they
avenged the Cairo people with blood and killed 30 of our people yesterday, we
want the rights of our martyrs.”
A friend interrupted: “They were celebrating yesterday — celebrating our blood!”
Tens of thousands of mourners — some wearing the long beards associated with
Islamists and others in affluent dress — carried the coffins toward the cemetery
on a road along the shore of the Mediterranean Sea. Then the funeral procession
passed the Grand Sky Resort, which belongs to the police.
It was unclear how the clashes began, but the police were soon firing heavy
volleys of tear gas into the funeral march. The gas attacks caused the
pallbearers to drop coffins, many witnesses said, and the bodies spilled into
the streets, a serious indignity here.
Soon, thousands of mourners who had already passed the police club returned to
attack it. Gunfire rang out, some from automatic weapons. Officers with rifles
and tear-gas cannons could be seen on the roof of the resort, crouching and
scurrying and sometimes firing their weapons.
Outside, protesters threw rocks, at least one incendiary bomb, and some of the
still-smoking canisters of tear gas back at the police. One thrown canister set
fire to a palm tree in a nearby cemetery, and another fire of unknown origin
broke out inside the police club. By the end of the night, at least three
protesters were seen carrying handguns and one an automatic rifle.
Similar battles broke out around police stations all over Port Said, with
heavily armed officers defending them from the roofs. The first protester
wounded by live ammunition was carried into the central hospital at 3:30 p.m.,
and by 4 p.m. the odor of tear gas and the sound of gunfire had permeated
several neighborhoods around police stations for hours. Outside the police club,
officers armed with automatic riffles had moved from the roof to confront
opponents on the pavement, and were firing gas straight into the crowd.
But despite the facts on the ground, a spokesman for the Ministry of the
Interior said in a televised interview around the same time that the Port Said
police were unarmed and that tear gas was used only briefly about three hours
earlier. The spokesman, Gen. Osama Ismail, blamed the gunfire on “infiltrating
saboteurs” and suggested that civilians may have fired the tear gas.
“Are there any police forces there to begin with?” General Ismail said. “This is
only a small group pushing back against intense shooting.”
Mr. Morsi had already deployed army troops to secure vital facilities around the
city, and they stood unmolested outside the prison and certain administrative
buildings. But the soldiers made no effort to control the streets, and watched
without intervening as besieged police officers battled civilian mobs.
In his speech on Sunday night, Mr. Morsi praised and thanked the police and the
armed forces for their work battling the chaos. He also renewed his invitation
to his political opponents to join him in a “national dialogue,” beginning with
a meeting on Monday evening.
But Mr. Abdel-Fattah, the political scientist, was skeptical that such a
dialogue could restore trust in the government.
“Morsi has, to a large extent, lost his credibility before the opposition — too
many false promises,” he said. “There is going to be chaos for some time.”
Mayy El Sheikh
contributed reporting from Port Said, and Kareem Fahim from Cairo.
January 25,
2013
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD and NICK CUMMING-BRUCE
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — More than 6,000 Syrians have fled to Jordan over the past two days, a
record influx that prompted the Jordanian monarch, Abdullah II, to call Friday
for more international aid, even as the Syrian government urged refugees to
return in a bid that was met with broad skepticism among antigovernment
activists.
The accelerating flight from Syria into Jordan and Lebanon has occurred as
fighting has raged near the southern city of Dara’a and in the northern province
of Homs, where an increasing number of villages have been nearly emptied of
residents, according to antigovernment activists inside Syria and people who
recently fled the area for Lebanon. The government has recently stepped up its
offensive in Homs in what may be an effort to clear a route from the capital,
Damascus, to the pro-government strongholds on the coast.
In the northern province of Idlib, rebels declared that they had taken over the
central prison and freed scores of prisoners. Antigovernment activists posted
videos of fighters prying open barred windows to allow prisoners to escape.
More than 4,000 Syrians arrived at the Zaatari camp in northern Jordan on
Thursday, and another 2,000 overnight, according to Melissa Fleming, the
spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
The influx, consisting mainly of families led by women, brought to more than
30,000 the number of Syrians reaching Zaatari this month, close to double
December’s number, Ms. Fleming said, speaking in Geneva.
Many had come from the city and the suburbs of Dara’a, she said, describing a
“real day-to-day struggle to survive” in the face of combat damage, the closure
of medical facilities and shortages of food, water and electricity.
The Zaatari camp, which opened in July, already has some 65,000 people, and the
agency said it was working with Jordan to open a second camp by the end of the
month to initially accommodate 5,000 refugees and eventually some 30,000.
The refugee agency reported that it was trying to register Syrians elsewhere in
Jordan and expected to have 50,000 by the end of February, but it noted that the
Jordanian authorities say 300,000 Syrians have now entered the country. The
number of Syrian refugees in the region is approaching 700,000, the refugee
agency said, with 221,000 registered in Lebanon, 156,000 in Turkey and 76,000 in
Iraq.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, King Abdullah issued an
urgent call for help.
“I cannot emphasize enough the challenges that we are all facing, both in Jordan
and Lebanon, and it’s only going to get worse,” he said. “What we’re asking from
the international community is not just to help us with the refugee problems and
their challenges as they face this harsh winter, but also stockpiling in Jordan
so that we can move supplies across the borders to keep people in place.”
Jordan’s fears for its own stability surfaced last week when the country’s prime
minister, Abdullah Ensour, said that if the Syrian government collapsed, Jordan
would not accept more refugees but would use its military to create safe havens
inside Syria for those displaced by conflict.
Syria’s interior minister issued a call late Thursday for refugees to return to
the country, promising that even those who fled without their identity cards
would be welcomed back.
The government also said, in a statement on the state-run news agency SANA, that
political opposition groups were free to enter the country to take part in a
national dialogue aimed at creating a transitional government — and that they
would be free to leave the country as well.
Government opponents commented widely on social media that the offer could be
interpreted as a trap. The authorities also called on people to pray for peace
on Friday, a day after the holiday celebrating the birth of the Prophet
Muhammad.
State television showed hundreds of people praying at the Umayyad Mosque in
central Damascus, as a senior cleric prayed for President Bashar al-Assad and
asked God for “a miracle of your many miracles, to cleanse our country from
oppression and of those rogues who commit injustice, murder and slaughter.”
In Homs, activists reported that the government was shelling the neighborhoods
of Juret al-Shiyah and Khaldiyeh, which have been heavily damaged by months of
fighting. They also said a family, including five children, had been found
killed and burned at home.
Anne Barnard
reported from Beirut, and Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva.
January 23,
2013
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
WASHINGTON
— For President Obama, whose relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel has often resembled that of a couple trapped in a loveless marriage,
the last three months must have offered some grim satisfaction.
In November, Mr. Obama won re-election over Mitt Romney, who had been the
not-so-subtle favorite of Mr. Netanyahu. Then on Tuesday, Mr. Netanyahu stumbled
in his own re-election bid, with his Likud Party holding enough seats in
Parliament to keep him in office but falling far short of expectations in the
face of surging centrist voters.
Still, there was no crowing at the White House, at least in public, as the
returns flowed in from Israel. Administration officials on Wednesday were
reluctant to comment on how Mr. Netanyahu’s setback may affect his relations
with Mr. Obama, especially since the Israeli leader has not yet begun the work
of cobbling together a governing coalition.
As they sifted through the implications, analysts said there was more than
vindication for Mr. Obama in Israel’s new political landscape.
Mr. Netanyahu’s weakened position could set the stage for, if not a “reset,” to
use the administration’s well-worn phrase, then an improvement in his ties with
the president.
If, as some analysts expect, Mr. Netanyahu seeks to put together a center-right
coalition that includes Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid party won 19 seats in the
120-seat Parliament, it could sand away the roughest edges of Mr. Netanyahu’s
existing right-wing coalition.
Mr. Lapid could push a new government in directions that would ease longstanding
sources of tension with Mr. Obama. For example, he is more interested in
creating jobs and providing housing than in expanding construction of Jewish
settlements in the West Bank, a recurring source of friction between Mr. Obama
and Mr. Netanyahu.
With Ehud Barak, a hawkish former general, leaving the Defense Ministry, Mr.
Netanyahu may be under less pressure to consider a unilateral strike on Iran
over its nuclear program. That would be a relief to the White House, which has
had to plead with the Israelis for patience while it pursues a last-ditch
diplomatic effort with Tehran.
“A weaker Bibi heading a government with some centrists was the best outcome the
White House could have hoped for,” said Aaron David Miller, a longtime Middle
East negotiator, using Mr. Netanyahu’s nickname. “It gives them a better chance
to avoid war with the Iranian mullahs and preserve the chance of a peace with
the Palestinians.”
The most optimistic outcome, Mr. Miller said, would be a kind of “odd couple”
relationship between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu, in which they retain their
differences over issues like settlements, but learn to manage them more
skillfully.
That would be no small step, given the mutual suspicion that has suffused their
relationship. White House officials alternately fumed and rolled their eyes
during the presidential campaign when Mr. Netanyahu appeared to tilt toward Mr.
Romney, inviting him to dinner at his home during the Republican candidate’s
visit to Jerusalem last July.
Mr. Obama, members of the Likud Party believe, returned the favor during the
Israeli election when Jeffrey Goldberg, an American journalist who writes
frequently about Israel, reported that the president had disparaged Mr.
Netanyahu after the Israeli government announced plans for settlements in a
contested area of the West Bank known as E1.
Mr. Goldberg quoted Mr. Obama as saying repeatedly, “Israel doesn’t know what
its own best interests are.” The White House did not confirm or deny Mr. Obama’s
comments.
But days before the election, Mr. Netanyahu shot back that “only Israeli
citizens will be the ones who determine who faithfully represents the vital
interests of Israel” — a vivid reminder of his chilly relationship with the
leader of Israel’s most important ally.
While in the past Israeli leaders — including Mr. Netanyahu himself during a
previous stint as prime minister — have been punished by Israeli voters for
mismanaging their relationships with American presidents, analysts were
reluctant to attribute too much of his troubles to Mr. Obama, given the
complexities of an election that surprised even the experts.
Still, as Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel, put it, “the
Israeli public cares about the relationship, and it didn’t help that he
mishandled it, and there was a reminder of how badly he mishandled it on the eve
of the election.”
Among the intriguing questions, Mr. Indyk said, is whether Mr. Lapid would
insist on concessions for joining a coalition with Mr. Netanyahu, like a freeze
in settlement construction. While Mr. Lapid’s party has put its emphasis on
concerns like jobs and housing, taking a stand on settlements would signal a
shift from the right’s agenda.
Almost no one predicts that a new Israeli government will suddenly allow Mr.
Obama to rekindle his first-term goal of a peace agreement between the Israelis
and Palestinians. Mr. Lapid’s party did not score its victory by pushing to
revive long-moribund peace talks. The political climate on both sides remains
hostile to such an effort.
Nor, after the frustrations of his first term, does Mr. Obama appear any more
likely to invest heavily in Middle East peacemaking. The president scarcely
mentions the subject these days.
While Mr. Indyk said that Senator John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who has
been nominated to succeed Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state, would
make a game effort to preserve the two-state solution, he is no more likely to
achieve a breakthrough than Mrs. Clinton did.
Mr. Miller, now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said he
had rarely seen a relationship as persistently dysfunctional as that between Mr.
Obama and Mr. Netanyahu. A resounding Netanyahu victory would only have
exacerbated those strains.
Now, though, in the wake of his deflating victory, Mr. Netanyahu may have the
chance to mend fences, Mr. Miller said.
“The good news for Bibi, if he manages to put it together, is that a broader
government would ease tensions and make the next four years much less rocky,” he
said. “Netanyahu will be able to preside over a much more functional
relationship with the United States.”
January 23,
2013
The New York Times
By KARIMA BENNOUNE
BEFORE the
recent French intervention in Mali began, 412,000 people had already left their
homes in the country’s north, fleeing torture, summary executions, recruitment
of child soldiers and sexual violence against women at the hands of
fundamentalist militants. Late last year, in Algeria and southern Mali, I
interviewed dozens of Malians from the north, including many who had recently
fled. Their testimonies confirmed the horrors that radical Islamists,
self-proclaimed warriors of God, have inflicted on their communities.
First, the fundamentalists banned music in a country with one of the richest
musical traditions in the world. Last July, they stoned an unmarried couple for
adultery. The woman, a mother of two, had been buried up to her waist in a hole
before a group of men pelted her to death with rocks. And in October the
Islamist occupiers began compiling lists of unmarried mothers.
Even holy places are not safe. These self-styled “defenders of the faith”
demolished the tombs of local Sufi saints in the fabled city of Timbuktu. The
armed groups also reportedly destroyed many churches in the north, where
displaced members of the small Christian minority told me they had previously
felt entirely accepted. Such Qaeda-style tactics, and the religious extremism
that demands them, are completely alien to the mainstream of Malian Islam, which
is known for its tradition of tolerance.
That openness is exactly what the jihadists seek to crush. “The fact that we are
building a new country on the base of Shariah is just something the people
living here will have to accept,” the Islamist police commissioner in the town
of Gao said last August. Until military action began this month, local citizens
were on their own in resisting the imposition of Shariah — and they fought back
valiantly. A radio journalist was severely beaten by Islamist gunmen after
speaking on the radio against amputations. Women marched through the streets of
Timbuktu against Islamist diktats on veiling until gunfire ended their protest.
The acting principal of a coed high school in Gao told me his school had been
occupied by militants from the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa. They
announced that they had come to protect the premises. Instead, they quickly
stole its computers, refrigerators and chairs. “We consider ourselves under
occupation,” the principal told me. “We consider ourselves martyrs.” He has
risked his life to keep his school open, to continue to educate boys and girls
together, though he must put them on opposite sides of the classroom now. “My
presence creates hope for my students. I cannot kill this hope,” he told me.
Since the jihadist takeover, Gao’s economy has come to a standstill. Every
Thursday, there are theocratic show trials in Arabic, a language many residents
do not speak. The fundamentalists focus on teaching the predominantly Muslim
population of Gao “how to be Muslim.” Like Al Shabab in Somalia and the Taliban
in Afghanistan, they have a morality brigade that patrols the city, checking who
is not wearing a sufficient veil and whose telephone sins with a musical
ringtone. Speaking to a woman in public is an offense; this ban has caused such
terror that some men flee in fear if they simply see a woman on the street.
The principal had been attending public punishments to document the atrocities.
This meant repeatedly watching his fellow citizens get flogged. He has seen what
it looks like when a “convict” has his foot sawed off. Close to tears, he said:
“No one can stand it, but it is imposed on us. Those of us who attend, we cry.”
Some local and international opponents of military intervention have advocated
negotiation with the rebel groups as an alternative. But negotiating with groups
who believe they are God’s agents and whose imposed mode of governance is
utterly alien to the people of northern Mali is unlikely to succeed, especially
while the north remains occupied. “The population is not for the Shariah” is the
refrain I heard again and again — from those displaced from Timbuktu and Kidal;
from women and men; from Muslims and Christians. The preservation of Mali’s
tradition of secularism is essential for them all.
Policy decisions regarding this potential Afghanistan-in-the-Sahara must be
informed by the fact that what is happening there is not simply a question of
regional or global security, but of basic human rights. The current intervention
in Mali could deal a decisive blow to the recent advance of fundamentalism
across North Africa, but only if French and West African soldiers take care to
distinguish between civilians and their jihadist oppressors, who hide among the
innocent.
They must also avoid simply shifting the problem elsewhere in the region. After
all, one of the causes of the Islamist occupation of northern Mali was the
displacement of armed men from Libya after the overthrow of Col. Muammar
el-Qaddafi in 2011. Algeria had lost hundreds of thousands of its own people to
fundamentalist armed groups since the 1990s. Since then, many Algerian jihadists
have crossed the border into northern Mali, reproducing the problem there.
Some Malians fear that foreign intervention may have grave consequences for
their homes and livelihoods. But most of the displaced northerners I met last
month, before France intervened, had already decided that “the risks of
nonintervention are 10,000 times worse than the risks of intervention,” as a
women’s rights activist told me in Bamako. Or, as a young refugee from Gao whom
I met in Algeria put it: “We do not want war, but if these people don’t leave us
alone, we have to fight them.”
Karima
Bennoune, a professor of international law at the University of California,
Davis,
is the author
of the forthcoming book “Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here:
Untold Stories
From the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism.”
January 22,
2013
The New York Times
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
First, my
congratulations and condolences to John Kerry for being nominated to be our next
secretary of state. There is no one better for the job today and no worse job to
have today. It is no accident that we’ve started measuring our secretaries of
state more by miles traveled than milestones achieved. It is bloody hard to do
big diplomacy anymore.
Why? Well, as secretary of state today you get to deal with Vladimir Putin, who
was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple. That is, even though Russia’s
economy is hugely corrupt and nowhere nearly as innovative as it should be,
Putin sits atop a huge reserve of oil and gas that makes him think he’s a genius
and doesn’t need to listen to anyone. When recently confronted with his regime’s
bad behavior, his first instinct was to block American parents from adopting
Russian orphans, even though so many of them badly need homes. If there were an
anti-Nobel Peace Prize, Putin would win hands down.
When Putin isn’t available to stiff us, China, to whom we owe a gazillion
dollars, is ready to stand in. Those two are the real nations, where there’s at
least someone to answer the phone — and hang up on us. Elsewhere, the secretary
of state gets to deal with failed or failing states, like Mali, Algeria,
Afghanistan and Libya, whose governments cannot deliver for their people, let
alone for us. If he is looking for a break, Kerry could always call on our
longtime ally Egypt, whose president, Mohamed Morsi, we find out, in 2010
described Jews as “descendants of apes and pigs.” Who knew?
So what’s a secretary of state to do? I’d suggest trying something radically
new: creating the conditions for diplomacy where they do not now exist by going
around leaders and directly to the people. And I’d start with Iran, Israel and
Palestine. We live in an age of social networks in which every leader outside of
North Korea today is now forced to engage in a two-way conversation with their
citizens. There’s no more just top-down. People everywhere are finding their
voices and leaders are terrified. We need to turn this to our advantage to gain
leverage in diplomacy.
Let’s break all the rules.
Rather than negotiating with Iran’s leaders in secret — which, so far, has
produced nothing and allows the Iranian leaders to control the narrative and
tell their people that they’re suffering sanctions because of U.S. intransigence
— why not negotiate with the Iranian people? President Obama should put a simple
offer on the table, in Farsi, for all Iranians to see: The U.S. and its allies
will permit Iran to maintain a civil nuclear enrichment capability — which it
claims is all it wants to meet power needs — provided it agrees to U.N.
observers and restrictions that would prevent Tehran from ever assembling a
nuclear bomb. We should not only make this offer public, but also say to the
Iranian people over and over: “The only reason your currency is being crushed,
your savings rapidly eroded by inflation, many of your college graduates
unemployed and your global trade impeded and the risk of war hanging overhead,
is because your leaders won’t accept a deal that would allow Iran to develop
civil nuclear power but not a bomb.” Iran wants its people to think it has no
partner for a civil nuclear deal. The U.S. can prove otherwise.
On Israel-Palestine, the secretary of state should publicly offer President
Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority the following: the U.S. would
recognize the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank as the independent State of
Palestine on the provisional basis of the June 4, 1967, lines, support its full
U.N. membership and send an ambassador to Ramallah, on the condition that
Palestinians accept the principle of “two states for two peoples” — an Arab
state and a Jewish state in line with U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 — and
agree that permanent borders, security and land swaps would be negotiated
directly with Israel. The status of the refugees would be negotiated between
Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization, which represents all
Palestinians inside and outside of Palestine. Gaza, now a de facto statelet,
would be recognized as part of Palestine only when its government recognizes
Israel, renounces violence and rejoins the West Bank.
Why do this? Because there will be no Israeli-Palestinian breakthrough unless
the silent majorities on both sides know they have a partner — that Palestinians
have embraced two states for two peoples and that Israelis have embraced
Palestinian statehood. Neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nor President
Abbas have shown a real commitment to nurture these preconditions for peace, and
our secret diplomacy with both only plays into their hands. We need to blow this
charade wide open by trying to publicly show Iranians, Israelis and Palestinians
that they really do have options that their leaders don’t want them to see.
(Israel’s election on Tuesday showed that the peace camp in Israel is still
alive and significant.) It may not work. The leaders may still block it or the
people may not be interested. But we need to start behaving like a superpower
and forcing a moment of truth. Our hands are full now, and we can’t waste four
more years with allies (or enemies) who may be fooling us.
Gas
Complex Worker Tells of Terror and a Desperate Escape
January 22,
2013
The New York Times
By NICHOLAS KULISH
BERGEN,
Norway — After militants stormed his remote desert workplace last week, Liviu
Floria, a Romanian gas worker, locked the door and sought refuge under a desk.
For five hours, as he stayed hidden, he communicated by text message with a
Romanian co-worker in another part of the sprawling In Amenas gas facility.
Then an ominous final message flashed on his cellphone from the colleague. “I am
a hostage,” it said.
That colleague would later be found dead, Mr. Floria said, along with at least
36 other foreigners whom the Algerian government has identified as victims of
the attack. But Mr. Floria’s story is one of both terror and salvation as he and
seven others managed to scale the fence surrounding the compound, trek through
the desert and escape death.
Mr. Floria saw the attack as it began last Wednesday. He and a colleague, George
Iachim, were making their morning coffee when an alarm sounded. They rushed to
the window and saw what looked like an action movie unfolding before them. Four
men with assault rifles had gotten out of a car and were shooting at the guards
stationed at the entrance.
“Out of a peaceful place, a normal place to work, in a few seconds it was
transformed into a cemetery,” Mr. Iachim later told Romanian television.
After nearly two days of hiding from the hostage-takers, Mr. Floria and seven
others decided their only chance at survival would come from climbing the fence
and running away. They left around 2 a.m. for what became a harrowing desert
trek, guided only by the flickering flame atop a gas well in the distance and a
compass application on Mr. Floria’s iPhone.
Algerian officials said Tuesday that they were searching the Sahara for five
missing foreigners, in the hopes that others might have escaped into the desert
as Mr. Floria and the others did. “It’s ongoing,” said a senior Algerian
official. “They’ve disappeared. We’re not going to just abandon them like that.”
Helge Lund, chief executive of Statoil, the Norwegian company that is one of the
operators of the In Amenas plant, said Monday in a televised news conference
that 12 of Statoil’s 17 employees had returned home, while “extensive searches
in and around the plant at In Amenas and at hospitals in Algeria are taking
place” for the other five. It was unclear whether the Algerians were referring
to the Norwegians, who as of late Tuesday were still classified as missing
rather than dead.
Mr. Floria recounted his experiences from back home in Romania on Tuesday. He
was clearly still shaken by the experience and traumatized about the deaths of
his colleagues, including two Romanians, and on Monday he had gone to a
monastery to pray.
Mr. Floria, 45, said that he was no wildcat cowboy, no thrill seeker or
adventurer, just a hard-working man hoping to provide a better life for his
family. He had been employed in the oil and gas industry in Pitesti, Romania,
for nearly 20 years when he was contacted through the job-networking Web site
LinkedIn by an international recruiting agency.
The new job in Algeria as a mechanical foreman paid five times as much as he was
making in Romania, where the industry was struggling and the future looked
uncertain. With the money he earned, Mr. Floria hoped that he could send his
teenage daughter to Britain for college and eventually buy himself a little
house in the mountains. Safety was not a concern, he said.
He began work in 2010 and before long was used to the routine, one month in the
Sahara working 12-hour days and one month back home.
The night before the attack, Mr. Floria went to bed early. It was a decision he
said he believed might have saved his life. He woke up early, at 5:15 a.m., and
he and Mr. Iachim drove in a Toyota Land Cruiser from the living area to the
central processing facility a few miles away. They drove through the very gate
that the militants would storm minutes later.
The two Romanians stayed all day and all night in the office, trying to keep
quiet, subsisting on water and a few cookies they had with them. Long periods of
silence were interrupted by minutes of gunfire and explosions. Mr. Floria tried
to suppress his emotions and remain focused on staying alive.
“In my mind, the fate was we should escape from here,” Mr. Floria said. “I must
stay calm, manage my feelings and we see what happens next.”
On Thursday afternoon, after more than 24 hours in hiding, they heard someone
calling: “Anybody here? Anybody here?”
It was Lou Fear, one of the Britons. “When we heard his voice, we were very
happy,” Mr. Floria said, relieved to have been found by others who had eluded
capture.
Soon a group of eight had gathered. There were two Norwegians, three Britons, an
Algerian and the two Romanians. Word had spread that the attackers were
targeting only expatriates and letting Algerians go, but the lone Algerian
stayed with them, risking his life to help his co-workers, Mr. Floria said.
Someone in the group saw the attackers returning, and everyone went back into
hiding. But that night Mr. Fear came back and told them there was talk of trying
to escape. “Sooner or later they will discover us, and they will kill us,” Mr.
Floria said. “All of us agreed. It’s our chance. We should fight for our lives.”
They were terrified of discovery. One of the would-be escapees knocked over
something metal, and in the dead silence of the desert at night it rang as loud
as a bell. Everyone froze and waited, but no one discovered them.
The fence, which Mr. Floria estimated was over six feet tall, built to protect
them from the outside world, was now an impediment. But they managed to squeeze
between the razor wire and the top of the fence, Mr. Floria said.
They were elated but wary when they made it out of the complex, knowing they
were nowhere close to safe. If the attackers found them they would most likely
be shot.
The group walked toward the beacon of burning gas in the distance, but when dawn
came they could no longer see the flame. In their haste to escape several of the
men, including Mr. Floria, had not thought about supplies, and the group had
only four bottles of water for the eight of them.
Fortunately, the iPhone app worked without a cellular signal. They walked over
barren terrain of sand and rocks and small hills, from about 2 a.m. until the
late afternoon with only short breaks.
At last they found the gas well. There was a temporary building there, and at
least one of the men was struggling to go on. Four of the men stayed and the
other four continued to a nearby road. They saw vehicles but feared they might
be the assailants.
They waited and watched from a distance. A white car with a green crescent
looked like an official Algerian vehicle. They went to the road, stopped the car
and felt incredible relief to find three Algerian security officers inside. The
officers took the men and gave them cookies, orange juice and apples. Mr. Floria
said the Algerians did not pick up the remaining four people despite repeated
pleas. Mr. Floria’s group was flown out of Algeria on an American military
transport plane. The other four made it to the road once the sun had set, Mr.
Floria learned later, and also escaped safely.
“I got pain in my bones, but this was nothing for me,” Mr. Floria said,
contrasting his fate with the dozens who did not make it out alive. “We
escaped.”
Mihai Radu
contributed reporting from Bucharest, Romania;
Henrik Pryser
Libell from Bergen; and Adam Nossiter from Algiers.
January 22,
2013
The New York Times
By C. J. CHIVERS
ALGHOOZ,
Syria — The arc of Omar Abdulkader’s transformation from farmer to fighter
resembles that of uncountable others in Syria, where since 2011 tens of
thousands of men have been drawn into a civil war.
A rebel commander seeking to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad, he described
the choice of a cornered man. His resistance began with peaceful demonstrations,
he said. When the government answered with force, his tactics changed. “It was
only after they showed that they would kill us that we became armed,” he said.
But there is a difference between this story and many others. Mr. Abdulkader is
a Kurd, not an Arab, which means his experiences and decisions upend
conventional wisdom that holds that the Kurds do not see this as their fight.
To hear the governments of Turkey and Syria describe it, Syria’s Kurds often
side with or remain neutral toward Mr. Assad, whose government supported the
Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in its bloody insurgency against Turkey
until 1998, when Syria grudgingly extradited the Kurdish group’s leader at the
brink of war with Turkey.
But the scenes in Alghooz and in a string of Kurdish villages north of Aleppo
present a more complex picture of Syria’s Kurds and their ambitions and
relations with the government. Kurds here fiercely note that they have suffered
under Mr. Assad’s rule, too, and taken up arms against him. They sharply
contradict the notion that they rely on Mr. Assad’s government for protection.
And so while there have been signs that many Kurds remained pro-government, with
some pro-P.K.K. fighters clashing with rebels, hundreds of others have joined
the Free Syrian Army, as the loosely assembled antigovernment fighters call
themselves, Kurdish and rebel leaders say.
The flatlands north of Aleppo are spotted with towns. Local men said that about
40,000 Kurds live here, and that their families have produced more than 600
fighters against Mr. Assad.
The fighters are organized into at least eight separate groups, Kurdish leaders
and fighters said. Their names include the Islamic Kurdish Front, the Pesh Merga
Falcons and the Martyrs of Mecca.
Defying official and popular accounts of Kurdish loyalties, these men fight
beside Arabs against Mr. Assad. They and their leaders bluntly denounce the
P.K.K., which the United States and Europe consider a terrorist organization,
and also criticize many Kurdish nationalists, saying that calls for an
independent Kurdistan are not a vision they share.
“We are not interested in a separate homeland,” said Yousef Haidar, 72,
Alghooz’s mukhtar, or village elder. “We want to be part of Syria.”
He added, “For hundreds of years we have lived together with Arabs, and after
the revolution we want to live together more.”
The Kurdish revolutionary fighters also reject neutrality, like the public
position of the Democratic Union Party, Syria’s largest Kurdish political party,
which has largely kept out of the uprising, furthering the impression that Kurds
were not supporting the rebels.
“I am Kurdish, and as a Kurdish citizen I am fighting side to side with the Free
Syrian Army, because you cannot find anybody who was not stepped on by the
regime, or was not wronged,” Mr. Haidar said. “We were wronged as well.”
Alghooz is a small farming village on an agricultural plain. It lies a few miles
east of Marea, one of the area’s thoroughly anti-Assad towns.
Fewer than 3,000 people live here. Its elders said that perhaps 30 men from
local families were now fighting, and that these men had attracted Arabs,
Christians and Turkmens to fight with them under the rebels’ flag.
Mr. Abdulkader commands one of three sections of a group that calls itself the
Grandsons of Saladin and claims to field nearly 90 fighters in all. It fights
under the command of Al Tawhid Brigade, the largest Free Syrian Army unit in the
Aleppo region.
From 1989 to 1992, Mr. Abdulkader said, he served a tour of duty as an infantry
conscript at a base south of Damascus. Then he returned home to work in the
local fields, growing potatoes, lentils, onions and other crops. His Kurdish
village lived peacefully beside the Arab villages nearby.
When protests against Mr. Assad began in early 2011 and Syrians in other
villages in the countryside north of Aleppo demonstrated and organized into an
underground movement, the Kurds in Alghooz did not commit.
But as the Assad government turned violent, the village picked a side, its
elders said. “We joined the revolution,” Mr. Haidar said.
The imperative for the uprising, he said, was even greater than when the
villages rose against colonial powers. “We were colonized by the French, but
even France did not do what Bashar does,” he said. “The government kills
innocent people. We felt no other option but to fight against this criminal.”
In doing so, the Kurds here noted that they face the same difficulties as the
other Free Syrian Army units.
The Grandsons of Saladin split time now between their home villages, organizing
roaming patrols at night on the roads, and holding a small portion of the front
in Aleppo’s shattered neighborhoods.
They have relied in part on the training many of their members received during
their brief service as conscripts in Mr. Assad’s army.
One man was previously a rifleman, another a machine-gunner. One — an Arab
fighting inside the Kurdish group — was in a Syrian military communications
unit. Two were trained in air defense.
All of them denounced the lack of Western support, and said their dearth of
military equipment had slowed their progress and caused them many casualties.
“In general, we have a shortage of ammunition and weapons,” said Hussein Abu
Mahmoud, a construction worker who is one of Mr. Abdulkader’s fighters. “Most of
our fighters who were killed died because we don’t have enough weapons.”
Facing continued shortages, the Grandsons of Saladin make their own hand
grenades, from pipes and locally made explosives, and use a large slingshot to
heave some of their bombs, each slightly smaller than a grapefruit, toward army
positions.
In recent months, the fighters said they had suffered five killed and seven
wounded — proof enough, they said, of their role in the anti-Assad cause, and
that Kurdish loyalties in Syria should not be defined by the statements from
Damascus or Ankara, the Turkish capital, alone.
“There has been much propaganda that the Kurds are with the regime,” Mr.
Abdulkader said. “We are not with Assad. We are fighting him.”
Sebnem Arsu
contributed reporting from Antakya, Turkey.
January 21,
2013
The New York Times
By ROGER COHEN
London
DIPLOMACY is dead.
Effective diplomacy — the kind that produced Nixon’s breakthrough with China, an
end to the Cold War on American terms, or the Dayton peace accord in Bosnia —
requires patience, persistence, empathy, discretion, boldness and a willingness
to talk to the enemy.
This is an age of impatience, changeableness, palaver, small-mindedness and an
unwillingness to talk to bad guys. Human rights are in fashion, a good thing of
course, but the space for realist statesmanship of the kind that produced the
Bosnian peace in 1995 has diminished. The late Richard Holbrooke’s realpolitik
was not for the squeamish.
There are other reasons for diplomacy’s demise. The United States has lost its
dominant position without any other nation rising to take its place. The result
is nobody’s world. It is a place where America acts as a cautious boss,
alternately encouraging others to take the lead and worrying about loss of
authority. Syria has been an unedifying lesson in the course of crisis when
diplomacy is dead. Algeria shows how the dead pile up when talking is dismissed
as a waste of time.
Violence, of the kind diplomacy once resolved, has shifted. As William Luers, a
former ambassador to Venezuela and the director of The Iran Project, said in an
e-mail, it occurs “less between states and more dealing with terrorists.” One
result is that “the military and the C.I.A. have been in the driver’s seat in
dealing with governments throughout the Middle East and in state to state
(Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq) relations.” The role of professional diplomats is
squeezed.
Indeed the very word “diplomacy” has become unfashionable on Capitol Hill, where
its wimpy associations — trade-offs, compromise, pliancy, concessions and the
like — are shunned by representatives who these days prefer beating the
post-9/11 drums of confrontation, toughness and inflexibility: All of which may
sound good but often get you nowhere (or into long, intractable wars) at great
cost.
Stephen Heintz, president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, wrote in an e-mail
that, “When domestic politics devolve into polarization and paralysis the impact
on diplomatic possibility becomes inordinately constraining.” He cited Cuba and
Iran as examples of this; I would add Israel-Palestine. These critical foreign
policy issues are viewed less as diplomatic challenges than potential sources of
domestic political capital.
So when I asked myself what I hoped Barack Obama’s second term would inaugurate,
my answer was a new era of diplomacy. It is not too late for the president to
earn that Nobel Peace Prize.
Of course diplomats do many worthy things around the world, and even in the
first term there were a couple of significant shifts — in Burma where patient
U.S. diplomacy has produced an opening, and in the yo-yoing new Egypt where U.S.
engagement with the Muslim Brotherhood was important and long overdue (and
raised the question of when America would do the same with the Brotherhood’s
offshoot, Hamas.)
But Obama has not had a big breakthrough. America’s diplomatic doldrums are
approaching their 20th year.
There are some modest reasons to think the lid on diplomacy’s coffin may open a
crack. This is a second term; Obama is less beholden to the strident whims of
Congress. The Republican never-give-an-inch right is weaker. In John Kerry and
Chuck Hagel, his nominees for secretary of state and secretary of defense, Obama
has chosen two knowledgeable professionals who have seen enough war to loathe it
and have deep experience of the world. They know peace involves risk. They know
it may not be pretty. The big wars are winding down. Military commanders may
cede some space to diplomats.
Breakthrough diplomacy is not conducted with friends. It is conducted with the
likes of the Taliban, the ayatollahs and Hamas. It involves accepting that in
order to get what you want you have to give something. The central question is:
What do I want to get out of my rival and what do I have to give to get it? Or,
put the way Nixon put it in seeking common ground with Communist China: What do
we want, what do they want, and what do we both want?
Obama tried a bunch of special envoys in the first term. It did not work. He
needs to empower his secretary of state to do the necessary heavy lifting on
Iran and Israel-Palestine. Luers suggested that one “idea for a New Diplomacy
would be for Hagel and Kerry to take along senators from both parties on trips
abroad and to trouble spots. This used to be standard practice. Be bold with the
Senate and try to bring them along.”
For diplomacy to succeed noise has to be shut out. There are a lot of
pie-in-the-sky citizen-diplomats out there these days blathering on about dreamy
one-state solutions for Israel-Palestine and the like. Social media and
hyper-connectivity bring huge benefits. They helped ignite the wave of
liberation known as the Arab Spring. They are force-multipliers for openness and
citizenship. But they may distract from the focused, realpolitik diplomacy that
brought the major breakthroughs of 1972, 1989 and 1995. It’s time for another.
January 21,
2013
The New York Times
By LYDIA POLGREEN and PETER TINTI
SEGOU, Mali
— Malian and French troops appeared to recapture two important central Malian
towns on Monday, pushing back an advance by Islamist militants who have overrun
the country’s northern half.
French soldiers in armored vehicles rolled through the town of Diabaly, about
275 miles from the capital, Bamako, to cheers from residents, who flew French
and Malian flags to welcome them.
“I want to thank the French people,” said Mamadou Traoré, a Diabaly resident. He
said French airstrikes had chased away the militants without harming any
civilians, a claim echoed by other residents.
“None of us were touched,” Mr. Traoré said. “It was incredible.”
Islamist fighters overran Diabaly a week ago, the closest they have come to
Bamako in an aggressive surge this month. Worried that there was little to stop
them from rolling into the capital, where many French citizens live, France
quickly stepped into the fight, striking the militants at the front lines and
bombing their strongholds in the north.
Suddenly a long-simmering standoff with the Islamist groups holding the north
had been transformed into a war involving French forces, precisely the kind of
event the West hoped to avoid. American officials have long warned that Western
involvement could stir anti-Western sentiment and provoke terrorist attacks, a
fear that seemed to be realized when militants stormed a gas facility in Algeria
last week, resulting in the deaths of at least 37 foreign hostages.
Even after French forces entered the fight in Mali, driving back the Islamists
would prove more difficult than officials initially suggested. Rather than flee,
many of the militants in Diabaly seemed to dig in, taking over homes and putting
the civilian population in the cross-fire.
But they eventually fled on Friday morning, residents said, in the face of
relentless French airstrikes.
The fighters had little time to impose the version of Shariah law that has made
them infamous in the north, where they have carried out public whippings and
amputations and stoned a couple to death. But their brief reign over Diabaly was
a small taste of the harsh policies they have enacted elsewhere.
“I had to cover my head at all times,” Djenaba Cissé said. “When I walked with
my brother to the fields, they would bother us,” she continued. “They would ask
us questions to verify that we were siblings.”
Few residents said they actually met the hardened men who had taken control of
their village, but Kola Maiga, who lives at the edge of town, recalled their
arrival on the morning of Jan. 14.
“I was in my house, and I saw them coming, and I knew, I knew that war was here
in Diabaly,” Mr. Maiga said. “The first day, they started shooting in the air.
They wanted the population to know they have power.”
He feared them, he said, but they tried to reassure him, offering cookies to his
children.
“They said: ‘Do not be afraid. We are with Allah,’ ” Mr. Maiga said.
Militants have also abandoned the town of Douentza, which they held for several
months, The Associated Press reported.
Mali has been in crisis since last January, when Tuaregs in northern Mali began
a separatist uprising, newly invigorated by an influx of fighters and weapons
from Libya after the fall of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
A military coup by junior officers angry at how the government responded to the
Tuareg uprising followed in March, leaving the country in disarray and hastening
the loss of its northern half to insurgents. Islamist groups, some with links to
Al Qaeda, quickly pushed aside the secular Tuareg militants, taking over
northern towns and imposing their strict interpretation of Shariah law.
The fighters appeared to find little support among the local population, who
said the harsh version of Islam they sought to impose had little resemblance to
the moderate faith practiced by most people here.
“These guys, they are vicious,” said Oumar Diakité, Diabaly’s mayor. “It’s not
Islam that they want. They want other things. As you can see, a poor country
like Mali, they have come to attack us.”
Residents who had fled to nearby towns returned to their homes on Monday after
hearing that the militants had been chased away.
“They arrived, and they said they were going to bring Shariah here,” said
Mohamed Tounkara, who returned on Monday. “We don’t want Shariah. That’s why I
left with my family.”
He said he was grateful to the French military but had little faith in his own
country’s army, which in the past year has let half of Mali’s territory slip
away and ended two decades of democratic rule.
“If France stays here, I trust their army,” Mr. Tounkara said. “We don’t have
complete faith in our army, honestly.”
Lydia Polgreen
reported from Segou, and Peter Tinti from Diabaly, Mali.
January 21,
2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and ERIC SCHMITT
ALGIERS —
The prime minister of Algeria offered an unapologetic defense on Monday of the
country’s tough actions to end the Sahara hostage crisis, saying that the
militants who had carried out the kidnappings intended to kill all their
captives and that the army saved many from death by attacking.
But the assertion came as the death toll of foreign hostages rose sharply, to
37, and as American officials said they had offered sophisticated surveillance
help that could minimize casualties, both before and during the military
operation to retake a seized gas field complex in the Algerian desert.
At least some of the assistance was accepted, they said, but there were still
questions about whether Algeria had taken all available steps to avert such a
bloody outcome.
American counterterrorism officials and experts said they would have taken a
more cautious approach, using detailed surveillance to gain an information
advantage and hopefully outmaneuver the militants. But others declined to
second-guess the Algerians, saying events had unfolded so rapidly that the
government might have felt it had no choice but to kill the kidnappers, even if
hostages died in the process.
The debate over how the Algerians handled one of the worst hostage-taking
episodes in recent memory reflects conflicting ideas over how to manage such
mass abductions in an age of suicidal terrorist acts in a post-9/11 world.
The Algerians — and some Western supporters — argue that the loss of innocent
lives is unavoidable when confronting fanatics who will kill their captives
anyway, while others say modern technology provides some means of minimizing the
deaths.
At a news conference in Algiers, the prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal,
portrayed the military’s deadly assaults on the Islamist militants who had
stormed and occupied an internationally run gas-producing complex last Wednesday
in remote eastern Algeria as a matter of national character and pride.
“The whole world has understood that the reaction was courageous,” Mr. Sellal
said, calling the abductions an attack “on the stability of Algeria.”
“Algerians are not people who sell themselves out,” he said. “When the security
of the country is at stake, there is no possible discussion.”
It was the Algerian government’s first detailed public explanation of its
actions during the siege, a brazen militant assault that has raised broad new
concerns about the strength of extremists who have carved out enclaves in
neighboring Mali and elsewhere in North Africa.
Mr. Sellal said that the 37 foreign workers killed during the episode — a toll
much higher than the 23 previously estimated — came from eight countries and
that five captives remained unaccounted for. It was unclear how many had died at
the hands of the kidnappers or the Algerian Army. The United States said that
three Americans were among the dead and that seven had survived.
The prime minister also said that 29 kidnappers had been killed, including the
leader, and that three had been captured alive. The militants were from Egypt,
Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Tunisia and Canada, he said — an assertion the Canadian
government said it was investigating. Mr. Sellal said the group began the plot
in Mali and entered Algeria through Libya, close to the site.
Other countries, notably Japan and Britain, have raised concerns about what they
considered Algeria’s harsh and hasty response. The United States has not
publicly criticized Algeria, which it regards as an ally in the fight to contain
jihadist groups in Africa. But law enforcement and military officials said
Monday that they almost certainly would have handled such a crisis differently.
First, the United States would have engaged in longer discussions with the
captors to identify the leaders and buy time, the officials said. In the
meantime, the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and possibly allied security services could
have moved surveillance drones, high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft and
electronic eavesdropping equipment into place to help identify the locations of
the hostages and the assailants.
“It would have been a precision approach as opposed to a sledgehammer approach,”
said Lt. Gen. Frank Kearney, a retired deputy commander of the United States
military’s Special Operations Command.
A senior American official said the Algerians had allowed an unarmed American
surveillance drone to fly over the gas field on Thursday. But it was unclear
what role, if any, it had played in the Algerian Army’s assault that day.
American officials said they had not been told of the strike in advance.
Prime Minister Sellal conceded no mistakes as he provided the government’s first
distinct timeline in the sequence of events, breaking it down into three
episodes.
First, the militants attacked a guarded bus carrying foreign plant workers to
the airport at In Amenas, and two people aboard were killed. “They wanted to
take control of this bus and take the foreign workers directly to northern Mali
so they could have hostages, to negotiate with foreign countries,” he said. “But
when they opened fire on the bus, there was a strong response from the gendarmes
guarding it.”
After they failed to capture the bus, the prime minister said, the militants
split into two groups: one to seize the complex’s living quarters, the other to
capture the gas plant itself, a maze of pipes and machinery. They invaded both
sections, taking dozens of hostages, attaching bombs to some and booby-trapping
the plant.
At this point, he said, the facility was ringed by security forces.
Perhaps late Wednesday or early Thursday morning — Mr. Sellal described it as a
nighttime episode — the kidnappers attempted a breakout. “They put explosives on
the hostages. They wanted to put the hostages in four-wheel-drive vehicles and
take them to Mali.”
Mr. Sellal then suggested that government helicopters immobilized the
kidnappers. Witnesses have described an intense army assault, resulting in both
militant and hostage deaths.
“A great number of workers were put in the cars; they wanted to use them as
human shields,” the prime minister said. “There was a strong response from the
army, and three cars exploded,” he said. One contained an Algerian militant whom
the prime minister identified as the leader, Mohamed-Lamine Bouchneb.
The second and final operation happened Saturday, Mr. Sellal said, when the 11
remaining kidnappers moved into the gas-producing part of the complex, a
hazardous area that he said they had already tried to ignite.
“The aim of the terrorists was to explode the gas compound,” he said. In this
second assault, he said, there were “a great number of hostages,” and the
kidnappers were ordered to kill them all. It was then, he said, that army
snipers killed the kidnappers.
None of the Algerian reporters questioned the prime minister’s version of
events, and some spoke of a disconnect between foreign complaints about the way
Algeria had managed the crisis and Algeria’s protracted struggle with Islamic
militancy over the past three decades.
“The terrorists came with a precise plan: Kidnap foreigners and destroy the gas
plant,” said Hamid Guemache, a journalist at TSA-Tout sur l’Algérie, an online
news site, dismissing criticism of the government. “Did it really have a choice?
If the assault hadn’t been undertaken quickly, maybe the terrorists would have
succeeded in killing all the hostages, and blowing up the factory.”
Some American counterterrorism officials conceded that point.
“If the terrorists were shooting hostages or at least putting explosives around
their necks and their intent was to sabotage the plant, this might have been a
suicide mission to blow up the plant, and not negotiate,” said Henry A.
Crumpton, a retired career C.I.A. officer and formerly the State Department’s
top counterterrorism official.
“It sounds horrible to say, but given the number of hostages and scope of this,
this is not as bad an outcome as what could have happened, if that was their
intent.”
In all, 790 workers were on the site — including 134 foreigners of 26
nationalities — when it was first seized, the prime minister said.
From the start of the siege, the Algerians were bound to respond with force,
said Mansouria Mokhefi, a professor who heads the Middle East and Maghreb
program at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris. The
question, she said, was how bloody the outcome would be.
“Everyone knows the Algerians do not negotiate,” Dr. Mokhefi said, and surely
the attackers knew this as well.
After all, she said, the foundation of the Algerian government is its
longstanding defeat of Islamist militancy and its restoration of a “certain
peace” to the country after the civil war during the 1990s, when tens of
thousands died.
“The legitimacy of this government in Algeria is its fight against terrorism and
the security of the country,” Dr. Mokhefi said.
Criticizing the Algerians for their harsh tactics, as the British and Japanese
have done, simply shows “a deep lack of knowledge about this regime, of its
functioning,” she said.
But the French understand the Algerians, Dr. Mokhefi said.
French officials have publicly supported Algeria’s actions, in part because
France needs to use Algerian airspace for its military intervention in Mali and
wants Algeria to work harder to seal its borders with Mali.
“There isn’t a military unit that would have done better, given the strategic
conditions, the place where this unfolded, the number of assailants and the
number of hostages,” said Christian Prouteau, who was chief of security under
President François Mitterrand. “I challenge any Western country confronting this
kind of operation to do better.”
Adam Nossiter
reported from Algiers, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Reporting was
contributed by Hadjer Guenanfa from Algiers, Steven Erlanger
and Scott
Sayare from Paris, Alan Cowell from London,
January 20, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON — Not quite nine months into his presidency, Barack
Obama woke to the news that he had won the Nobel Peace Prize — not for anything
yet accomplished, but for the promise that he would end the Iraq war, win the
“war of necessity” in Afghanistan, move toward the elimination of nuclear
weapons, tackle climate change and engage America’s adversaries.
Yet beyond Iraq, his first-term accomplishments from that list are sparse. In a
fractured world, President Obama struggled to define a grand strategy for
America’s role, apart from preserving its pre-eminence while relying
increasingly on a changing cast of partners.
As Mr. Obama begins his second term, aides and confidants say he is acutely
aware that his ambitious agenda to restore America’s influence and image in the
world stalled almost as soon as the prize was awarded. But the president has
indicated that he plans to return to his original agenda, though he has hinted
it may be in a different, less overtly ambitious way.
Bitter experience — from getting the most modest arms control agreement through
the Senate his first year, trying and failing to engage leaders in Iran and
North Korea, discovering his lack of leverage over Egypt, Pakistan and Israel,
and finding Afghanistan to be a costly waste of American lives and resources —
is driving him to a strategy reminiscent of one of his Republican predecessors,
President Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It is a strategy in which Mr. Obama will try to redirect world events subtly,
rather than turning to big treaties, big military interventions and big aid
packages.
“The appeal of the Eisenhower approach is that it had a big element of turning
inward, of looking to rebuilding strength at home, of conserving American
power,” said one of Mr. Obama’s senior national security advisers, who would not
agree to be quoted by name. “But there’s also the reality that some of the
initiatives that seemed so hopeful four years ago — whether it’s driving down
the number of nuclear weapons or helping Afghanistan remake itself — look so
much harder now.”
Whether this approach can work is very much an open question. His early forays
into covert action and lightning-quick strikes — like the fast war in Libya or
the cyberwar against Iran — have set back adversaries, but the satisfactions of
striking with a “light footprint” have usually been temporary at best.
His promises of transformative change are now viewed around the world with more
suspicion. There was the student in Cairo who cornered a reporter a year ago and
demanded to know why the prison at Guantánamo Bay was still open, and the
European foreign minister who, at a diplomatic dinner in Washington, asked
whether “the pivot to Asia is another phrase for ignoring the rest of the
world.”
Mr. Obama’s questions during Situation Room sessions, some of his current and
former aides say, seem to reflect a concern that his first term was spent
putting out fires, rather than building lasting institutions.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Harry S. Truman solidified
America’s post-World War II role by helping create the United Nations, the
international financial institutions and the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe;
President John F. Kennedy emerged from the Cuban Missile Crisis with treaties
limiting the spread of nuclear weapons; the first President George Bush lured
new allies from the ruins of the Soviet Union.
By comparison, Mr. Obama’s biggest accomplishments have been largely defensive:
a full withdrawal from Iraq and devastating strikes against the core leadership
of Al Qaeda. (When President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan visited the White House
last week, he was presented a scorecard: of the “20 most wanted” Qaeda leaders
when Mr. Obama was first inaugurated, 13 were dead, along with many of their
successors.)
The president’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, has argued in
speeches since Mr. Obama’s re-election that in the first term the president
built a broader alliance against Iran than any of his predecessors; that is
true, but so far it has not moved the Iranians to limit their nuclear drive.
The United States has variously offered to increase aid to Egypt or restrict it
if the country heads off on an illiberal path. So far neither approach has given
Mr. Obama leverage in influencing the new government led by the Muslim
Brotherhood. A promising start in building an economic and political partnership
with China has devolved into an argument over whether the United States is
seeking to contain China’s ambitions.
“He wants to be something more than a pure manager for the next four years,”
said Jeffrey A. Bader, a longtime diplomat who was one of the White House
architects of the “rebalancing” toward Asia. He added that Mr. Obama
“understands that being a transformative president on a global stage is about
more than good intentions and good plans. It’s about finding places where you
are not dependent on adversaries who refuse to budge, or who benefit from
demonstrating their hostility to the U.S.”
If there is a big strategic bet in Mr. Obama’s second term, it may be that Asia
is that place. The huge, unexpected burst in oil and gas production in the
United States has bolstered Mr. Obama’s conviction that the United States has an
opportunity to extract itself from an overdependence on events in the Middle
East. In Asia, he has found a region more welcoming to American influence,
largely because a greater American presence — meaning more naval ships and more
investment — can quietly counterbalance China’s rising power.
Mr. Obama’s focus on Asia has reinforced his interest in the Eisenhower era.
After the Korean War, Americans simply wanted to bring the troops home and focus
on growth. Eisenhower had publicly committed to both balancing the budget and
containing growing threats around the world, while in secret he began a broad
rethinking of American national security called Project Solarium.
Just as Mr. Obama has privately worried about being manipulated by generals who
were trying to lengthen the American involvement in Afghanistan, Eisenhower left
office warning of the “military-industrial complex” that he feared would
dominate American decision making.
At the same time, those who work with Mr. Obama, and parse his questions in
Situation Room debates over the ability of the United States to influence events
in places like Syria or Mali or North Korea, say they sense in him a greater
awareness than he had four years ago of the limits of American influence.
He asks more detailed questions about how sending 100 troops, or 10,000, might
influence long-term outcomes. Paraphrasing the president, one aide said he is
more likely to ask, “So if we put troops into Syria to stabilize the chemical
weapons, what can they accomplish in a year that they couldn’t accomplish in a
week?”
That is a product of Mr. Obama’s bitter experience in 2009, when he yielded to
advice from the military to send a surge of tens of thousands of troops into
Afghanistan. He regretted it almost instantly. The move to an “Afghan good
enough” strategy followed, with minimal goals and a quicker withdrawal of
troops. Ever since, he has been hesitant to use traditional power in traditional
ways.
“He has got to find the happy medium between not committing us to a decade-long
ground war and choosing not to do anything,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, who was
the head of the State Department’s policy planning operation for Mr. Obama’s
first two years in office and has urged him to intervene more strongly in
humanitarian disasters.
Mr. Obama’s caution has incurred a cost. To much of the world, his presidency
thus far looks unlike what they expected. He promised “direct engagement” with
longtime adversaries, including Cuba, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea and Venezuela.
He is one for five: only the generals running Myanmar responded to his letters,
economic incentives and offers of a new relationship.
In what Mr. Obama once called the “war of necessity,” in Afghanistan, the
complaint heard more often is that Mr. Obama has abandoned any pretense of
accomplishment in favor of accelerating the withdrawal.
“The situation is obviously not very confidence-inspiring,” Hina Rabbani Khar,
Pakistan’s foreign minister, said in an interview last week. “A responsible
transition means that you have achieved your objectives and then you leave. It’s
not ‘We leave in January.’ It’s ‘We leave when the objectives are achieved.’ ”
And what of the grand initiatives?
A proposal for a very large reduction in deployed nuclear weapons has been in
the hands of the White House for months, but the president has not acted on it.
Mr. Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. promised a new push to win
passage of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which was defeated during the
Clinton administration. They have never submitted it to the Senate.
“We were assured by President Obama when he was elected that the U.S. would
ratify this C.T.B.T.,” Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations,
said on Friday. “But somehow, it has not happened.”
Given the composition of the Senate, it is not likely to happen in a second
term, either. So Mr. Obama, his aides say, will have to find another way; like
Eisenhower, he will have to redirect American policy quietly, from the Oval
Office.
January 19,
2013
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK and MAYY EL SHEIKH
CAIRO —
When President Mohamed Morsi and his allies in the Muslim Brotherhood pushed
through a new constitution last month, liberals feared it would enable them to
put an Islamist stamp on the Egyptian state, in part by purging nearly half the
judges on the Supreme Constitutional Court.
But those warnings are turning out to be premature, at the very least, as the
court itself made clear last week at its opening session last week, its first
meeting under the new charter.
The president of the court sneered with disdain at a lawyer for the Muslim
Brotherhood trying to address the reconfigured bench, stripped of 7 of its 18
members. “As if you left a court to be spoken of like this!” Judge Maher
el-Beheiry snapped. He had already declared that the court, perceived as an
enemy of the Islamists, “can never forget” the Brotherhood’s protests against it
during the constitutional debate.
In the two years since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, Mr. Morsi and the Islamists
have trounced their political opposition again and again at the polls and have
accumulated unrivaled political power.
But Judge Beheiry’s rebuke was a vivid reminder that their political victories
have not yet translated into real power over the Egyptian bureaucracy. Mr. Morsi
still appears to exercise little day-to-day authority over the judiciary, the
police, the military and the state-run news media.
“If you think of the main pillars of the bureaucracy, the Brotherhood has not
gotten control of them yet, and I don’t think they will completely,” said Hani
Shukrallah, 62, the left-leaning editor of an English-language state news Web
site who was recently was asked to retire by its new management. “There are so
many people who are very difficult to bring to heel,” he said. “I think we are
in for several years of turbulence where state power is diffused.”
Although Mr. Morsi has the legitimacy of a democratic election, he has inherited
the still-intact remnants of Mr. Mubarak’s authoritarian state, built on fear,
loyalty and patronage, and much of it permeated by a deep distrust of the
Islamists.
Mr. Morsi and his allies are now only beginning to attempt to exert some control
over the body of the state that would allow him to put in effect a social,
economic and political program. And his ultimate success, or failure, will help
decide some of the most pivotal questions concerning Egypt’s future, for better
or worse.
On the one hand, the bureaucracy’s resistance could prevent the Islamists from
consolidating their power, imposing their ideology, or, as some liberals say
they fear, building a new dictatorship. But the failure to exert control could
also prolong vexing social problems, like the collapse of public security
because of the withdrawal of the police.
The analysts say that Mr. Morsi is clearly working to install networks of allies
over key parts of the state. He has named Brotherhood members as governors in 7
out of 28 provinces. In a recent cabinet shake-up, he named another Brotherhood
member as minister of local development, who under the new Constitution could
have new powers over day-to-day local government.
His Islamist allies in the legislature named at least 11 fellow Islamists,
including at least 3 ultraconservatives, to the 27 seats on the newly empowered
National Council for Human Rights. The Constitution and other new rules give it
the authority to regulate election observers, investigate human rights
violations and act as a public ombudsman.
But Mr. Morsi’s attempts to consolidate his power have often yielded equivocal
results. He finally persuaded Egypt’s top generals to relinquish their authority
over the civilian government last August. But in December, the Islamist-backed
Constitution granted the generals broad immunity and autonomy from civilian
control, in an apparent quid pro quo.
Brotherhood leaders acknowledge they face deep resistance. When the president
took office, the holdover staff was destroying his faxes and mail in small acts
of sabotage, said one senior Brotherhood leader, speaking on the condition of
anonymity to avoid further inflaming the tensions. In the Interior Ministry,
which nominally reports to the president, rank-and-file officers remain all but
openly antagonistic to Mr. Morsi and his party.
During the contentious run-up to the constitutional vote late last year, the
police failed to increase security outside Brotherhood offices as one after
another were vandalized and often burned. And when protesters clashed with
Islamists outside the presidential palace, the police effectively vanished from
the scene. “It seemed like a clear mutiny,” said Heba Morayef, a researcher with
Human Rights Watch.
“It was as if the arm of the state was striking at its own head,” the senior
Brotherhood leader complained.
The police say the lesson they learned from the revolution against Mr. Mubarak
was not to stand against protesters on behalf of an individual president.
“It fills me with pride that a police officer was the one who opened the
improvised metal gate for protesters during the march to the presidential palace
to allow them to continue,” said Ahmed Mansour al-Helbawi, the head of a police
union that claims to have 400,000 members. “The protesters carried him on their
shoulders and chanted: ‘The people and the police are one hand.’ ”
Mr. Helbawi said the officers were no longer willing to use force against
demonstrators even outside the presidential palace. But he acknowledged that the
police still show no such hesitation when protesters approach their own
headquarters.
As for the failure to protect the offices of the Brotherhood’s Freedom and
Justice Party, “If I protect the F.J.P., then I must also protect the Wafd Party
and the Constitution Party and every other party there is!” Mr. Helbawi said,
adding that the police would never again “turn into the ministry of just one
political party,” as it was under Mr. Mubarak.
Mr. Morsi has tried to extend control over the police and removed the interior
minister, who presided over last month’s debacle and was a Mubarak enforcer who
had run the Cairo district during the brutal crackdown two years ago. But Mr.
Morsi replaced him with another longtime Mubarak-era police official, Mohamed
Ibrahim, in an apparent bid to avoid an even broader police insurrection.
(Groups claiming to represent the police have still circulated anonymous calls
for a police protest over the dismissal this week.)
Mr. Morsi’s allies have not fared much better in trying to gain control of the
official state news media, one of the most visible bellwethers of their hold on
the bureaucracy. The Islamist-controlled upper house of Parliament replaced the
top officials, but state television still provides evidence that many of the
tens of thousands who work in the state news media oppose the Brotherhood.
The host Hala Fahmy, for example, opened a show by accusing the new government
of selling out the “martyrs” and theatrically holding up a shroud to show she
was ready to join them. She is now off the air, pending an investigation of the
outburst.
“There are 40,000 people working in the building,” said Ehab El Mergawi, a state
television news producer who is also a member of the leftist April 6 group. “And
I think 35,000 out of those can’t stand the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Emad Shahin, a political scientist at the American University in Cairo, said
that so far the Brotherhood takeover sometimes appears to be working in reverse.
“You feel that the institutions are taking over Morsi and the Muslim
Brotherhood,” he said, “not the other way around.”
Hostages
Dead in Bloody Climax to Siege in Algeria
January 19,
2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER
BAMAKO,
Mali — The four-day hostage crisis in the Sahara reached a bloody conclusion on
Saturday as the Algerian Army carried out a final assault on the gas field taken
over by Islamist militants, killing most of the remaining kidnappers and raising
the total of hostages killed to at least 23, Algerian officials said.
Although the government declared an end to the militants’ siege, the authorities
believed that a handful of jihadists were most likely hiding somewhere in the
sprawling complex and said that troops were hunting for them.
The details of the desert standoff and the final battle for the plant remained
murky on Saturday night — as did information about which hostages died and how —
with even the White House suggesting that it was unclear what had happened. In a
brief statement released early Saturday night the president said his
administration would “remain in close touch with the government of Algeria to
gain a fuller understanding of what took place.”
The British defense minister, Philip Hammond, called the loss of life “appalling
and unacceptable” after reports that up to seven hostages were killed in the
final hours of the hostage crisis, and he said that the leaders of the attack
would be tracked down. The Algerian government said that 32 militants had been
killed since Wednesday, although it cautioned that its casualty counts were
provisional.
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta, who appeared with Mr. Hammond at a news
conference in London, said he did not yet have reliable information about the
fate of the Americans at the facility, although a senior Algerian official said
two had been found “safe and sound.”
What little information trickled out was as harrowing as what had come in the
days before, when some hostages who had managed to escape told of workers being
forced to wear explosives. They also said that there were several summary
executions and that some workers had died in the military’s initial rescue
attempt.
On Saturday, Algerian officials reported that some bodies found by troops who
rushed into the industrial complex were charred beyond recognition, making it
difficult to distinguish between the captors and the captured. Two were assumed
to be workers because they were handcuffed.
Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, said that five Britons and one
British resident had died in the final rescue attempt or were unaccounted for.
He said that police forces were fanning out across Britain visiting each of the
families involved.
Most of the hundreds of workers at the plant, who come from about 25 countries,
appear to have escaped sometime during the four days.
The Algerian government has been relatively silent since the start of the
crisis, releasing few details. The government faced withering international
criticism for rushing ahead with its first assault on the militants on Thursday
even as governments whose citizens were trapped inside the plant pleaded for
more time, fearing that rescue attempts might lead to workers dying. The
Algerians responded by saying they had a better understanding of how to handle
militants after fighting Islamist insurgents for years.
On Saturday, it was unclear who killed the last hostages. Initial reports from
Algerian state news media said that seven workers had been executed during the
army’s raid, but the senior government official and another high-level official,
both of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity, later said the number killed
and the cause were unknown. The early reports also said 11 militants were
killed, but later information suggested that some may have blown themselves up.
One of the Algerian officials defended the latest military assault, saying the
government feared the militants were about to set off explosions at the In
Amenas complex.
The Algerian state oil company, Sonatrach, said that the attackers had evidently
mined the facility with the intention of blowing it up and that the company was
working to ensure the safety of the plant.
The government official, meanwhile, said that the militants had set fire to the
plant’s control tower on Friday night and that it was later extinguished by
soldiers and workers. The militants also tried to blow up a pipeline, he said,
leading officials to worry about the stocks of gas at the plant. “The
authorities were afraid they were going to blow up the reserves,” said the
official, who believed the militants had planned all along to destroy the
complex.
Whatever the goal, the message of the militant takeover of the gas complex, in a
country that has perhaps the world’s toughest record for dealing with
terrorists, seemed clear, at least to Algerian officials: the Islamist ministate
in northern Mali, now under assault by French and Malian forces, has given a new
boost to transnational terrorism. The brigade of some 32 Islamists that took the
plant was multinational, Algerian officials said — with only three Algerians in
the group.
“We have indications that they originated from northern Mali,” one of the senior
officials said. “They want to establish a terrorist state.”
A Mali-based Algerian jihadist with ties to Al Qaeda, Mokhtar Belmokhtar, has
claimed responsibility through spokesmen — and is blamed by the Algerians — for
masterminding the raid.
The militants who attacked the plant said it was in retaliation for the French
troops sweeping into Mali this month to stop an advance of Islamist rebels south
toward the capital, although they later said they had been planning an attack in
Algeria for some time. The group that attacked the plant, thought to be based in
Gao, Mali, was previously little known and had splintered last year from Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Al Qaeda’s North African branch.
The gas plant is operated by Sonatrach, Norway’s Statoil and BP of Britain.
The militant takeover of the site began with heavy gunfire early Wednesday, and
continued through the fierce, helicopter-led government assault on Thursday.
United States officials had said that “seven or eight” Americans had been at the
In Amenas field when it was seized by the militants.
One American, Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Tex., was confirmed dead on
Friday.
On Saturday, BP announced that another American, a Texan named Mark Cobb, who
was a manager of the plant, survived. A man from Austin also survived, according
to a spokesman for Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas. It was
unclear if either of the Texans who survived were the two declared “safe and
sound” early on Saturday.
In a call with reporters, Robert Dudley, BP’s chief executive, said that 18 BP
employees had been at the facility during the “unprovoked attack by heavily
armed murderers” and that 14 had been evacuated safely. He said the fate of the
four other employees remained unknown.
Among the workers killed at the plant were a French citizen identified as Yann
Desjeux, who died before Saturday’s raid. An Algerian state news agency said
some Algerians had also been killed as of Friday.
One Algerian who managed to escape told France 24 television late Friday night
that the kidnappers said, “We’ve come in the name of Islam, to teach the
Americans what Islam is.” The haggard-looking man, interviewed at the airport in
Algiers, said the kidnappers then immediately executed five hostages.
While the government has defended its actions because of its experience with
militants, one of the senior government officials acknowledged Saturday morning
that the militant attack was of a scale and complexity the country had not
experienced before.
“This one is different,” he said. “It’s of another dimension.”
Nonetheless, the brazenness of the assault — with scores of fighters attacking
one of the country’s most important gas-producing facilities — is likely to call
into question Algeria’s much vaunted security strategy in dealing with the
Islamic militants who find shelter in its southern deserts, near the border with
Mali.
The Algerians have made a virtue out of keeping a lid on these militants,
pushing them toward Mali in a strategy of modified containment, and ruthlessly
stamping them out when they attempt an attack in the Algerian interior. So far
it has worked, and Algeria’s extensive oil and gas fields, which are essential
sources of revenue, have been protected.
That relative success had allowed Algeria to take a hands-off approach to the
Islamist conquest of northern Mali in recent months, even as Western governments
pleaded with it to become more directly involved in confronting the militants,
who move across the hazy border between the two countries.
But now Algeria may have to rethink its approach, analysts suggest.
If the outcome represents a relative setback for Algeria, it could be viewed as
a victory for the Islamists who carried out the assault on the gas plant,
achieving several of their perennial goals: killing large numbers of Westerners
and disrupting states they have put on their enemies list — including Algeria.
Indeed, a spokesman for those militants — in a report on a news site that often
carries their statements — said Friday that they planned more attacks in
Algeria.
Reporting was
contributed by Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris,
Elisabeth
Bumiller and John F. Burns from London, Manny Fernandez
and Clifford
Krauss from Houston, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.
This article
has been revised
to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 19, 2013
Because of an editing error,
an earlier version of this article misstated the
nationality
January 18,
2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and RICK GLADSTONE
BAMAKO,
Mali — Defying the Algerian Army’s demands to give up, the band of Islamist
militant kidnappers who terrorized a remote Saharan gas field complex still held
at least 10 and possibly dozens of foreign hostages on Friday, and a senior
Algerian government official said there were no talks planned to end the
standoff.
“They are being told to surrender, that’s it,” the official said on the third
day of the crisis. “No negotiations. That is a doctrine with us.”
The United States said for the first time that Americans were among the
remaining captives and confirmed the first known death of an American hostage,
Frederick Buttaccio, 58, of Katy, Tex. Linked In, the social networking site for
professionals, lists a Frederick Buttaccio as a sales operations coordinator for
BP, the British energy giant that helped run the complex, but a company official
said it would not comment on any employee who may have been at the facility.
France said a French citizen also was known to have been killed.
All foreign governments with citizens at risk were still scrambling for basic
information about the missing as they ferried escaped hostages out of the
country on military aircraft and urged Algeria to use restraint.
“This is an extremely difficult and dangerous situation,” Secretary of State
Hillary Rodham Clinton told reporters in Washington. Describing a conversation
she had earlier Friday with Algeria’s prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, Mrs.
Clinton said she had emphasized to him that “the utmost care must be taken to
preserve innocent life.”
Algeria’s state news agency, APS, said 12 Algerian and foreign workers had been
killed since Algerian special forces began an assault against the kidnappers on
Thursday. It was the highest civilian death toll Algerian officials that have
provided in the aftermath of the assault, which freed captives and killed
kidnappers but also left some hostages dead in one of the worst mass abductions
of foreign workers in years.
Previous unofficial estimates of the foreign casualties have ranged from 4 to
35. The American who died, Mr. Buttaccio, lived in a gated community in Katy, a
suburb that is about 30 miles west of downtown Houston.The Algerian news agency
also said that 18 militants had been killed and that the country’s special
forces were dealing with remnants of a “terrorist group” that was still holding
hostages in the refinery area of the gas field in remote eastern Algeria.
It also gave a new sense of how many people may have been at the facility when
the militants seized it on Wednesday, asserting that nearly 650 had managed to
leave the site since then, including 573 Algerians and nearly half of the 132
foreigners it said had been abducted. But that still left many people
unaccounted for.
The senior Algerian official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he
believed there were about 10 hostages, under the control of possibly 13 to 15
militants, but he emphasized that “nothing is certain” about the numbers, which
have varied wildly since the crisis began. He also said that there were other
workers on the site “who are still in hiding” but that the Algerian military had
secured the residential part of the gas-field complex.
“What remains are a few terrorists, holding a few hostages, who have taken
refuge in the gas factory,” he said. “It’s a site that’s very tricky to handle.”
The official also challenged the criticism made in some foreign capitals that
the Algerian military had acted hastily and with excessive force. On the
contrary, he said, Algerian forces had returned fire only as the militants
sought to escape the complex with their captives.
“There was a reaction by the army,” he said. “They tried to flee and they were
stopped,” the official said of the militants. “They came absolutely to blow the
whole site up. These are bitter-enders.”
Earlier Friday, the State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, said that not
all Americans had been freed. “We have American hostages,” she said, offering
the first update on what was known about United States citizens since officials
confirmed on Thursday that seven or eight of them had been inside the gas-field
complex.
Ms. Nuland also said the United States would not consider a reported offer made
by the kidnappers to exchange two Americans for two prominent figures imprisoned
in the United States — Omar Abdel Rahman, a sheik convicted of plotting to bomb
New York landmarks, and Aafia Siddiqui, a Pakistani woman convicted of shooting
two American soldiers in Afghanistan. It was impossible to confirm that offer,
which was reported by the Washington-based SITE Intelligence Group, a service
that tracks jihadist activity on the Internet.
Intensifying the uncertainties, a spokesman for the militants, who belong to a
group called Al Mulathameen, said Friday that they planned further attacks in
Algeria, according to a report by the Mauritanian news agency ANI, which
maintains frequent contact with militant groups in the region. The spokesman
called upon Algerians to “keep away from the installations of foreign companies
because we will suddenly attack where no one would expect it,” ANI reported.
The Algerian military operation to end the gas-field siege was done without
consulting foreign governments whose citizens worked at the facility. It has
been marked by a fog of conflicting reports, compounded by the remoteness of the
facility, near a town called In Amenas that is hundreds of miles across the
desert from the Algerian capital, Algiers, and close to the Libyan border.
In London, Prime Minister David Cameron told Parliament that the number of
Britons at risk was estimated late Thursday at “less than 30.” That number has
now been “quite significantly reduced,” he said, adding that he could not give
details because the crisis was continuing. British officials have said they know
at least one Briton was killed when the militants seized the facility.
Offering a broad account of Algeria’s handling of the operation, he told
lawmakers: “We were not informed of this in advance. I was told by the Algerian
prime minister while it was taking place. He said that the terrorists had tried
to flee, that they judged there to be an immediate threat to the lives of the
hostages and had felt obliged to respond.”
In Paris, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius confirmed for the first time that a
French citizen had been killed, although it was not clear exactly when. The
victim, whom Mr. Fabius identified as Yann Desjeux, had contacted relatives as
recently as noon Thursday, according to the French newspaper Sud Ouest, which
also said it had spoken with Mr. Desjeux. Three other French citizens were
involved in the hostage situation but are now safe, Mr. Fabius said.
Frustration with Algeria’s information vacuum seemed particularly vexing to
Japan, where an energy company that had assigned 17 employees to the gas-field
facility said Friday that seven were confirmed safe but that 10 were unaccounted
for. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe had personally appealed to his Algerian
counterpart by phone early Friday to stop the military action, the Asahi Shimbun
newspaper reported, but was told that military action was “the best response and
we are continuing our operation.”
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta met with Mr. Cameron in London as Pentagon
officials were continuing to try to learn details about the raid.
“We are working around the clock to ensure the safe return of our citizens, and
we will continue to be in close consultation with the Algerian government,” Mr.
Panetta said in a speech in London before meeting with Mr. Cameron.
A separate hostage situation of sorts appeared to have been averted at a village
in Mali, the neighboring country where a French military intervention to stop
radical Islamists may have been the catalyst for the Algerian gas-field seizure
by the Al Mulathameen group. But details were sketchy.
A senior French official in Paris said Malian Islamist fighters, threatened by
French and Malian soldiers, had occupied the village, Diabaly, and were
threatening to use residents as human shields if attacked. But by Friday
evening, a local official in Diabaly said the Islamists and most of the
villagers had fled. “There’s practically nothing left in Diabaly except
burned-out vehicles and boxes of ammunition,” said the official, Benco Ba, a
local parliamentary deputy.
The Algerian fighters had been prepared to attack the gas complex for nearly two
months, the militants’ spokesman said, according to the ANI report, because they
believed that the Algerian government “was surely going to be the ally of
France” in the Malian conflict.
Hostages and analysts have said the attackers appeared well-prepared and deeply
knowledgeable about the site, and there was evidence to suggest they had
informers on the site or were in contact with workers there. An official at BP
indicated earlier in the week that the attackers had shut off production at the
site at the time of the attack, for instance. And at least two former hostages,
interviewed independently, have said the fighters were aware of labor tensions
and plans for a strike among catering workers on the site.
“We know you’re oppressed; we’ve come here so that you can have your rights,”
the militants told Algerians on the site, according to one former hostage.
Another hostage said the fighters had asked about the plans for a strike.
Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting
was contributed by Elisabeth Bumiller, John F. Burns and Julia Werdigier from
London; Alan Cowell, Steven Erlanger and Scott Sayare from Paris; Michael R.
Gordon, Eric Schmitt and Thom Shanker from Washington; Martin Fackler and Hiroko
Tabuchi from Tokyo; and Clifford Krauss and Manny Fernandez from Houston.
January 18,
2013
The New York Times
By LYDIA POLGREEN and SCOTT SAYARE
The gunmen,
dressed in fatigues and wearing turbans, stormed in well before dawn aboard
pickup trucks, announcing their arrival with a burst of gunfire.
Dozens of employees were eating breakfast at the time before heading off to the
vast network of tubes and silos of the In Amenas gas field, where hundreds of
Algerians and foreigners work to extract natural gas from the arid sands of the
Sahara.
“God is great,” the gunmen cried as they arrived.
It was the beginning of a terrifying ordeal — one in which foreign hostages
would come under fire from both the gunmen holding them and the Algerian
government soldiers trying to free them. For many of the captives, it is an
ordeal that has yet to end.
Some hostages were forced to wear explosives on their bodies. Others hid under
beds and on rooftops, praying to survive but expecting death. One was shot in
the back while his fellow captives looked on. Left by their captors with their
cellphones, some phoned home with terrifying accounts of the horrors unfolding
all around.
These were among the chilling tales recounted Friday by some of the hundreds of
workers who managed to escape the national gas field on the eastern edge of
Algeria that had been stormed by Islamist militants two days before.
The gunmen, fighters with a group called Al Mulathameen, said they were acting
to avenge the French intervention in nearby Mali, Algerian officials said. But
there were indications that the attack had been planned long before the French
military began its offensive to recapture the northern half of that country from
Islamist insurgents.
The attackers appeared to know the site well, even the fact that disgruntled
Algerian catering workers were planning a strike.
“We know you’re oppressed; we’ve come here so that you can have your rights,”
the militants told Algerians at the facility, according to one Algerian former
hostage. Another hostage said the fighters had asked about the plans for a
strike.
“The terrorists were covered with explosives, and they had detonators,” said a
senior Algerian government official who was briefed on the crisis. He said the
situation remained a standoff on Friday, with “a few terrorists holding a few
hostages.”
Former captives said that several of the fighters appeared to be foreign, with
non-Algerian accents. One Algerian worker said that some of them may have been
Libyan and Syrian, and that one might have been French. Another gunman who spoke
impeccable English was assigned to speak to the many foreigners.
When the Algerian military eventually intervened, the situation grew even more
chaotic. According to one witness, Algerian helicopters attacked several jeeps
that were carrying hostages. The fate of at least some of those hostages remains
unknown. The Algerian state news agency reported that 12 Algerian and foreign
workers had been killed since the start of the military operation and that
dozens remained unaccounted for.
From the start, it was clear that the gunmen only wished to harm foreigners.
Algerian workers, along with other Muslims who could prove their faith by
reciting from the Koran, were herded into one area, workers said.
“They told us, ‘We are your brothers. You have telephones: call your families to
reassure them,’ ” said Moussa, an Algerian worker who asked to be identified
only by his first name.
Algerian women in the group of hostages were released right away on Wednesday
morning, Moussa said, but the militants initially declined to release the
Algerian men, saying it was for their own good. “We’re afraid that if we free
you, the army will shoot at you,” he quoted them as saying.
Foreigners, meanwhile, were taken away, their hands bound with rubber, both
Algerian witnesses said. Some of the employees resisted. Several Filipino
workers who had refused to leave their rooms were beaten, Moussa said. At one
point, the fighters shot a European as he tried to flee, he said. The other
Algerian described seeing a middle-aged European man, perhaps a security
official, shot in the back in the cafeteria, where the lights had been switched
off. He believed the man had died.
Before being captured, Stephen McFaul, 36, an electrical engineer from Belfast,
Northern Ireland, barricaded himself in a room with a colleague at the first
sound of gunfire, quietly using his cellphone to assure his family that he was
all right.
“I joked that I was from Northern Ireland and that I had been through better
riots,” he told the colleague, according to John Morrissey, a representative for
his family in Belfast who was responding to reporters for media organizations
around the world.
Mr. McFaul, who had been sent to work in Algeria only three weeks ago, was
seized a few hours later, Mr. Morrissey said, and ultimately placed in the last
jeep of a five-jeep convoy that came under heavy air attack from Algerian
forces.
The first four jeeps were destroyed, and when Mr. McFaul’s vehicle veered off
the road, he and a fellow worker managed to climb out of the back window, which
had been broken. Their hands had been tied, their mouths taped and they had been
forced to wear vests loaded with explosives, Mr. Morrissey said.
The two made a run for it, reaching the security forces, who disarmed the
explosives. The spokesman said Mr. McFaul was “bright and together and nervously
excited” about returning home.
At least one American, identified by a Corpus Christi, Tex., television station
as Mark Cobb, also escaped. Mr. Cobb, who is from the Corpus Christi area, is
said to have taken cover in an unused room and then made his way out of the
plant unharmed, according to the station, KRIS-TV. On Friday, the station said,
Mr. Cobb sent a text message to a friend that said, “I’m alive.”
Other foreigners, like Alexandre Berceaux, a French employee of a catering
company working at the site, hid themselves as best they could.
“I stayed hidden for nearly 40 hours in my bedroom,” Mr. Berceaux told Europe 1
Radio. “I was under the bed, and I put boards everywhere just in case. I had
food, water; I didn’t know how long I would be there.”
He said he was certain he would be killed. “When the Algerian soldiers, whom I
thank, came to get me, I didn’t even know it was over,” he said. The soldiers
came with his colleagues, he said, “otherwise I would never have opened the
door.”
Mr. Berceaux said Algerian soldiers found some British hostages hiding on the
roof and were still searching the site for others when he was escorted to a
nearby military base, from which he expected to be transferred to France. Others
might still be hidden, he said.
Among the casualties was a French citizen identified as Yann Desjeux, the French
foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, said in a statement on Friday evening. Mr.
Desjeux had contacted his family by telephone midday on Thursday and died
sometime later, according to the French newspaper Sud Ouest, which also had
spoken to Mr. Desjeux on Thursday.
The newspaper said a freelance journalist had dialed up a militant he had been
in contact with previously and discovered that the man was involved in the raid
on the factory. The journalist asked if any Frenchmen were captives, and the
militant then passed the phone to Mr. Desjeux, 52, who said he was being well
treated and that the captors wanted the French government to warn Algeria not to
raid the factory.
The circumstances of his death were not clear.
Adam Nossiter
contributed reporting from Bamako, Mali; Douglas Dalby from Dublin;
January 17,
2013
The New York Times
By STEVEN ERLANGER and ADAM NOSSITER
PARIS — His
entourage calls him “the Prince,” and after the militant Islamist takeover of a
town in northern Mali last year, he liked to go down to the river and watch the
sunset, surrounded by armed bodyguards.
Others call him “Laaouar,” or the One-Eyed, after he lost an eye to shrapnel;
some call him “Mr. Marlboro” for the cigarette-smuggling monopoly he created
across the Sahel region to finance his jihad. And French intelligence officials
called him “the Uncatchable” because he escaped after apparently being involved
in a series of kidnappings in 2003 that captured 32 European tourists, an
undertaking which is thought to have earned him millions of dollars in ransoms.
Mokhtar Belmokhtar, 40, born in the Algerian desert city of Ghardaïa, 350 miles
south of Algiers, is now being called the mastermind of the hostage crisis at an
internationally run natural-gas facility in eastern Algeria.
Algerian officials say he mounted the assault and the mass abduction of
foreigners; his spokesmen say the raid is in reprisal for the French
intervention in Mali and for Algeria’s support for the French war against
Islamist militants in the Sahel.
Mr. Belmokhtar has been active in politics, moneymaking and fighting for decades
in the Sahel, which includes Mali, Mauritania and Niger and is one of the
poorest regions in the world. But through this single action, one of the most
brazen kidnappings in years, he has suddenly become one of the best-known
figures associated with the Islamist militancy sweeping the region and agitating
capitals around the world.
The 1989 killing in Pakistan of Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, a Palestinian considered
the “father of global jihad” and a mentor of Osama bin Laden’s, prompted Mr.
Belmokhtar to seek to avenge Mr. Azzam’s death, he has said in interviews. At 19
he traveled to Afghanistan for training with Al Qaeda, and has claimed in
interviews to have made contact with other jihadi luminaries like Abu Qatada and
Abu Muhammad al-Maqdisi, according to a 2009 Jamestown Foundation study. Bin
Laden made contact with him, through emissaries, in the early 2000s, according
to Djallil Lounnas, who teaches at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco.
Mr. Belmokhtar later named a son Osama, after Bin Laden, and inserted himself
into local populations in the southern Algerian and northern Malian desert by
marrying the daughter of a prominent Arab leader from Timbuktu, Mali. He is also
said to have shared the riches of his lucrative activities with the impoverished
local population, Mr. Lounnas has written.
Mr. Belmokhtar, described as taciturn, watchful and wary by a Malian journalist,
Malick Aliou Maïga, who met him last summer, was one of the most experienced of
the leaders of what became Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb until he broke with
the group last year to form his own organization, the Signed-in-Blood Battalion,
sometimes translated as the Signatories for Blood. Occasionally using the alias
Khaled Abu Abass, he is thought to have based himself in Gao, Mali, which has
seen heavy bombing by French warplanes.
It was not clear whether Mr. Belmokhtar was at the scene or commanding the
operation from afar.
There are stories that he lost his eye fighting in Afghanistan, but others say
he lost it fighting Algerian government troops after he returned to Algeria in
1993. The country was being ripped apart by civil war at the time, after the
government annulled 1992 elections that were about to be won by an Islamist
party. Mr. Belmokhtar has been a wanted man in Algeria since that time and
condemned to death several times by Algerian courts.
Mr. Belmokhtar was falsely reported to have been killed in 1999. Nearly a decade
later, the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, which he joined, adopted the
jihadist ideology of Bin Laden and renamed itself Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb. Mr. Belmokhtar is considered to have been a key intermediary with Al
Qaeda and a well-known supplier of weapons and matériel in the Sahara.
But he clearly does not share authority easily, and left or was removed from his
post as commander of a battalion in Mali last October, reportedly for “straying
from the right path,” according to a Malian official, quoting the leader of Al
Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, Abdelmalek Droukdel.
The dispute was about Mr. Belmokhtar’s return to smuggling and trafficking.
Dominique Thomas, a specialist in radical Islam, told Le Monde that Mr.
Belmokhtar’s activities ran counter to the group’s official line, which presents
itself as entirely virtuous.
Mr. Belmokhtar then founded his new group, which he allied with the Movement for
Oneness and Jihad in West Africa, another Islamist group that had broken off
from Al Qaeda.
Some suggest that his expertise has been more in criminal activities than in
holy warfare. Kidnapping and smuggling — of cigarettes, stolen cars, arms and
drugs — have been his specialties in the vast and largely lawless border
regions. He was said to be central to hostage-takings and subsequent
negotiations for their release in 2003, 2008 and 2009.
Robert R. Fowler, a former Canadian diplomat and a United Nations special envoy
to Niger, was kidnapped by Mr. Belmokhtar’s brigade in late 2008 and met with
him several times.
“He’s a fairly slight, very serious, very confident-looking guy who moves with
quiet authority,” Mr. Fowler said in a telephone interview from Canada. “He’s
clearly been in the business of being a terrorist and surviving for a long time.
I was always impressed by the quiet authority he exhibited.”
Mr. Maïga, the Malian journalist, recalled seeing Mr. Belmokhtar, dressed in
black and wearing a turban that descended over his eye, leaving a hospital in
Gao with his entourage. He called out to him, and a bodyguard quickly interposed
himself: “You must not,” the bodyguard warned. “That is the Prince.”
Subsequently, Mr. Maïga recalled seeing Mr. Belmokhtar seated on the beach by
the river at Gao, surrounded by bodyguards. “He was saying nothing. He has a
fixed stare. He doesn’t trust people.”
Mr. Maïga and others say locals regard him with both respect and fear.
In an interview with the Mauritanian news agency Alakhbar in Gao in November,
Mr. Belmokhtar said he respected “the clearly expressed choice” of the people of
northern Mali “to apply Islamic Shariah law.” He warned against foreign
interference, saying that any country that did so “would be considered as an
oppressor and aggressor who is attacking a Muslim people applying Shariah on its
territory.”
Mr. Belmokhtar was already scheduled to be tried again in absentia by the
Algiers criminal tribunal starting next Monday, on charges that include
supplying weapons for attacks on Algerian soil. Planned targets were said to
include pipelines and oil company installations in southern Mali.
Steven Erlanger reported from Paris, and Adam Nossiter
from Bamako, Mali. Harvey
Morris contributed reporting from London, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
January 17,
2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER and RICK GLADSTONE
BAMAKO,
Mali — Without warning other governments, Algeria mounted an assault on Thursday
on the heavily armed fighters holding American and other hostages at a remote
Sahara gas field facility, freeing captives and killing kidnappers but leaving
some hostages dead and foreign leaders scrambling to find out the fates of their
citizens.
Hours after the raid, there was no official word on the number of hostages who
had been freed, killed or still held captive. Estimates of the foreign
casualties ranged from 4 to 35, though one Algerian official said the high
figure was “exaggerated.”
Despite requests for communication and pleas to consider the safety of their
abducted citizens, the United States, Britain and Japan said they had not been
told in advance about the military assault, stirring frustration that the
Algerians might have been overly aggressive and caused needless casualties.
But the Algerian government, which has a history of violent suppression of
Islamist militancy, stood by its decision to deal forcefully with the
kidnappers, who were holding Algerians and citizens of nine other countries.
“Those who think we will negotiate with terrorists are delusional,” the
communications minister, Mohand Saïd Oublaïd, said in an announcement about the
assault on the facility near In Amenas, in eastern Algeria, close to the Libya
border. “Those who think we will surrender to their blackmail are delusional.”
The midday assault came more than 24 hours after a militant group, which the
Algerians said had ties to jihadis in the region, ambushed a bus carrying
gas-field workers to a nearby airport and then commandeered the compound. It was
one of the boldest abductions of foreign workers in years.
The abductions were meant to avenge France’s armed intervention in neighboring
Mali, Mr. Oublaïd said, a conflict that has escalated since French warplanes
began striking Islamist fighters who have carved out a vast haven there.
On Thursday, the United States became more deeply involved in the war, working
with the French to determine how to best deploy American C-5 cargo planes to
ferry French troops and equipment into Mali, according to an American military
official.
The United States has long been wary about stepping more directly into the Mali
conflict, worried that it could provoke precisely the kind of anti-Western
attack that took place in Algeria, with deadly consequences. After the raid to
free the hostages, the Algerians acknowledged a price had been paid.
“The operation resulted in the neutralization of a large number of terrorists
and the liberation of a considerable number of hostages,” said Mr. Oublaïd, the
communications minister. “Unfortunately, we deplore also the death of some, as
well as some who were wounded.”
Algerian national radio described a scene of pandemonium and high alert at the
public hospital in the town of In Amenas, where wounded and escaped hostages
were sent. The director of the hospital, Dr. Shahir Moneir, said in the report
that wounded foreign hostages were transferred to the capital, Algiers.
In a telephone interview from the hospital, one of the Algerians who had been
held captive, who identified himself as Mohamed Elias, said some of the hostages
had exploited the chaos created by the Algerian assault to flee. “We used the
opportunity,” he said, “and we just escaped.”
Senior American military officials said that aides traveling in London with
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta were struggling to get basic information about
the raid, and that an unarmed American Predator drone was monitoring the
gas-field site.
One senior official said that possibly seven to eight Americans were among the
hostages — the first official indication of the number of Americans involved —
and that he did not know if any had been killed in the raid.
Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain said his office had not been told ahead
of time, an implicit criticism of the Algerian government. A spokesman said that
Mr. Cameron had learned of the raid through Britain’s own intelligence sources
and that “the Algerians are aware that we would have preferred to have been
consulted in advance.”
Mr. Cameron told reporters the situation was “very dangerous” as he and other
British officials appeared to prepare for bad news. The gravity of the crisis
prompted him to cancel plans to deliver a major speech in Amsterdam.
Japan also expressed strong concern, saying Algeria had failed not only to
advise of the operation ahead of time, but to heed its request to halt the
operation because it was endangering the hostages.
“We asked Algeria to put human lives first and asked Algeria to strictly
refrain,” the chief cabinet secretary, Yoshihide Suga, quoted Prime Minister
Shinzo Abe as telling his Algerian counterpart, Abdelmalek Sellal, by telephone
late Thursday.
The situation is “very confused,” President François Hollande of France said at
a news conference in Paris and was “evolving hour by hour.” Mr. Hollande gave
the first official confirmation that French citizens were among the captives.
A European diplomat who was involved in the effort to coordinate a Western
response to the hostage seizure said that the information available to the
United States, France and Britain had been “confusing at best, and sometimes
contradictory.”
Several Western officials complained that the Algerians appeared to have taken
none of the usual care exercised to minimize casualties when trying to free
hostages.
“They care deeply about their sovereign rights,” said the European diplomat, who
spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s delicacy.
Even before reports of the Algerian military’s raid began to emerge, many
hostages — Algerian and foreign — were reported to have escaped as the
kidnappers failed to persuade the Algerian authorities to give them safe passage
with their captives.
The Algerian news site T.S.A. quoted a local official, Sidi Knaoui, as saying
that 10 foreigners and 40 Algerians had managed to flee after the kidnappers
made several attempts to leave with the hostages.
Ireland confirmed that an Irish citizen, Stephen McFaul, had escaped. The man
had contacted his family and was “understood to be safe and well and no longer a
hostage,” Irish officials said.
Earlier, a French TV station, France 24, quoted an unidentified hostage as
saying the attackers “threatened to blow up the gas field.”
Algeria’s interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, said the seizure of the gas field
had been overseen by Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Algerian who fought in Afghanistan
in the 1980s and had reportedly established his own group in the Sahara after
falling out with other Qaeda leaders.
The description of the leader was one of the most specific pieces of information
given by the Algerians on a day of vague and contradictory accounts of the
abduction and raid. Well into the night, officials warned that hostages were
still being held inside the compound and that the crisis remained unresolved.
“It’s a painful situation. It’s not over,” said a senior Algerian official. “I
can’t tell you how many are left in there. No numbers. None at all. Nothing is
certain.”
Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, and Rick Gladstone from New York. Reporting
was contributed by Alan Cowell and Scott Sayare from Paris, Elisabeth Bumiller
and John F. Burns from London, Eric Schmitt and David E. Sanger from Washington,
Hiroko Tabuchi from Tokyo, and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo.
January 16,
2013
The New York Times
By MARK MAZZETTI and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON
— As Islamic militants methodically carved out a base in the desert of northern
Mali over the past year, officials in Washington, Paris and African capitals
struggling with military plans to drive the Islamists out of the country agreed
on one principle: African troops, not European or American soldiers, would fight
the battle of Mali.
But the surprise French assault last Friday to blunt the Islamists’ advance
upended those plans and set off a cascading series of events, culminating in a
raid on Wednesday by militants on a foreign-run gas field in Algeria. That
attack threatens to widen the violence in an impoverished region and drag
Western governments deeper into combating an incipient insurgency.
And yet the rush of events has masked the fact that officials in Washington
still have only an impressionistic understanding of the militant groups that
have established a safe haven in Mali, and they are divided about whether some
of these groups even pose a threat to the United States.
Moreover, the hostage situation in Algeria has only heightened concerns that a
Western military intervention could transform militant groups that once had only
a regional focus into avowed enemies of the United States — in other words, that
the backlash might end up being worse than the original threat.
Largely for these reasons, the Obama administration adopted a strategy over the
past year to contain the Islamists in Mali until African troops were ready to
confront them, rather than to challenge them directly with an American military
campaign of drone strikes or commando raids.
During Congressional testimony in June, Johnnie Carson, the assistant secretary
of state for African affairs, played down the terrorist threat to the United
States from Mali, saying that the Qaeda affiliate operating there “has not
demonstrated the capability to threaten U.S. interests outside of West or North
Africa, and it has not threatened to attack the U.S. homeland.”
Some Pentagon officials have long taken a more hawkish stance, and they cite
intelligence reports that fighters with ties to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,
which has a loose affiliation to the remnants of Osama bin Laden’s terrorist
network, played a role in the deadly attack in September on the American
diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya. They have pushed for targeted strikes
against Islamist leaders in northern Mali, arguing that killing the leadership
could permanently cripple the strength of the militants.
The administration has embraced a targeted killing strategy elsewhere, notably
in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, after top White House, Pentagon and C.I.A.
officials determined that militants in those countries were bent on attacking
the United States.
Asked if fighters from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb posed such an imminent
threat, Gen. Carter F. Ham, the top American commander in Africa, said,
“Probably not.” But, he said in an interview, “they subscribe to Al Qaeda’s
ideology” and have said that their intent is to attack Westerners in Europe and,
“if they could, back to the United States.”
Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta made it clear on Wednesday that he considered
the group a serious danger. “This is an Al Qaeda operation,” he told reporters
while traveling in Italy, “and it is for that reason that we have always been
concerned about their presence in Mali, because they would use it as a base of
operations to do exactly what happened in Algeria.”
It is too early to judge the impact of the French-led offensive in Mali, which
came after an urgent plea by Mali’s government for help in repelling Islamist
fighters who were rapidly moving south. But on Wednesday, some American
officials said that the hostage episode in Algeria could be just the beginning
of a wave of attacks against foreigners in the region. And there is a chance
that if the Americans taken hostage on Wednesday are killed by their captors,
American officials might reconsider their pledges not to commit ground troops to
the battle.
As Islamists have tightened their grip on northern Mali over the past year, the
American military has expanded spying operations in the region in the hope of
gathering intelligence both about the strength of the militants and about their
connections to tribal groups in Mali and elsewhere across North Africa.
According to current and former American government officials, as well as
classified government cables made public by the group WikiLeaks, in recent years
the military has set up a constellation of small bases in Africa for aerial
surveillance missions flown by turboprop planes designed to look like civilian
aircraft. One of the principal bases used for the missions in Mali is in
Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, according to one former official and
the government cables.
But the surveillance missions in northern Mali have had only a limited effect.
Islamist leaders have banned cellphones, closed Internet cafes and shut down
cellular towers in an effort to cut the region off from the outside world. With
the clock turned back decades, there are few electronic communications for
American eavesdroppers to intercept.
General Ham said that it had been very difficult to get consistent, reliable
intelligence about what he called a militant “safe haven” in Mali.
“It’s tough to penetrate,” he said. “It’s tough to get access for platforms that
can collect. It’s an extraordinarily tough environment for human intelligence,
not just ours but the neighboring countries as well.”
The surveillance flights in Africa, which are mostly run by private contractors,
are part of a classified Pentagon program called Creek Sand. The Washington Post
first reported about the flights last year.
After a military coup overthrew Mali’s government last year, the northern part
of the country — an area larger than France — was taken over by three militant
groups.
The group most worrisome to American officials is Al Qaeda in the Islamic
Maghreb, which emerged out of Algeria’s civil war in the 1990s and originally
was strictly focused on overthrowing Algeria’s government.
The group rebranded itself several years ago with the name AQIM, and since 2008
it has collected several million dollars in ransom payments for kidnapped
Westerners in Mali, Mauritania, Niger and southern Algeria. According to a
report by the Congressional Research Service released this week, the group’s
influence in the region appeared to be waning before the coup last year gave it
a safe haven in northern Mali.
The Qaeda affiliate controls the region in an alliance with a homegrown Islamist
movement, Ansar Dine, or Defenders of the Faith, and another radical splinter
group, the Mujao, or the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in West Africa.
Together, these groups share the goal of imposing an extreme form of Shariah law
on the people of northern Mali.
But what remained an open question, at least until last Friday, was whether the
militant threat in Mali was serious enough to justify military intervention.
Now, the context of that debate has changed.
General Ham put the matter succinctly in the interview, which took place last
Friday, just hours after he learned about the French incursion into Mali.
“The real question,” he said as he raced off to a secure teleconference with
senior Obama administration officials, “is now what?”
Elisabeth
Bumiller and Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting.
January 13,
2013
The New York Times
By ADAM NOSSITER, ERIC SCHMITT and MARK MAZZETTI.
BAMAKO,
Mali — French fighter jets struck deep inside Islamist strongholds in northern
Mali on Sunday, shoving aside months of international hesitation about storming
the region after every other effort by the United States and its allies to
thwart the extremists had failed.
For years, the United States tried to stem the spread of Islamic militancy in
the region by conducting its most ambitious counterterrorism program ever across
these vast, turbulent stretches of the Sahara.
But as insurgents swept through the desert last year, commanders of this
nation’s elite army units, the fruit of years of careful American training,
defected when they were needed most — taking troops, guns, trucks and their
newfound skills to the enemy in the heat of battle, according to senior Malian
military officials.
“It was a disaster,” said one of several senior Malian officers to confirm the
defections.
Then an American-trained officer overthrew Mali’s elected government, setting
the stage for more than half of the country to fall into the hands of Islamic
extremists. American spy planes and surveillance drones have tried to make sense
of the mess, but American officials and their allies are still scrambling even
to get a detailed picture of who they are up against.
Now, in the face of longstanding American warnings that a Western assault on the
Islamist stronghold could rally jihadists around the world and prompt terrorist
attacks as far away as Europe, the French have entered the war themselves.
First, they blunted an Islamist advance, saying the rest of Mali would have
fallen into the hands of militants within days. Then on Sunday, French warplanes
went on the offensive, going after training camps, depots and other militant
positions far inside Islamist-held territory in an effort to uproot the
militants, who have formed one of the largest havens for jihadists in the world.
Some Defense Department officials, notably officers at the Pentagon’s Joint
Special Operations Command, have pushed for a lethal campaign to kill senior
operatives of two of the extremists groups holding northern Mali, Ansar Dine and
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. Killing the leadership, they argued, could lead
to an internal collapse.
But with its attention and resources so focused on other conflicts in places
like Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, the Obama administration has rejected
such strikes in favor of a more cautious, step-back strategy: helping African
nations repel and contain the threat on their own.
Over the last four years, the United States has spent between $520 million and
$600 million in a sweeping effort to combat Islamist militancy in the region
without fighting the kind of wars it has waged in the Middle East. The program
stretched from Morocco to Nigeria, and American officials heralded the Malian
military as an exemplary partner. American Special Forces trained its troops in
marksmanship, border patrol, ambush drills and other counterterrorism skills.
But all that deliberate planning collapsed swiftly when heavily armed,
battle-hardened Islamist fighters returned from combat in Libya. They teamed up
with jihadists like Ansar Dine, routed poorly equipped Malian forces and
demoralized them so thoroughly that it set off a mutiny against the government
in the capital, Bamako.
A confidential internal review completed last July by the Pentagon’s Africa
Command concluded that the coup had unfolded too quickly for American commanders
or intelligence analysts to detect any clear warning signs.
“The coup in Mali progressed very rapidly and with very little warning,” said
Col. Tom Davis, a command spokesman. “The spark that ignited it occurred within
their junior military ranks, who ultimately overthrew the government, not at the
senior leadership level where warning signs might have been more easily
noticed.”
But one Special Operations Forces officer disagreed, saying, “This has been
brewing for five years. The analysts got complacent in their assumptions and did
not see the big changes and the impacts of them, like the big weaponry coming
out of Libya and the different, more Islamic” fighters who came back.
The same American-trained units that had been seen as the best hope of repelling
such an advance proved, in the end, to be a linchpin in the country’s military
defeat. The leaders of these elite units were Tuaregs — the very ethnic nomads
who were overrunning northern Mali.
According to one senior officer, the Tuareg commanders of three of the four
Malian units fighting in the north at the time defected to the insurrection “at
the crucial moment,” taking fighters, weapons and scarce equipment with them. He
said they were joined by about 1,600 other defectors from within the Malian
Army, crippling the government’s hope of resisting the onslaught.
“The aid of the Americans turned out not to be useful,” said another ranking
Malian officer, now engaged in combat. “They made the wrong choice,” he said of
relying on commanders from a group that had been conducting a 50-year rebellion
against the Malian state.
The virtual collapse of the Malian military, including units trained by United
States Special Forces, followed by a coup led by an American-trained officer,
Capt. Amadou Sanogo, astounded and embarrassed top American military commanders.
“I was sorely disappointed that a military with whom we had a training
relationship participated in the military overthrow of an elected government,”
Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Africa Command, said in a speech at Brown
University last month . “There is no way to characterize that other than wholly
unacceptable.”
American officials defended their training, saying it was never intended to be
nearly as comprehensive as what the United States has done in Iraq and
Afghanistan. “We trained five units over five years but is that going to make a
fully fledged, rock-solid military?” asked an American military official
familiar with the region.
After the coup, extremists quickly elbowed out the Tuaregs in northern Mali and
enforced a harsh brand of Islam on the populace, cutting off hands, whipping
residents and forcing tens of thousands to flee. Western nations then adopted a
containment strategy, urging African nations to cordon off the north until they
could muster a force to oust the Islamists by the fall, at the earliest. To that
end, the Pentagon is providing Mauritania new trucks and Niger two Cessna
surveillance aircraft, along with training for both countries.
But even that backup plan failed, as Islamists pushed south toward the capital
last week. With thousands of French citizens in Mali, its former colony, France
decided it could not wait any longer, striking the militants at the front line
and deep within their haven.
Some experts said that the foreign troops might easily retake the large towns in
northern Mali, but that Islamist fighters have forced children to fight for
them, a deterrent for any invading force, and would likely use bloody insurgency
tactics.
“They have been preparing these towns to be a death trap,” said Rudy Atallah,
the former director of African counterterrorism policy for the Pentagon. “If an
intervention force goes in there, the militants will turn it into an insurgency
war.”
Adam Nossiter reported from Bamako, Eric Schmitt from Niamey, Niger, and from
Washington, and Mark Mazzetti from Washington. Steven Erlanger contributed
reporting from Paris.
January 12,
2013
The New York Times
By JODI RUDOREN
ZAATARI,
Jordan — The water has mostly been removed from hundreds of flooded tents and
the dirt paths that run between them here in the region’s vastest camp of Syrian
refugees. The clotheslines are laden with soggy sweaters and socks, waiting for
the sun after a week of harsh wind, rain and snow.
The residents are waiting, too: for the next storm, and the next, that they know
will come this winter and also, many fear, for their own demise.
“We were waiting for our deaths so we came out, but we found our second deaths
here,” said a man who identified himself as Abu Tarik from the Dhulash family.
He said he arrived in the Zaatari refugee camp 10 days ago after intense
shelling near his home and farm, which lie across the border in Dara’a, Syria.
“There, we were going to die from the fires,” he said, sitting on a mat
surrounded by a dozen family members. “Here we’re going to die from the cold. We
don’t want to die in this tent.”
With aid agencies expecting the number of Syrian refugees to reach one million
this year, and estimates for the cost of caring for them topping $1 billion, the
misery in this struggling six-month-old camp is part of a deepening humanitarian
crisis that threatens to destabilize the Middle East further. More than half a
million people who have already fled Syria have ended up in camps and villages
across Jordan, Turkey and Lebanon, all of which have asked for more
international aid. Last week was the worst yet in Zaatari, as scores of tents
collapsed under the most severe storm in 20 years. Two babies and a 22-year-old
amputee died, all of unrelated causes. Several aid workers were injured when a
riot broke out during food distribution.
Life began to return to normal on Friday, but normal in this desert camp of nine
square miles crowded with more than 50,000 people is, according to the refugees
and even some of those running the place, somewhere between horrible and
inhumane.
Barefoot children trod through mud in temperatures not far above freezing.
People lined up for hours for pots, utensils and buckets. Women pushed squeegees
through the remaining puddles, and washed clothes in plastic tubs with cold
water that quickly turned brown.
A young man got a $3 shave and haircut in a corrugated tin shack that a refugee
barber had set up four days before. A younger one shinnied up a 30-foot light
pole to pirate electricity.
“There’s no silver lining on such harsh conditions,” acknowledged Andrew Harper,
the top official of the United Nations refugee agency in Jordan. “It’s just a
really, really bad place to be.”
But Mr. Harper said the United Nations and the nonprofit groups helping it run
the camp were doing the best with what they had, noting that the agency had
appealed for $245 million to absorb Syrians regionwide in 2012 and received $157
million. Jordan, already consumed with an intense financial crisis and a growing
protest movement, is scrambling to keep up with the influx. Its task is
particularly complex given the delicate balance in its population of six
million, which is dominated by Palestinian refugees and their descendants and
includes hundreds of thousands who fled the war in Iraq.
Zaatari is only the most visible challenge. Nearly five times as many refugees
are living in Jordanian cities and villages, taxing the government’s resources,
and competing for scarce jobs.
Anmar Hmoud, who is handling the Syria file for the prime minister, said that
refugees could leave Zaatari and Jordan’s handful of smaller camps if a relative
or friend could guarantee financial support, but that the government was
“exhausting its own resources.” He estimated the cost of military, health,
education and other services at $670 million for 2012 and 2013.
“We are a neighbor, and we do our duty, but there is a limit to helping people
unless we are helped by others,” he said. “It’s not the Jordanian problem, it is
the international community’s problem.”
Some relief is coming. Mr. Hmoud said a new camp just south of here near Zarqa,
financed by the United Arab Emirates, would open in two weeks, allowing 6,000 of
Zaatari’s most vulnerable residents to move into prefabricated homes, and
eventually growing to accommodate 30,000. Saudi Arabia, which over the past
month has provided Zaatari with 2,500 prefabs costing $8 million, announced
Friday that it would give $10 million more to the Jordanian effort. Mr. Harper
said he had met with envoys from Qatar and the Emirates.
“It’s terrible to say, but sometimes it takes a miserable situation like we’re
having now to get people to say, ‘Yes, we can do something,’ ” Mr. Harper said.
Not soon enough for Iman Qardah, 30, who has been in the camp for 10 weeks with
her five children, ages 1 to 10. When the storm struck last week, her husband
spent the night hammering the stakes of the tent as the wind threatened to rip
it from the ground. The next night, rain seeped inside, so the family slept
piled on one side. The next, the tent “started swimming on the water,” she
recalled, and finally collapsed. “My husband started shouting in the street for
someone to help.”
The family moved to a prefab that is perhaps 10 feet by 20 feet. But they leak,
too. On Friday, the children huddled for warmth around a gas burner where Ms.
Qardah was simmering cauliflower and rice, as a bucket nearby caught drops from
the ceiling. A neighbor poked a head in, wondering jealously how she had
procured a space heater.
“Every day I’m thinner than the day before and my mind is more preoccupied,” Ms.
Qardah said as she nursed the baby. “I used to not sleep because of the
missiles. Now I don’t sleep because I’m worried about my kids constantly.”
The camp is rife with complaints. Skimpy food rations, scarce clothes. Spotty
electricity, rare hot water, squalid toilets. Suspicions that aid workers are
stealing blankets. Nothing to do, no prospects for getting out.
But given the weather and the continued flood of refugees — about 10,000 had
arrived in the camp in the past 10 days — it is remarkable things are not much,
much worse. Officials said there had been no casualties from the cold. Khaled
al-Hariri, the 22-year-old who was described in a YouTube video posted Wednesday
by a Syrian activist as “the martyr to negligence and cold,” actually died of
cancer in a nearby hospital, according to a spokesman for the World Health
Organization. There was also a stillbirth and a premature baby who died after
three days in an incubator.
Anne, the doctor at the French military clinic here, which requires personnel to
be identified only by first name, said she had seen a slight uptick in sore
throats and ears since the storm, but no frostbite. The main change is that
patients linger in the consultation tent to stay out of the cold.
The French have performed 192 surgical operations on war wounded in the camp. An
organization called Gynecologists Without Borders has delivered 172 babies here,
46 in the last three weeks.
Yusef Mohamed Hasan was at the clinic on Friday holding Sham, who was born Dec.
12 by Caesarean section. She was swaddled in four layers, then cradled in a big
fuzzy blanket as her mother had the stitches removed.
“As soon as my wife is O.K., we are going back,” said Mr. Hasan, 44. “It’s not
better for me there; it’s not safe. But it’s humiliating here.”
Talk of returning to Syria has increased as conditions have deteriorated, but
officials said there had been no marked change in the number heading back across
the border. Most are resigned to remaining through the winter, or longer.
As the sun came out Friday, Aboud Mohamed Awad and three neighbors set about
building themselves a bathroom. The storm made walking to the shared facilities
unbearable, he said, and anyhow they are filthy and crowded. Mr. Harper of the
United Nations said the goal was to have one toilet per 20 refugees, but that
the reality right now was more like one to 50.
Mr. Awad said he used the profits selling the ground floor of his home in Syria
to buy corrugated panels and wood for about $100 and hired a $1.50-an-hour
laborer, who started by smoothing cement with a pie plate to create a floor.
“We can at least take care of certain things,” Mr. Awad said with something like
pride. “We have young girls. It will make us feel more like people.”
January 12,
2013
The New York Times
By ISABEL KERSHNER
JERUSALEM —
Israeli security forces evicted scores of Palestinian activists before dawn on
Sunday from a tent encampment they had set up set up two days earlier in a
strategic piece of Israeli-occupied West Bank territory known as E1, east of
Jerusalem, where Israel says it plans to build settler homes.
A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said that police officers had removed the
activists one by one, without any use of force, aside from some pushing and
shoving, and that the police operation was over within an hour. But a
spokeswoman for the protesters, Abir Kopty, said that six Palestinians had
sought hospital treatment for injuries, some caused by punches to the face.
The encampment, which the protesters called the village of Bab al-Shams (Arabic
for “Gate of the Sun”), represented a new kind of action by Palestinian
grass-roots activists involved in what they describe as the nonviolent popular
struggle against the Israeli occupation.
Employing a tactic more commonly used by Jewish settlers who establish wildcat
outposts in the West Bank, the protesters had pitched their tents on Friday on
what they said was privately owned land, and with the permission of the
Palestinian landowners. They were immediately served eviction notices by the
Israeli military authorities, but their lawyers had obtained a temporary
injunction against their removal from the High Court of Justice until the state
detailed the grounds for such a move.
But on Saturday evening, with the end of the Sabbath, the office of Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued a statement saying he had ordered security
forces to evacuate “forthwith” the Palestinians who had gathered in the area
between Jerusalem and the large urban settlement of Maale Adumim.
The state responded to the High Court of Justice on Saturday night, arguing that
the gathering would become a focus of protest that could lead to rioting, and
asserting that most of the tents had been pitched on territory that Israel had
declared state land. The court overturned the injunction, allowing the people to
be removed from the site. Discussions about the fate of the tents were to
continue on Sunday.
The Israeli authorities declared the area a closed military zone on Saturday
evening and began building up security forces around the site.
The Palestinians claim E1, just east of Jerusalem, as part of a future state.
The protest came six weeks after Israel announced that it was moving forward
with plans for thousands of settlement homes in E1, stirring international
outrage. Israel announced its intention as a countermeasure after the United
Nations General Assembly voted in November to upgrade the Palestinians’ status
to that of a nonmember observer state.
Israel wants East Jerusalem, which it has annexed, and Maale Adumim, which lies
beyond E1, to be contiguous and says that the future of the West Bank has to be
settled in negotiations. In the meantime, critics say, Israel continues to
establish facts on the ground — a policy that the Palestinian protesters sought
to emulate.
Ms. Kopty, the spokeswoman for the protesters, said about 100 Palestinians were
removed from the site and taken to the Qalandia checkpoint between Jerusalem and
the West Bank city of Ramallah.
“The amount of support we got from Palestinians and across the world was
heartwarming,” she said, speaking by telephone from the hospital in Ramallah
where she was accompanying those who had been injured. “We hope this action will
inspire Palestinians to do more, to break through the apathy and to take the
popular struggle to the next level.”
And in a statement, leaders of the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee, a
grass-roots group, said, “Even though we were evicted, our strength was apparent
since the police needed hundreds and hundreds of special unit police officers”
to remove the protesters.
Israeli plans to build in E1 have been vehemently opposed by many countries,
including the United States, which say that construction there would partially
separate the northern and southern West Bank, harming the prospects of a viable
contiguous Palestinian state in that territory.
PRESIDENT Obama’s decision to nominate Chuck Hagel, a maverick Republican with
enough experience of war to loathe it, as his next secretary of defense is the
right choice for many reasons, chief among them that it will provoke a serious
debate on what constitutes real friendship toward Israel.
That debate, which will unfold during Senate confirmation hearings, is much
needed because Jewish leadership in the United States is often unrepresentative
of the many American Jews who have moved on from the view that the only
legitimate support of Israel is unquestioning support of Israel, and the only
mark of friendship is uncritical embrace of a friend.
Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, fired an opening salvo by
telling CNN that, “This is an in-your-face nomination by the president to all of
us who are supportive of Israel.”
The comment, based on Hagel’s lack of enthusiasm for war on Iran and his single
allusion to advocates of Israel as “the Jewish lobby,” was of a piece with last
year’s in-your-face Republican line that Obama, a strong supporter of Israeli
security, had thrown Israel “under the bus.”
Jewish voters, who overwhelmingly favored Obama once again, despite Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s unsubtle nudges, demonstrated at the ballot box
what they thought of this characterization of the president.
Identifying Israel’s enemies is easy. Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader,
illustrated why when he declared: “Palestine is ours from the river to the sea
and from the south to the north. There will be no concession on an inch of the
land. We will never recognize the legitimacy of the Israeli occupation and
therefore there is no legitimacy for Israel, no matter how long it will take.”
That is the sort of absolutist, annihilation-bent position that has been a
losing proposition since 1948 and will continue to undermine the legitimate
Palestinian quest for statehood alongside a secure Israel — the one embraced by
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas — for as long as it is advocated by
self-serving merchants of hatred.
But deciding who Israel’s real friends are is more difficult — and that decision
is critical both for Israel itself and for the future of U.S. policy toward the
Jewish state.
The question has been on the president’s mind for a long time. During the 2008
campaign, in a meeting with the Cleveland Jewish community, Obama said: “This is
where I get to be honest and I hope I’m not out of school here. I think there is
a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an
unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel and that can’t
be the measure of our friendship with Israel. If we cannot have an honest
dialogue about how do we achieve these goals, then we’re not going to make
progress.”
He suggested that to equate asking “difficult questions” with “being soft or
anti-Israel” was a barrier to moving forward.
Five years on, that needed dialogue has scarcely advanced. Self-styled “true
friends” of Israel now lining up against the Hagel nomination are in fact true
friends only of the Israeli right that pays no more than lip service to a
two-state peace (when it even does that); scoffs at Palestinian national
aspirations and culture; dismisses the significant West Bank reforms that have
prepared Palestine for statehood; continues with settlement construction on the
very shrinking land where a Palestinian state is envisaged (and was granted
nonmember observer status at the United Nations last November by 138 votes to 9
with 41 abstentions, including Germany); cannot find a valid Palestinian
interlocutor on the face of the earth despite the moderate reformist leadership
of Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad; ignores the grave implications for
Israel of its unsustainable, corrosive dominion over another people and the
question of how Israel can remain Jewish and democratic without a two-state
solution (it cannot); bays for war with Iran despite the contrary opinions of
many of Israel’s intelligence and military leaders; and propels Israel into
repetitive miniwars of dubious strategic value.
These “true friends” shout the loudest. They are well-organized and remorseless.
Then there are the other friends of Israel, the quieter ones, the many who are
unwaveringly committed to Israel’s security within its 1967 borders (with agreed
land swaps); who believe continued settlement expansion in the West Bank is
self-defeating and wrong; who hold that a good-faith quest for a two-state
solution that will involve painful compromises on both sides (Palestinian
abandonment of the “right of return” and Israeli abandonment of conquered land)
is the only true path to Israeli security and the salvaging of its core Jewish
values; who counsel against go-it-alone military adventurism against Iran; and
who are troubled by a rightward nationalist drift in Israel whose central
political tenet seems to be that holding on to all the land is doable and
sustainable.
Hagel, like Obama, is a quiet strong friend of Israel. The movement against him
is a relic of a binary with-Israel or against-Israel vision that does not have
the true interests of Israel or the United States at heart.
January 6,
2013
The New York Times
By ANNE BARNARD
BEIRUT,
Lebanon — Sounding defiant, confident and, to critics, out of touch with his
people’s grievances, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria used his first public
address in six months to justify his harsh crackdown, rally his supporters to
fight against his opponents and inform on them — and leave in tatters recent
efforts toward a political resolution to the country’s bloody civil war.
Mr. Assad offered what he called a peace plan, including a new cabinet, a new
constitution to replace the one adopted just last year in a widely dismissed
reform package, and talks with officially tolerated opposition groups. But he
ruled out any negotiations with the armed Syrian opposition, and pointedly
ignored its demands that he step down, making his proposal a nonstarter for most
of his opponents.
He sounded much as he did at the start of the uprising 21 months ago, dictating
which opposition groups were worthy and labeling the rest terrorists and
traitors. He gave no acknowledgment that the rebels have come to control large
parts of the north and east of the country, nor that many ordinary Syrians
continue to demand change in the face of a crackdown that has laid waste to
neighborhoods and killed tens of thousands, nor that even longtime allies like
Russia have signaled that Mr. Assad may be unable to defeat the insurgency.
He even dismissed as foreign interference the mediation efforts of the United
Nations envoy Lakhdar Brahimi, the senior Algerian diplomat who visited Damascus
on Dec. 24, warning of national disintegration if the two sides did not
negotiate a solution.
“Everyone who comes to Syria knows that Syria accepts advice but not orders,”
Mr. Assad told a cheering, chanting crowd at the Damascus Opera House, on
Umayyad Square in the center of the capital, where residents said the security
forces were deployed heavily starting the night before.
“He doesn’t seem to have moved an inch since summer 2011,” said Yezid Sayigh, an
analyst at the Carnegie Middle East Center in Beirut, noting that Mr. Assad gave
“barely the slightest nod” to Mr. Brahimi’s proposals.
Coming after days of hints that Mr. Assad might at last be ready to negotiate,
his defiant speech on Sunday promised trouble for both his friends and his
enemies. Russia may find it harder to stave off international action against
Syria, which it has done so far using its veto at the United Nations Security
Council, as the chances for a political solution seem to recede.
Moreover, Mr. Assad’s defiance may prompt Mr. Brahimi to decline to continue his
mission. That would present the “Friends of Syria,” the group of nations
supporting the opposition — the United States and its Western allies, Turkey and
some Arab countries — with an unpalatable choice: intervene more aggressively or
risk allowing the conflict to drag on indefinitely.
“Assad is not letting the Friends of Syria off the hook by making it easy for
them to declare victory and close the Syria file,” Mr. Sayigh said. “Now what
will they do?”
The United Nations estimates that more than 60,000 people have died in the civil
war, which began as a peaceful protest movement and turned into an armed
struggle after security forces fired on demonstrators. Rebels have made gains in
the north and east and in the Damascus suburbs, but Mr. Assad’s government has
pushed back with deadly air and artillery strikes, and appears to be confident
that it can hold the capital. Neither side appears ready to give up the prospect
of military victory, though analysts say neither side is close to achieving it.
Mr. Assad’s defiant stance on Sunday “means we’re in for a long fight,” said
Joshua Landis, a scholar on Syria and Mr. Assad’s minority sect, the Alawites,
at the University of Oklahoma. “This is a dark, dark tunnel. There is no good
ending to this. Assad believes he is winning.”
Victoria Nuland, the spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a statement
that Mr. Assad’s speech was “yet another attempt by the regime to cling to
power, and does nothing to advance the Syrian people’s goal of a political
transition.” She said that even as Mr. Assad “speaks of dialogue, the regime is
deliberately stoking sectarian tensions and continuing to kill its own people.”
Before the speech, Lebanese media outlets close to the Syrian government
reported, citing unnamed sources, that Mr. Assad would be much more
conciliatory, offering to share some power with the armed opposition. But if
anyone close to Mr. Assad was pushing that view, it did not make it into the
speech he delivered.
Instead, Mr. Assad repeated his longstanding assertions that the movement
against him was driven by “murderous criminals” and terrorists financed by
rivals such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia with American blessing.
“Who should we negotiate with — terrorists?” Mr. Assad said. “We will negotiate
with their masters.”
The main opposition body, the National Coalition of Syrian Revolutionary and
Opposition Forces, issued a statement calling the speech “a pre-emptive strike
against both Arab and international diplomatic solutions.”
There was little immediate reaction in Russia, where the speech came on the eve
of the Orthodox celebration of Christmas on Monday.
But Boris Dolgov of the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Eastern
Studies said the speech reflected a new push by Russia and other nations to
resolve the crisis.
Mr. Dolgov told the Voice of Russia radio station that Mr. Assad was correct to
assert in his speech that the first step toward a resolution of the civil war
must be the cessation of aid for armed rebel groups, adding that the current
situation was “complex, but not a dead end.”
In Midan, a contested neighborhood of southern Damascus, a shopkeeper said that
Mr. Assad’s speech had dashed his hopes that the president would end the
conflict.
“He divided Syrians in two camps, one with him who are patriots and one against
him who are criminals, terrorists and radicals,” said the shopkeeper, who gave
only a nickname, Abu Omar, for safety reasons. “He doesn’t see Syrians who are
patriots but don’t like him, and want to have another president in democratic,
fair elections.”
Mr. Assad, whose family has ruled Syria for 42 years, said Sunday that he was
open to dialogue with “those who have not sold Syria to foreigners,” most likely
a reference to tolerated opposition groups that reject armed revolution, such
the National Coordinating Body for Democratic Change. But his speech appeared
unlikely to satisfy even those opponents, since it made no apology for the
arrests of peaceful activists or for airstrikes that have destroyed
neighborhoods. Nor did he acknowledge that his opponents sought anything but
ruin for Syria.
“They killed the intellectuals in order to inflict ignorance on us,” Mr. Assad
said of his opponents. “They deprived children from school in order to bring the
country backward.”
Some armed rebel groups have used techniques that randomly target civilians,
like car bombs, and there are foreign fighters among the rebels. But most of the
armed movement is made up of Syrians who took up arms during the uprising or
defected from the armed forces.
Mr. Assad thanked military officers and conscripts in the speech and vowed to
stay by their side, seeking to dispel speculation that he would flee the
country.
The audience of government officials and university students at the opera house
chanted, “With our souls, with our blood, we defend you, Assad,” and vowed to be
his “shabiha,” a term that has come to mean progovernment militias that have
attacked demonstrators.
When the president finished speaking, scores of people rushed frantically to
greet him, and his bodyguards formed a phalanx to slowly escort Mr. Assad
through the crowd.
Several observers noted in social media postings that the opera house seemed a
fitting setting for such a speech.
“It was operatic in its otherworldly fantasy, unrelated to realities outside the
building,” Rami Khouri, the editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper,
wrote on Twitter.
Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada from Beirut; an employee of The New
York Times from Damascus, Syria; Eric Schmitt from Washington; and Ellen Barry
from Moscow.
January 3,
2013
The New York Times
By SEYED HOSSEIN MOUSAVIAN
and MOHAMMAD ALI SHABANI
IF there
are any two words in Persian that President Obama should learn, they are
“maslahat” and “aberu.” Maslahat is often translated as expediency, or
self-interest. Aberu means face — as in, saving face. In the nearly 34 years
since the Islamic revolution in Iran, expediency has been a pillar of decision
making, but within a framework that has allowed Iranian leaders to save face. If
there is to be any resolution of the nuclear standoff, Western leaders must
grasp these concepts.
Two examples illustrate this point. In 1988, after eight years of devastating
war with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Iran’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, accepted a United Nations-brokered cease-fire agreement, deeming it to
be in Iran’s maslahat. It was crucial that Iraqi forces had been pushed off
Iranian soil, so Tehran could claim a victory.
Thirteen years later, after the 9/11 attacks, the United States overthrew the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which had sheltered Al Qaeda, in a matter of
weeks. American troops would never have made it to Kabul and Mazar-i-Sharif with
such speed had Iran’s leaders not acquiesced to the toppling of their enemies to
the east. But the George W. Bush administration squandered an opportunity for
dialogue by spurning this potential diplomatic overture by Iran.
For thousands of years, Persian culture has been distinguished by customs that
revolve around honor and esteem. Preserving one’s aberu is tantamount to
maintaining one’s dignity. There are almost no instances in modern Iranian
history when maslahat has trumped aberu. The West has poorly understood these
concepts. This was particularly true under President Bush, who rewarded Iran’s
tacit acceptance of the American invasion of Afghanistan by labeling Iran a
member of an “axis of evil.”
Following the 2003 allied invasion of Iraq, the Swiss ambassador to Iran reached
out to Washington with an unofficial outline for a “grand bargain” with Tehran
that would cover everything from Iran’s nuclear program to its support for
militant groups in the region. Despite this bold step, Iran was left out in the
cold. Vice President Dick Cheney is said to have dismissed the initiative,
reportedly asserting that “we don’t talk to evil.”
We now know, thanks to a recent memoir by the former Iranian nuclear negotiator
Hassan Rowhani, that the Bush administration reached out to Tehran a year after
dismissing the proposal. Not surprisingly, partly because of the blow to its
pride, the Iranian government rejected the offer of direct, high-level talks as
insincere. In the nine years since, Iran’s nuclear program — a major symbol of
prestige for Iranians — has grown immensely. Things have gotten a lot more
complicated.
The pattern of missed opportunities has persisted for more than three decades
now. The result is that Barack Obama is the sixth consecutive president who has
been led to view Iran as a threat rather than an opportunity. It is time for
America to exit this vicious cycle and disregard irrational voices intent on
sabotaging efforts to reach an understanding.
When Mr. Obama took office in 2009, he promised a real dialogue with Iran. Many
in Tehran are still waiting for him to deliver on that promise. But how?
The foundation of post-1979 decision making in Iran is the pursuit of
sovereignty within a framework that balances maslahat and aberu. We believe Iran
would be open to new measures regarding the transparency of its nuclear program,
and would agree not to pursue any capability to enrich uranium beyond that
needed to fuel atomic power plants, if its legitimate right to enrichment under
the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty was recognized and if an agreement to remove
sanctions was reached.
Equally important is how a deal would be implemented. Decades of mutual,
institutionalized hostility have created a gulf of mistrust that neither side
can unilaterally bridge. So getting the sequence right would be crucial to any
accord.
While Tehran views a deal on its nuclear program as being in its self-interest,
Western leaders need to grasp that it would be devastating for Iran’s aberu to
take the first step solely in exchange for promises. The dominant discourse in
Tehran portrays the 2004 decision by the former Iranian president Mohammad
Khatami to suspend uranium enrichment on a voluntary, temporary basis as a
failure because it resulted only in humiliating calls by the West for an
indefinite suspension. The moral of this narrative is that placing maslahat
above aberu, even temporarily, leads to nothing good.
In the coming months, Iran is expected to again engage with the so-called P5+1
(the United States, Russia, China, Britain and France, along with Germany). Mr.
Obama and his team, including his chief Iran negotiator, Under Secretary of
State Wendy Sherman, should reflect on the meaning of maslahat and aberu.
Understanding the Iranian mentality is key to grasping why the Iranians won’t
put expediency above dignity. The only way to stop the dispute over Iran’s
nuclear program from spinning out of control is to offer the Islamic Republic a
face-saving way out.
Seyed Hossein Mousavian, a former spokesman for Iran’s nuclear negotiators, is a
research scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton and the author of
“The Iranian Nuclear Crisis: A Memoir.” Mohammad Ali Shabani is a doctoral
candidate at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
