History > 2014 > USA > International (IV)

 An unexploded bomb drew Palestinian onlookers on Friday

on a main road in Deir el-Balah in the central Gaza Strip.

Credit Adel Hana/Associated Press

Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls Apart

NYT

AUG. 1, 2014

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html

Turkish Inaction on ISIS Advance

Dismays the U.S.

OCT. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER,

ANNE BARNARD

and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.

While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.

But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.

Even as it stepped up airstrikes against the militants Tuesday, the Obama administration was frustrated by what it regards as Turkey’s excuses for not doing more militarily. Officials note, for example, that the American-led coalition, with its heavy rotation of flights and airstrikes, has effectively imposed a no-fly zone over northern Syria already, so Mr. Erdogan’s demand for such a zone rings hollow.

“There’s growing angst about Turkey dragging its feet to act to prevent a massacre less than a mile from its border,” a senior administration official said. “After all the fulminating about Syria’s humanitarian catastrophe, they’re inventing reasons not to act to avoid another catastrophe.

“This isn’t how a NATO ally acts while hell is unfolding a stone’s throw from their border,” said the official, who spoke anonymously to avoid publicly criticizing an ally.

Secretary of State John Kerry has had multiple phone calls in the last 72 hours with Turkey’s prime minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, and foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, to try to resolve the border crisis, American officials said.

For Mr. Obama, a split with Turkey would jeopardize his efforts to hold together a coalition of Sunni Muslim countries to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL. While Turkey is not the only country that might put the ouster of Mr. Assad ahead of defeating the radical Sunnis of the Islamic State, the White House has strongly argued that the immediate threat is from the militants.

But if Turkey remains a holdout, it could cause other fissures in the coalition. It is not only a NATO ally but the main transit route for foreigners seeking to enlist in the ranks of the Islamic State.

Ultimately, American officials said, the Islamic State cannot be pushed back without ground troops that are drawn from the ranks of the Syrian opposition. But until those troops are trained, equipped and put in the field, something that will take some time, officials said, Turkey can play a vital role.

“We have anticipated that it will be easier to protect population centers and to support offensives on the ground in Iraq, where we have partners” in the Kurdish pesh merga fighters and the Iraqi Army, said a senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. “Clearly, in Syria, it will take more time to develop the type of partners on the ground with whom we can coordinate.”

For this reason, the official said, the military strategy in Syria so far has focused on “denying ISIL safe haven and degrading critical infrastructure — like command and control and mobile oil refineries — that they use to support their operations in Iraq.”

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Mr. Obama’s spokesman, Josh Earnest, said he was confident that the president’s recently appointed special envoy for Syria, retired Gen. John R. Allen, would be able to resolve some logistical issues regarding the Turkish military’s participation in the coalition. But he acknowledged that Turkey’s differing view of the need to oust Mr. Assad was likely to come up.

While the diplomacy went ahead, the United States took pains to emphasize its support for the embattled Kurds in Kobani.

The military’s Central Command confirmed on Tuesday that coalition aircraft had carried out five airstrikes against Islamic State positions in the Kobani area in the past two days, destroying or damaging armed vehicles, artillery, a tank and troop positions.

The raids brought the number of airstrikes in and around Kobani to 18 — out of more than 100 in Syria altogether — since the air campaign was extended from Iraq to Syria.

But Kurdish fighters in Kobani said they were running out of ammunition and could not prevail without infusions of troops and arms from Turkey. Independent analysts and some influential members of Congress concurred, deriding the airstrikes in Kobani as too little, too late.

“This is yet another situation in which the Islamic State’s personnel and heavy weapons have been readily visible and vulnerable to U.S. airstrikes,” Representative Ed Royce, a California Republican who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said in a statement. “Instead of decisive action, the ISIL advance was met with only a handful of airstrikes. This morning’s escalated efforts may be too late.”

Staffan de Mistura, the United Nations envoy for Syria, issued an unusually strong call for the world to take “concrete action” to prevent Kobani from falling into control of the Islamic State.

“The world, all of us, will regret deeply if ISIS is able to take over a city which has defended itself with courage but is close to not being able to do so. We need to act now,” he said.

The fight along the sloping hills of Kobani, a Kurdish farming enclave, comes as neighboring Iraq is still groping to translate aerial bombardments against the Islamic State into momentum on the ground. It is further fragmenting Syria, cutting off Kurdish areas in the northeast.

And it has left the Kurds feeling abandoned, even though they are the sort of vulnerable minority group that Mr. Obama has made a priority of protecting — political moderates who have women fighting alongside men and have provided refuge for internally displaced Syrians of many ethnicities.

“Now I can see the shelling is getting closer to my neighborhood,” said Mahmoud Nabo, 35, a Syrian Kurd, pointing to the western side of town, which he fled Monday as Kurdish fighters urged civilians to evacuate. “We thought everything would stop after the first airstrike on ISIS, but now it is closer and more frequent.”

Analysts say the Kurds of Kobani are being held hostage as Mr. Erdogan seeks to wrest concessions not only from Washington but also from Kurdish leaders, his longtime domestic foes.

The aim, said Soner Cagaptay, an analyst at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, is to weaken Turkey’s outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or P.K.K., in peace talks with the Turkish government.

Turkey also wants the Kurdish fighters to denounce Mr. Assad and openly join the Syrian insurgents fighting him. But the fighters and local political leaders accepted control of Kurdish areas when Mr. Assad’s forces withdrew earlier in the Syrian war, and have focused more on self-rule and protecting their territory than on fighting the government. In some places they have fought alongside government troops.

The impasse leaves Kobani isolated. Some refugees are literally pressed against the fence, unwilling to cross because they cannot take their livestock, and sometimes blocked by the Turkish authorities, who have also stopped Syrian and Turkish Kurds from crossing into Syria to fight the Islamic State.

Tear gas wafted near the border on Tuesday, as Kurdish men packed the streets of the town of Suruc to protest Turkish policy; demonstrations broke out in several cities across Turkey. In Diyarbakir, at least 10 people were killed and more than 20 were injured in clashes between sympathizers of a pro-Kurdish party and a group known for its Islamic affiliations, while the authorities ordered schools to close in several southeastern cities, the Haberturk news channel reported.

On one small stretch of the border near Kobani, a fleeing Syrian Kurd, Omar Alloush, said a Turkish soldier had looked on as an Islamic State fighter addressed Syrian Kurds across the border fence, telling them they were welcome to return as long as they abided by the group’s extreme interpretation of Islam.

“We will never trust those people,” Mr. Alloush, a member of a Kurdish political party in Kobani, said by telephone.

Yet another hillside spectator, Avni Altindag, a Kurd from Suruc, said the Islamic State was stronger than a few air raids.

He pointed to the men watching the smoke rising over Kobani, who were chanting for the People’s Protection Committees, a Kurdish group known as Y.P.G. that is battling the Islamic State in the town’s streets. “They used to come with high expectations of strikes against ISIS, but all are disappointed,” he said.

Mr. Altindag blamed Turkey. “They don’t want to help what they say is their enemy,” he said. “This is why it is in Turkey’s favor that Kobani falls to ISIS.”

Mark Landler and Eric Schmitt reported from Washington, and Anne Barnard from Beirut, Lebanon. Reporting was contributed by Karam Shoumali from Mursitpinar, Turkey; Somini Sengupta from the United Nations; Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul; and Alan Cowell from London.

A version of this article appears in print on October 8, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Turkish Inaction On ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S..

    Turkish Inaction on ISIS Advance Dismays the U.S., NYT, 7.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/08/world/
    middleeast/isis-syria-coalition-strikes.html

U.S., Defending Kurds in Syria,

Expands Airstrikes

Against Islamic State Militants

 

SEPT. 27, 2014

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER

and ANNE BARNARD

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon said on Saturday that it had conducted its first strikes against Islamic State targets in a besieged Kurdish area of Syria along the Turkish border, destroying two armored vehicles in an area that has been the subject of a weeklong onslaught by the Islamic State.

The action around Kobani, where at least 150,000 refugees have crossed into Turkey, appeared to signify the opening of a new front for American airstrikes in Syria, and came on a day when several other strikes took place in Raqqa, the de facto headquarters of the Islamic State’s forces, and other sites in the eastern part of the country.

Symbolically, though, the modest strikes around Kobani demonstrated some American and Arab commitment to the direct defense of the Kurds in an area that, village by village, has been falling to Islamic State forces.

After days of pleading for air cover, Kurds watching the fighting from across the Turkish border west of Kobani were gleeful as jets roared overhead and two columns of smoke could be seen from the eastern front miles away. They hoped it meant that American warplanes had finally come to their aid.

Without President Obama, said Sheikh Mohammad Bozan, a Syrian Kurd, “we would all lose our heads.”

Nearby, Syrian and Turkish Kurds cheered from hilltops dotted with fig and olive trees and army foxholes as Kurdish fighters scaled a ridge and fired a heavy machine gun mounted on a pickup truck at an Islamic State position less than a mile from them. Islamic State fighters could be seen moving from a nearby village, but seemed to be shifting tactics in a hedge against airstrikes, moving one vehicle at a time rather than in a convoy.

The fighting took place just a few hundred yards inside Syria, clearly visible from hilltop olive groves in Karaca, a frontier village on the Turkish side of the border. They fought with rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns west of Kobani, the central town in the region.

As the day wore on, scores of Kurds gathered to watch from the relative safety behind the Turkish border, alongside journalists, Turkish soldiers watching from their armored vehicles, and even a few children. Despite the air of a soccer match — boos rose from the crowd when a rocket-propelled grenade fell short — the Syrian Kurds in the crowd knew they were watching one of their hometown’s last lines of defense. Over all, the Kurdish fighters still appeared to be outgunned by the Islamic State militants, with their tanks and artillery.

On the eastern front, a Kurdish activist, Mustafa Ebdi, said from Kobani that an Islamic State command post, a tank and a cannon had been hit by the American strike. Still, hours later, Islamic State shelling hit Kobani’s main town for the first time, killing at least two people.

In a statement, the United States Central Command said that strikes around the country had been carried out with forces from Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates — it did not specify which aircraft hit which areas — and that “all aircraft exited the strike areas safely.”

The administration has been eager to show that those three Arab countries, all dominated by Sunnis, are part of the effort against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS and ISIL.

The statement also said there were three airstrikes near Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region, that destroyed four of the Islamic State’s armed vehicles and one of its fighting positions.

But for all the action in the air, it was unclear how much progress was being made. American strategists and retired officers like Gen. David H. Petraeus, the former commander of Centcom and an architect of the troop surge in Iraq in the latter years of the George W. Bush administration, have made clear that airstrikes alone, without coordinated ground attacks, may halt but are unlikely to reverse the Islamic State’s territorial gains.

But the United States has ruled out using combat troops on the ground, as have Britain and other allies, even while agreeing to provide air power.
 

David E. Sanger reported from Washington, and Anne Barnard from Karaca, Turkey.

A version of this article appears in print on September 28, 2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S., Defending Kurds in Syria, Expands Airstrikes Against Islamic State Militants.

    U.S., Defending Kurds in Syria, Expands Airstrikes Against Islamic State Militants,
    NYT, 27.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/world/middleeast/
    us-strikes-isis-in-syria-to-defend-kurds.html

Clashing Goals in Syria

Strikes Put U.S. in Fix

 

SEPT. 25, 2014

By BEN HUBBARD

and ANNE BARNARD

BEIRUT, Lebanon — President Obama said the American-led airstrikes in Syria were intended to punish the terror organizations that threatened the United States — but would do nothing to aid President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, who is at war with the same groups.

But on the third day of strikes, it was increasingly uncertain whether the United States could maintain that delicate balance.

A Syrian diplomat crowed to a pro-government newspaper that “the U.S. military leadership is now fighting in the same trenches with the Syrian generals, in a war on terrorism inside Syria.” And in New York, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, said in an interview that he had delivered a private message to Mr. Assad on behalf of Washington, reassuring him that the Syrian government was not the target of American-led airstrikes.

The confident statements by Syrian leaders and their allies showed how difficult it already is for Mr. Obama to go after terrorists operating out of Syria without getting dragged more deeply into that nation’s three-and-a-half-year-old civil war. Indeed, the American strikes have provided some political cover for Mr. Assad, as pro-government Syrians have become increasingly, even publicly, angry at his inability to defeat the militants.

On the other side, Mr. Obama’s Persian Gulf allies, whom he has pointed to as crucial to the credibility of the air campaign, have expressed displeasure with the United States’ reluctance to go after Mr. Assad directly. For years, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have pressed Washington to join the fight to oust the Syrian president.

And for years, the United States has demurred.

“We need to create an army to fight the terrorists, but we also have to fight the regime,” Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, emir of Qatar, said Thursday in an interview with New York Times editors. “We have to do both.”

Mr. Obama told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday that the United States would work with its allies to roll back the Islamic State through military action and support for moderate rebels. But he added, “The only lasting solution to Syria’s civil war is political: an inclusive political transition that responds to the legitimate aspirations of all Syrian citizens, regardless of ethnicity, regardless of creed.”

Yet as the Syrian conflict transformed from peaceful, popular calls for change to a bloody unraveling of the nation, it also became a proxy battlefield for regional and global interests. Iran and Russia sided with Mr. Assad. Arab Gulf nations sided with the rebels, though not always with the same rebels. The United States called for Mr. Assad to go, but never fully engaged.

The rise of the Islamic State militant group, also known as ISIS, prompted Mr. Obama to jump in, but under the auspices of an antiterrorism campaign. The United States was not taking sides in the civil war, or at least it did not intend to. But the minute it entered the battlefield, it inevitably muddled its standing in Syria and across the Middle East, analysts and experts in the region said.

When American attacks, for example, killed militants with the Nusra Front, a group linked to Al Qaeda, it angered some of the same Syrian insurgents who Mr. Obama has said will help make up a ground force against the Islamic State.

Some of the groups that had said they would support the United States’ mission have now issued statements condemning the American strikes on the Qaeda-linked militants. Those groups have also expressed concern that by making the Islamic State its priority, the United States has acknowledged that it does not seek to unseat Mr. Assad.

Conversely, supporters of the Syrian government say hitting the Nusra Front is proof that the United States has switched sides.

“Of course coordination exists,” said a pro-government Syrian journalist speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, who had criticized the prospect of the strikes but turned practically jubilant once they began. “How else do you explain the strikes on Nusra?”

But the battle lines are not so clear-cut, as both sides try to spin the American involvement to their advantage, pressing Washington to shift even as Mr. Obama remains determined to stay his course. The Arab allies have, to Washington’s delight, made no effort to hide their involvement in the bombing raids. They have, in fact, even boasted of their roles.

Saudi Arabia has released “Top Gun”-style photos of its pilots posing with their jets, and the United Arab Emirates has bragged that one of its pilots is a woman. But the delight has as much to do with the countries’ hope that the United States will eventually come around to helping oust Mr. Assad as it does with aiding the United States in a fight against extremism, analysts said.

“The key gulf states agreed to the American request in a large part to try to steer America’s Syria policy after years of frustration,” said Emile Hokayem, a Middle East analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies. “They believed that if they had said no to the Americans, the hope for a shift in U.S. policy toward Syria would be nil.”

Other commentators said gulf nations frustrated with Mr. Obama’s hesitancy had gladly joined in when his tone changed.

“Once there is a determined America and a determined President Obama, he will find a receptive ally in the region to work with him,” said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political analyst in the United Arab Emirates.

At the same time, these Arab partners see that the United States is once again depending on regional strongmen and monarchs with absolute authority to pursue its interests in the region.

For a time, it appeared that Washington was moving away from that decades-old model toward supporting popular movements that sought to bring democracy and greater rights to the region. That infuriated Saudi Arabia and the other monarchies, but with the collapse of the Arab Spring and the rise of the Islamic State, the old alliances have been reinvigorated.

“We are back to the future,” said Salman Shaikh, the director of the Brookings Doha Center, a Qatar-based branch of the Brookings Institution. “After the rush of the Arab Spring, there is a realization that they are our real friends and allies in the region and in this fight.”

American officials have called the participation of five Arab countries — Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — in the Syria campaign essential to combating the perception that the United States is waging war on Muslims.

All five are hereditary monarchies that limit political participation and often face criticism from human rights groups for cracking down on dissidents.

Saudi Arabia, a Sunni powerhouse, has wielded its vast oil wealth to support the Egyptian military in its fight against the Muslim Brotherhood, funded rebels in Syria and deployed troops in 2011 to help the Sunni rulers of Bahrain put down a political uprising led by that nation’s Shiite majority.

The United Arab Emirates has also contributed to the regional battle against Islamists, most recently by teaming up with Egypt to bomb them in Libya. At home, it has rounded up Islamist activists and limited free speech.

Qatar, too, has bankrolled rebels in Syria, and in 2012 it sentenced a poet to life in prison for reciting a verse deemed insulting to the country’s ruler. Jordan also criminalizes criticism of the king and limits press freedoms.

Rights activists fear that these countries’ partnership with the United States will make it harder for the West to press them to make reforms.

“These are states with very problematic human rights records,” said Nicholas McGeehan, a Gulf researcher at Human Rights Watch. “This bonding together against a common enemy is understandable, but there will be implications for the human rights in these countries.”

The Arab allies worked to bolster their own global standing at the United Nations General Assembly this week, exposing the disagreements that have often kept them from acting together.

The king of Jordan cast himself as a staunch American ally and said Jordan would propose a Security Council resolution to make attacks on religious communities a crime against humanity.

Bahrain highlighted the problem of illicit financing for extremist groups from the region, in a clear dig at its neighbor Qatar.

But most of these countries stand together in supporting a leadership change in Syria, which the United States says is not its goal. And that stance from the United States has delighted pro-government Syrians.

“The Syrian Army will certainly benefit from the American airstrikes,” the unnamed diplomat told the pro-government Syrian newspaper Al Watan.

Reporting was contributed by Hwaida Saad and Mohammed Ghannam from Beirut, and Somini Sengupta and Michael R. Gordon from the United Nations.

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clashing Goals In Syria Strikes Bedevil Obama.

    Clashing Goals in Syria Strikes Put U.S. in Fix, NYT, 25.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/
    middleeast/clashing-goals-in-syria-strikes-put-us-in-fix.html

Warplanes Blast Militants’ Refineries

in Syria, Targeting a Source of Cash

SEPT. 25, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

and ANNE BARNARD

WASHINGTON — Warplanes from the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates on Thursday attacked what military officials believe were the majority of the Islamic State’s oil refineries in Syria as part of the continuing effort to target sources of the terrorist group’s financing, Pentagon officials said.

The strikes on the 12 small refineries came on the third day of the American-led air campaign in Syria, and early reports indicated that the attacks had crippled the plants in the eastern provinces of Deir al-Zour and Hasakah, Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said at a news conference.

He played a video and displayed aerial photographs of the strikes, which in at least one case left a refinery tower standing while destroying the buildings around it.

Still, Admiral Kirby and other military officials acknowledged shortcomings in the budding effort to roll back gains by the Islamic State, particularly given that there were no plans to send in American troops to capitalize on airstrikes.

“We get caught up in the immediacy of these airstrikes,” Admiral Kirby said, “but this is going to take time, and nobody here in this building is not unaware of that.”

The strikes in Syria have been more intense than the attacks against Islamic State targets in Iraq, and the targets are different, too. In Iraq, American planes have, for the most part, bombed artillery positions, convoys and even individual patrol boats. The attacks in Syria have been concentrated on the Islamic State’s command and control structures and the sources of its revenues.

Officials with the United States Central Command, which oversees American military operations in the Middle East, said the refineries produced 300 to 500 barrels of oil daily, generating as much as $2 million per day in black-market oil sales for the group’s operations. That estimate is higher than American officials had previously made public, and would put the price around $333 per barrel. Oil sells for about $100 a barrel on the open market.

The Islamic State “is an organization that has both tooth and tail,” Admiral Kirby said, using the military terms for war fighters (tooth) and command, finance and logistical support (tail). “In Iraq, we’ve gone after their teeth. In Syria, we’re trying to cut off their tail.”

Defense officials said the attacks on Thursday involved six American planes and 10 from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Admiral Kirby said. On Monday, the first day of the strikes, most of the bombing was done by American planes.

Attacks also continued Thursday in Iraq, where American forces conducted 11 airstrikes on Islamic State militants, armed vehicles, Humvees, a fighting position, four checkpoints, two guard towers and a command post west of Baghdad, according to Central Command. Iraqi security forces have worked with the Americans there, but their performance has been “mixed,” a military official said.

Admiral Kirby said the Pentagon would investigate reports that civilians have been killed in the Syrian strikes, but he said American and coalition pilots and war planners took pains to carry out the attacks with precision. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a British-based monitoring group, said that the raids against the oil refineries had killed 14 militants as well as five civilians, including a child.

“We are aware of some reporting out there that there may have been civilian casualties, and we are taking a look at that,” Admiral Kirby said.

Defense officials said that about 500 soldiers from the First Infantry Division will deploy to the region, and about 200 of them will be sent to joint operations centers in Erbil, in Kurdish-controlled Iraq, and Baghdad.

The strikes have done little to impede the advance of the Islamic State on Kurdish villages near the Turkish border, where tens of thousands of people have fled, fearing a massacre. Artillery and heavy machine-gun fire could be heard from the border in southern Turkey, sounding closer later in the day.

Kurdish fighters defending the area said they were able to push the Islamic State back a few miles, but issued a statement urging members of the American-led coalition to prove they “are serious” by striking the Islamic State there. The Kurds offered to provide targeting coordinates.

Such help could prove to be a delicate matter in relations with Turkey, an American ally and NATO member that has remained vague about how it will participate in the fight against the Islamic State. Turkey views the Kurdish fighters — who are affiliated with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party in Turkey, known as the P.K.K., which Turkey and the United States list as a terrorist group — with suspicion because of the longtime tensions between the Turkish government and its own Kurdish population.

Redur Xelil, a spokesman for the People’s Protection Units, the Kurdish fighters in Syria also known as the Y.P.G., said the group had only light weapons and was outgunned by the Islamic State. He said that the Islamic State’s weapons, vehicles and equipment “are in open air and visible to everyone, but yet they haven’t been targeted by the airstrikes.”

“If the U.S. and their alliance are serious,” he added, the Y.P.G. is “willing to cooperate.”

A member of the Islamic State’s de facto local administration in the town of Qourieh said the group’s headquarters were evacuated not long before it was hit by an airstrike.

“The brothers have taken a new path,” he said. “They decided to change the way they operate.”

He added: “It’s almost impossible to know where the brothers are. They disappeared, they became ghosts, their heavy weapons disappeared. Now they are only around Deir al-Zour airport and near the front lines.”

The scene was calmer on the Turkish side of the border, where waves of Syrian Kurdish refugees and Turkish Kurds have arrived wanting to enter Syria to join the fight.

But from a village near the border fence, the black flag of the Islamic State could be seen flying from a hillock. Jumaa Ali, 49, said he had watched a man that villagers suspected as an Islamic State militant climb into a border watchtower. He said Kurdish villagers were waiting for him to climb down in the hope of shooting him.

“It’s dangerous now to live in this village,” he said, then added with a laugh, “but we can cut heads, too.”

Nearby, masked men checked cars. Residents said they were local Kurds who were extorting goods from Syrian Kurdish refugees as they made their way into Turkey.

About a mile away, as police checked refugees’ bags for weapons, Selin Unal, a spokeswoman for the United Nations refugee agency, said that Turkey had accepted as many Syrian refugees since last Friday as Europe had throughout the three-year civil war. “This is a huge responsibility on Turkey,” she said.
 

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Anne Barnard from Gaziantep, Turkey. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 26, 2014, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Warplanes Blast Militants’ Refineries in Syria,

    Warplanes Blast Militants’ Refineries in Syria, Targeting a Source of Cash,
    NYT, 25.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/26/world/middleeast/
    isis-revenue-sources-remain-crucial-target-us-says.html

U.S. Invokes Iraq’s Defense

in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes

 

SEPT. 23, 2014

The New York Times

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

and CHARLIE SAVAGE

UNITED NATIONS — The United States said on Tuesday that the American-led airstrikes against the Islamic State — carried out in Syria without seeking the permission of the Syrian government or the United Nations Security Council — were legal because they were done in defense of Iraq.

The American ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, officially informed the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, of the legal justification in a letter, asserting that the airstrikes had been carried out under a fundamental principle in the United Nations Charter. That principle gives countries the right to defend themselves, including using force on another country’s territory when that country is unwilling or unable to address it.

International law generally prohibits using force on the sovereign territory of another country without its permission or authorization from the United Nations, except as a matter of self-defense. American intelligence agencies have concluded that the Islamic State poses no immediate threat to the United States, though they say that another militant group targeted in the strikes, Khorasan, does pose a threat.

Yet the letter asserted that Iraq had a valid right of self-defense against the Islamic State — also known as ISIS or ISIL — because the militant group was attacking Iraq from its havens in Syria, and the Syrian government had failed to suppress that threat. Because Iraq asked the United States for assistance in defending itself, the letter asserted, the strikes were legal.

“The Syrian regime has shown that it cannot and will not confront these safe havens effectively itself,” the letter states. “Accordingly, the United States has initiated necessary and proportionate military actions in Syria in order to eliminate the ongoing ISIL threat to Iraq, including by protecting Iraqi citizens from further attacks and by enabling Iraqi forces to regain control of Iraq’s borders.

“In addition the United States has initiated military actions in Syria against Al Qaeda elements in Syria known as the Khorasan Group to address terrorist threats that they pose to the United States and our partners and allies.”

The argument seems to have persuaded Mr. Ban to issue an implicit nod to the airstrikes. He told reporters earlier Tuesday that the strikes had been carried out “in areas no longer under the effective control of that government.”

The American government is also citing a Sept. 20 letter from Iraq’s minister of foreign affairs, Ibrahim al-Jafari, to the United Nations complaining that the Islamic State was attacking Iraq from its havens and saying that it had requested the United States’ assistance in defending itself.

Iraq has “requested the United States of America to lead international efforts to strike ISIL sites and military strongholds, with our express consent,” the Iraqi letter said. “The aim of such strikes is to end the constant threat to Iraq, protect Iraq’s citizens and, ultimately, arm Iraqi forces and enable them to regain control of Iraq’s borders.”

Two legal scholars, Jack Goldsmith of Harvard Law School and Ryan Goodman of the New York University School of Law, said the United States appeared to be on solid ground by invoking the argument of collective self-defense of Iraq, but that the notion that Syria’s sovereignty could legally be violated because it was “unable or unwilling” to suppress the threat would be more controversial. While the United States has long invoked that argument in various contexts, many international law scholars disagree with it, they said.

The United States is also asserting a right to defend its own personnel in Iraq from the Islamic State. American officials said this right, which was not asserted in the letter to Mr. Ban, should be understood as supplementary authority to helping Iraq defend itself directly.

Administration officials have said that as a matter of domestic law, they believe that the United States has statutory authority to attack the Islamic State under Congress’s 2001 authorization to fight Al Qaeda. They also believe that Congress’s 2002 authorization of the Iraq war could provide an alternate source of such authority. The United States has been bombing Islamic State forces in Iraq since August.

Both congressional authorizations provide legal authority for the strikes in Syria, too, the officials contended, because of the Islamic State’s history of ties to Al Qaeda — notwithstanding the fact that the two groups recently split. And, they said, the 2002 Iraq war authorization can be read in part as promising to help foster a stable, democratic government in Iraq, which would include defending it from terrorist attacks.

In May 2013, President Obama announced a new policy for targeted killings under which the United States would generally strike only at specific individuals who were deemed to pose a “continuing and imminent threat” of attacks on Americans. The policy appeared designed to foreclose the possibility of so-called signature strikes, which target groups of people whose identities are unknown but whose patterns of life suggest that they are members of militant groups.

Neither the strikes targeting the Islamic State nor those targeting Khorasan were based on any individualized, case-by-case analysis that a specific person in the strike zone posed a continuing and imminent threat to the United States, the officials said. Rather, the United States was hitting members of the groups based on their status as part of an enemy force.

The officials said the May 2013 policy for targeted killings did not apply to the broader armed conflict now underway in Iraq and Syria.
 

Somini Sengupta reported from the United Nations, and Charlie Savage from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2014, on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Invokes Defense of Iraq in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes.

    U.S. Invokes Iraq’s Defense in Legal Justification of Syria Strikes,
    NYT, 23.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/us/politics/
    us-invokes-defense-of-iraq-in-saying-strikes-on-syria-are-legal.html

U.S. Is Carrying Out

Vast Majority of Strikes on ISIS,

Military Officials Say

 

SEPT. 23, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

and MICHAEL R. GORDON

WASHINGTON — The vast majority of airstrikes launched against Sunni militant targets in Syria have been carried out by American war planes and ship-based Tomahawk cruise missiles, military officials said Tuesday, in what they described as the successful beginning of a long campaign to degrade and destroy the Islamic State.

In disclosing the identities of the five Sunni Arab nations that joined or supported the attacks in Syria — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Jordan and Qatar — the Obama administration sought to paint a picture of an international coalition resolute in its determination to take on the Sunni militant group.

Jordan said that “a number of Royal Jordanian Air Force fighters destroyed” several targets but did not specify where; the Emirati Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that the air force “launched its first strikes against ISIL targets” on Monday evening, using another acronym for the Islamic State. American officials said that Saudi Arabia and Bahrain also took active part in the strikes, and that Qatar played a “supporting” role.

But Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., the director of operations with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the majority of strikes were carried out by American warplanes and cruise missiles, with the aim of hindering the ability of the Islamic State to cross the border into Iraq and attack Iraqi forces.

“What we have been doing over these last couple of weeks and what last night’s campaign was about was simply buying them some space so that they can get on the offensive,” General Mayville said.

Military officials said that the airstrikes began at midnight Monday local time with the launching of some 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the guided missile destroyer Arleigh Burke at positions held in Aleppo by a Qaeda-linked network known as Khorasan and at Islamic State targets around the group’s headquarters in Raqqa.

That first stage of the attack was conducted solely by the United States. The second stage began soon afterward, with American warplanes joined by fighters and bombers from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Jordan, targeting Islamic State compounds, barracks and vehicles in northern Syria.

A third wave, which also included the Arab nations, targeted Islamic State positions in eastern Syria, Pentagon officials said. A senior military official said that during the three waves of Syria strikes, the United States and its Arab allies dropped almost as many bombs in one night as the United States had used during all of its operations in Iraq against the Islamic State.

At a briefing for reporters, military officials showed photographs and video of before and after shots of the targets hit in Syria. In one case, the military bombed what officials said was an Islamic State finance center in Raqqa, targeting and destroying electronic and communications equipment on the roof, while leaving the rest of the building intact.

In another instance, American F-22 fighters targeted an Islamic State command and control building, hitting the right side of the structure, which officials said the Sunni militants were using for communications, storing weapons and holding meetings, while leaving the rest of the building intact.

General Mayville told reporters that the strikes were the beginning of a “credible and sustainable” campaign to destroy the Islamic State. He and other officials said that the hope is to limit civilian casualties by using precision strikes. American officials are also hoping to counter any attempt by the Islamic State’s formidable propaganda arm to accuse the United States and its allies of killing civilians.

A Pentagon official said Tuesday that with the exception of the Tomahawk cruise missiles, all of the strikes were launched from aircraft inside Syrian airspace. But officials declined to say whether the American military jammed Syria’s air defense system or whether the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, simply decided to allow the coalition warplanes into the country’s airspace.

When asked, General Mayville said that Syria’s air defenses were “passive” during the strikes.

While the airstrikes are the opening wave in what officials say will be a sustained air campaign, military analysts say the weak link in the strategy for combating the Islamic State remains the ability to train and equip Iraqi forces and Syrian rebels. It will take time to build up forces in both countries that will be strong enough to capture and hold territory from the militants.

In Iraq, American advisers need to train the 26 Iraqi brigades that the Pentagon says are still intact and loyal to the government and help the Iraqis establish new national guard units, which would have the primary responsibility for defending Sunni-dominated provinces and would be recruited largely from Iraqi tribes.

A senior State Department official said that the new Iraqi government had a plan to establish the national guard units but acknowledged that doing so would not be easy.

“It is not going to be soon,” said the official, who could not be identified under the agency’s protocol for briefing reporters.

Meanwhile in Syria, the United States and its allies have another hard task in training the moderate Syrian resistance.

Hadi al-Bahra, the president of the Syrian opposition, said in an interview on Monday that some sort of no-fly zone would need to be imposed over Syria once the trained troops take to the battlefield so that the fighters would not be attacked by Mr. Assad’s air force. Mr. Bahra said that he met with Defense Department officials in New York to discuss the situation on the ground.

“Our forces have to be either equipped with an air-defense system like Manpads or a no-fly zone has to be imposed in these areas,” he said, referring to a type of shoulder-fired missile launcher. “We cannot throw our people to fight where they are a target of airstrikes by the regime.”

Turkey had been reluctant to play a prominent role in the American-led coalition while the militants held 49 Turkish hostages. But now that they have been released, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan signaled Tuesday that Turkey would assist the effort in some way.

“We will give the necessary support to the operation; the support could be military or logistics,” Mr. Erdogan said, according to the Turkish broadcaster NTV. But Mr. Erdogan, who is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, did not provide details.

Secretary of State John Kerry said Tuesday at a meeting on countering terrorist threats, “Clearly, Turkey had an initial challenge with respect to its hostages and that being resolved, now Turkey is ready to conduct additional efforts along with the rest of us in order to guarantee success.”
 

Helene Cooper reported from Washington, and Michael R. Gordon from New York. Eric Schmitt contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. Is Carrying Out Vast Majority of Strikes on ISIS, Military Officials Say.

    U.S. Is Carrying Out Vast Majority of Strikes on ISIS, Military Officials Say,
    NYT, 23.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/middleeast/
    us-is-carrying-out-vast-majority-of-strikes-on-isis-military-officials-say.html

In Airstrikes,

U.S. Targets Militant Cell

Said to Plot an Attack

Against the West

SEPT. 23, 2014

The New York Times

By PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — American forces took advantage of the airstrikes against the Islamic State extremist group in Syria to try to simultaneously wipe out the leadership of an unrelated cell of veterans of Al Qaeda that the White House said Tuesday was plotting an “imminent” attack against the United States or Europe.

The barrage of bombs and missiles launched into Syria early Tuesday was aimed primarily at crippling the Islamic State, the formidable Sunni organization that has seized a large piece of territory to form its own radical enclave. But the blitz also targeted a little-known network called Khorasan, in hopes of paralyzing it before it could carry out what American officials feared would be a terrorist attack in the West.

American military and intelligence analysts were still studying damage reports from the initial air assault, but senior Obama administration officials expressed hope that they had killed Muhsin al-Fadhli, the leader of Khorasan and a onetime confidant of Osama bin Laden. The officials said they had been contemplating military action against Khorasan in recent months, but President Obama’s decision to hit the Islamic State’s forces inside Syria provided a chance to neutralize the other perceived threat.

Several officials said Khorasan had an advanced plan for an attack involving a bomb that could pass undetected through airport security systems, perhaps by lacing nonmetallic objects like toothpaste tubes and clothes with explosive material, although officials offered no details in public and did not provide specifics on how soon an attack might be carried out.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said the concerns about Khorasan were behind a decision last summer to ban uncharged laptop computers and cellphones from some United States-bound commercial airliners.

The air campaign against Khorasan and the Islamic State got underway even as Mr. Obama flew to New York to meet with world leaders gathering at the opening session of the United Nations General Assembly. Mr. Obama did not seek United Nations permission for the military campaign, but he presented the strikes as the collaboration of a multinational coalition that included five Arab nations: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain.

“Because of the almost unprecedented effort of this coalition, I think we now have an opportunity to send a very clear message that the world is united,” Mr. Obama said during a hastily arranged photo opportunity in New York with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi of Iraq, King Abdullah II of Jordan and representatives of the other Arab allies.

Still, the bulk of the military efforts were conducted by American forces, and reaction in the Middle East was mixed. President Hassan Rouhani of Iran, which is allied with the government of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, said the airstrikes were illegal because they were not conducted with the approval of Syria’s government, a point later echoed by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, another ally of Syria’s.
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The Syrian government itself seemed more accepting, probably because it was glad to see military power brought to bear against forces that have been fighting Mr. Assad and recently killed many of his soldiers. The Syrian Foreign Ministry said the government “backs any international effort that contributes to the fight against terrorists,” whether it is the Islamic State, the Nusra Front “or anyone else.”

Samantha Power, the American ambassador to the United Nations, informed her Syrian counterpart about the strikes ahead of time, but did not seek permission or disclose the timing or targets. “In fact, we warned them to not pose a threat to our aircraft,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, the president’s deputy national security adviser. Mr. Rhodes said Mr. Obama had issued the order for the strikes on Thursday, a day after visiting the United States Central Command headquarters in Tampa that would carry out the operation.

In his public appearances on Tuesday, Mr. Obama cautioned again that the campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, would take time. He also cited the strike on Khorasan, the first time he has mentioned the group in public. “Once again, it must be clear to anyone who would plot against America and try to do Americans harm that we will not tolerate safe havens for terrorists who threaten our people,” he said at the White House before his departure for New York.

Most officials speaking publicly on Tuesday characterized the Khorasan threat as imminent. Lt. Gen. William C. Mayville Jr., who is in charge of operations for the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, said the terrorist group was nearing “the execution phase of an attack either in Europe or the homeland.”

But one senior counterterrorism official, who insisted on anonymity to discuss intelligence matters, said the group might not have chosen the target, method or even the timing for a strike. An intelligence official said separately that the group was “reaching a stage where they might be able to do something.”

Khorasan is closely allied with the Nusra Front, which is Al Qaeda’s designated affiliate in Syria, according to American intelligence officials. The group, they said, is made up of Qaeda operatives from places like Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Africa and Chechnya who have traveled to Syria on the orders of Ayman al-Zawahri, the Qaeda leader.

Mr. Holder told Katie Couric of Yahoo News that the United States had followed the group for two years. “I can say that the enhanced security measures that we took” banning uncharged electronic devices on some flights were “based on concerns we had about what the Khorasan group was planning to do,” he said.

The strikes on Tuesday were aimed at the group’s leaders, including Mr. Fadhli, a Kuwaiti associate of Bin Laden’s who moved to Syria last year. Officials said they were not certain if he had been killed, but Twitter accounts associated with jihadist groups said that he and another Khorasan leader, Abu Yusef al-Turki, had died in the airstrikes.

One Twitter user said that by killing Mr. Fadhli, the United States had “presented him a great wish and a most honorable gift” of martyrdom, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors militant groups’ social media postings.

Lawmakers and terrorism experts said that even if Mr. Fadhli had been killed, it would not necessarily derail the group’s ambitions. “Fadhli is certainly one of the most capable of the Al Qaeda core members,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff, a California Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. “His loss would be significant, but as we’ve seen before, any decapitation is only a short-term gain. The hydra will grow another head.”

Congressional leaders largely rallied behind the strikes, including Republicans who oppose the president on most other issues, although some of them still faulted his strategy and many disagreed on whether he needed approval from lawmakers. The administration contends he does not need new action by Congress because of the authorization it passed targeting Al Qaeda and affiliates after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“ISIL is a direct threat to the safety and security of the United States and our allies,” the House speaker, John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio, said in a statement. “I support the airstrikes launched by the president, understanding that this is just one step in what must be a larger effort to destroy and defeat this terrorist organization.”

The participation of the five Arab countries may bolster Mr. Obama’s argument that the campaign does not pit the United States against the Sunni Muslim world, but is, rather, a broad alliance of Sunni Muslim countries against a radical group. Qatar and Saudi Arabia have been heavily involved in Syria’s civil war, so joining the coalition was merely a more direct form of intervention.

Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Bahrain worry that their citizens who joined the Islamic State’s forces will later return and plot attacks at home. “This is the right way to do it, if you want to defeat the Islamic State, because you cannot cut off the tail and leave the head,” said Ebtesam al-Ketbi, the chairwoman of the Emirates Policy Center.

But evident elsewhere was a familiar current of cynicism about the motives behind the strikes. The United States and its allies “want to divide our lands, destroy our nations, occupy our homelands and monopolize our choices, without shedding one drop of their blue blood,” Massoud al-Hennawi wrote in Al Ahram, a state-run newspaper in Egypt. “They have no problem that our cheap Arab blood flows in rivers, if it achieves their goals and purposes.”

Reporting was contributed by Matt Apuzzo, Mark Mazzetti, Charlie Savage, Michael S. Schmidt, Eric Schmitt and Jonathan Weisman from Washington; Mark Landler and Somini Sengupta from New York; Ben Hubbard from Beirut, Lebanon; and Alan Cowell from London.

A version of this article appears in print on September 24, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: IN AIRSTRIKES, U.S. TARGETS CELL SAID TO PLOT AN ATTACK.

    In Airstrikes, U.S. Targets Militant Cell Said to Plot an Attack Against the West,
    NYT, 24.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/world/middleeast/us-isis-syria.html

Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies

Hit ISIS Targets in Syria

 

SEPT. 22, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON — The United States and allies launched airstrikes against Sunni militants in Syria early Tuesday, unleashing a torrent of cruise missiles and precision-guided bombs from the air and sea on the militants’ de facto capital of Raqqa and along the porous Iraq border.

American fighter jets and armed Predator and Reaper drones, flying alongside warplanes from several Arab allies, struck a broad array of targets in territory controlled by the militants, known as the Islamic State. American defense officials said the targets included weapons supplies, depots, barracks and buildings the militants use for command and control. Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired from United States Navy ships in the region.

The strikes are a major turning point in President Obama’s war against the Islamic State and open up a risky new stage of the American military campaign. Until now, the administration had bombed Islamic State targets only in Iraq, and had suggested it would be weeks if not months before the start of a bombing campaign against Islamic State targets in Syria.

Bahrain, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates took part in the strikes, American officials said, although the Arab governments were not expected to announce their participation until later Tuesday. The new coalition’s makeup is significant because the United States was able to recruit Sunni governments to take action against the Sunni militants of the Islamic State. The operation also unites the squabbling states of the Persian Gulf.

The strikes came less than two weeks after Mr. Obama announced in an address to the nation that he was authorizing an expansion of the military campaign against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS.

Unlike American strikes in Iraq over the past month, which have been small-bore bombings of mostly individual Islamic State targets — patrol boats and trucks — the salvo on Tuesday in Syria was the beginning of what was expected to be a sustained, hourslong bombardment at targets in the militant headquarters in Raqqa and on the border.

The strikes began after years of debate within the Obama administration about whether the United States should intervene militarily or should avoid another entanglement in a complex war in the Middle East. But the Islamic State controls a broad swath of land across both Iraq and Syria.

Defense officials said the goal of the air campaign was to deprive the Islamic State of the safe havens it enjoys in Syria. The administration’s ultimate goal, as set forth in the address Mr. Obama delivered on Sept. 10, is to recruit a global coalition to “degrade and ultimately destroy” the militants, even as Mr. Obama warned that “eradicating a cancer” like the Islamic State was a long-term challenge that would put some American troops at risk.

American warplanes had been conducting surveillance flights over Syria for more than a month in anticipation of airstrikes, but it had been unclear just how much intelligence the Pentagon had managed to gather about the movements of the Sunni militant group in Syria. Unlike Iraq, whose airspace is controlled by the United States, Syria has its own aerial defense system, so American planes have had to rely on sometimes jamming the country’s defenses when crossing into Syria.

The strikes in Syria occurred without the approval of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, whose government, unlike Iraq, did not ask the United States for help against the Sunni militant group. Mr. Obama has repeatedly called on Mr. Assad to step down because of chemical weapons attacks and violence against his own people, and defense officials said Mr. Assad had not been told in advance of the strikes.

But administration officials acknowledge that American efforts to roll back the Sunni militant group in Syria cannot help but aid Mr. Assad, whose government is also a target of the Islamic State.

The United Arab Emirates announced three weeks ago that it was willing to participate in the campaign against the Islamic State, and administration officials have also said they expect the Iraqi military to take part in strikes both in Iraq and Syria. If both nations are in fact participants, the strikes on Tuesday could mark a rare instance when the Shiite-dominated Iraqi military has cooperated in a military operation with its Sunni Arab neighbors.

Combined with a French airstrike last week on a logistics depot held by Islamic State militants in northeastern Iraq, the allied participation in the strikes allows Mr. Obama to make the case that his plan to target the Islamic State has international cooperation.

In addition, Saudi Arabia recently agreed to a training facility for moderate members of the Syrian opposition, whom the United States hopes to train, equip and send back to Syria to fight both Mr. Assad and Islamic State militants.

On Wednesday, Mr. Obama is expected to speak of the international coalition in an address to the United Nations General Assembly.

In his Sept. 10 speech to the nation, Mr. Obama drew a distinction between the military action he was ordering and the two wars begun by his immediate predecessor, George W. Bush. He likened this campaign to the selective airstrikes that the United States has carried out for years against suspected terrorists in Yemen and Somalia, few of which have been made public.

The airstrikes in Syria, so far, come without the benefit of a large ground force to capitalize on gains they make. While some Syrian opposition groups fighting the Islamic State militants may be able to move into a few cleared areas, administration officials acknowledged on Monday that it was doubtful that the Free Syrian Army, the opposition group most preferred by the United States, would be able to take control of major sections of Islamic State territory, at least not until it has been better trained — which will take place over the next year.

That could leave the forces of Mr. Assad in perhaps the best position to take advantage of any American bombardment. An administration official on Monday acknowledged that that was a worry, but said, “We don’t plan to make it easy for Assad to reclaim territory.” He declined to say what methods the United States would use to prevent the Syrian leader from capitalizing on the American aerial bombardment.

Although the full scope of the airstrikes was not immediately clear, they followed an urgent appeal from Hadi al-Bahra, the president of the Syrian Opposition Coalition, for American military action. He said the United States needed to act quickly to stop militants from the Islamic State from pressing their attack against the Kurdish communities near the Syrian border town of Ayn-al-Arab, as it is known by Arabs, or Kobani, as it is called by the Kurds.

And Representative Eliot L. Engel, a New York Democrat who serves on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a statement urging “targeted American airstrikes” to protect the Syrian Kurds and prevent a “potential massacre.”

Obama administration officials asserted that they were having success building an international coalition to confront the Islamic State, but Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, said on Monday that France would limit its military operations to Iraq.

“The French president has said we do not have intention to do the same in Syria, I mean by air,” Mr. Fabius said in an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, adding that France would support the moderate Syrian opposition.

“I can confirm that U.S. military and partner nation forces are undertaking military action against ISIL terrorists in Syria using a mix of fighter, bomber and Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles,” said Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, using an alternate name for the Islamic State.

“Given that these operations are ongoing, we are not in a position to provide additional details at this time,” Admiral Kirby said in a statement Monday night in Washington. “The decision to conduct these strikes was made earlier today by the U.S. Central Command commander under authorization granted him by the commander in chief. We will provide more details later as operationally appropriate.”
 

Michael R. Gordon contributed reporting from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on September 23, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria.

    Airstrikes by U.S. and Allies Hit ISIS Targets in Syria, NYT, 22.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/world/middleeast/
    us-and-allies-hit-isis-targets-in-syria.html

Fleeing Gaza,

Only to Face Treachery and Disaster

at Sea

 

SEPT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By FARES AKRAM

and ISABEL KERSHNER

ABASSAN, Gaza Strip — Samir Asfour, 57, held a mobile phone that never stopped ringing in one hand, a cigarette in the other. His Palestinian passport was sticking out of the chest pocket of his white jalabiya.

“I will travel whenever I can,” he said, speaking nervously outside his home in Abassan, a small town east of Khan Younis in the southern Gaza Strip. “I need to go and bring back their bodies from wherever they are.”

Mr. Asfour’s son Ahmed, 24, and three of Ahmed’s cousins, ages 17 to 27, are among dozens of young Gazans missing in the Mediterranean. Mr. Asfour last heard from them on Sept. 6, a week after they left Gaza for Egypt. There, they intended to board an illegal migrant ship bound for Italy. Their final destination was not clear, but relatives said they had been heading to Europe in search of jobs and better medical care.

The ship, with about 500 migrants aboard, sank last week off the coast of Malta after it was rammed by human traffickers on another boat during an argument with the migrants, according to survivors. Nearly all aboard are believed to have died.

Mr. Asfour said he had contacted one survivor who made it to Malta, Mamoun Doghmosh, who confirmed that he had seen Ahmed on the boat. Mr. Asfour said he was sure that his son was dead because he was sick and could not swim.

The recent war between Israel and Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, prompted a wave of attempts by Palestinians to reach Europe with the aid of Egyptian smugglers, despite — or perhaps because of — Israeli and Egyptian restrictions on regular movement in and out of the Palestinian coastal enclave.

Fleeing conflict, unemployment and an outlook that many here described as hopeless, at least 1,000 Palestinians have left Gaza in the past three months seeking passage to Europe, according to Palestinians tracking the migration, joining the increasing flow of asylum seekers and migrants from Syria, and from Egypt, Sudan and other parts of Africa who set out from ports in Egypt and Libya. Facebook posts by those who made it safely to Europe encourage others to attempt the journey.

But the deadly shipwreck has suddenly shined a light on the exodus, and for the distraught relatives back in Gaza, it has underscored the risks involved. The Euro-Mid Observer for Human Rights, an organization based in Geneva with an office in Gaza, said 90 Gaza residents were among the hundreds missing and feared dead in the shipwreck, though information about the dead, the missing and possible survivors has been scarce here.

Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the United Nations human rights chief, on Friday condemned what he said appeared to be a “mass murder in the Mediterranean” and called for concerted international action against traffickers.

“The callous act of deliberately ramming a boat full of hundreds of defenseless people is a crime that must not go unpunished,” Mr. Zeid said in a statement from his Geneva office.

The ramming was just the worst case among four or five other boat sinkings over several days.

For many, the journey out of Gaza began in a smuggling tunnel running beneath the border with Egypt. But because Ahmed Asfour and his cousins were wounded in an Israeli airstrike in Abassan during a previous Gaza conflict, in 2008-9, they had medical records allowing them to enter Egypt legally, via the Rafah border crossing, on the understanding that they would receive treatment, Samir Asfour said.

Ahmed had the worst injuries. He lost sight in one eye and part of his pancreas. Leg injuries prevented him from walking long distances. After that earlier war, he initially received treatment in Egypt, then in Israel, and he was arrested and spent three years in an Israeli prison, his father said, declining to elaborate.

After his release in 2012, Ahmed could not find a job and received welfare payments of 800 shekels (about $220) a month. The Palestinian authorities said they could not pay for further treatment. “We reached a dead end,” Mr. Asfour said.

Before boarding the boat in Egypt, Ahmed and his cousins phoned their relatives in Gaza and asked them to pay the smugglers through a money-changing store in Khan Younis.

“They are a network,” Mr. Asfour said. “The smugglers have agents here, and they are like the Western Union.”

Mr. Asfour and his sister-in-law Samah Asfour, the mother of one of the cousins, Raed, 17, went to the money changer together and paid $2,000 for each of the four. Mrs. Asfour said that the usual cost was $1,500, but that the money changer had told her that the extra cash would ensure their sons a place on a large, sturdy ship, not a small one that could sink.

“We paid more so our boys would be safe,” she said. They were hoping to find medical treatment, jobs and a better future than the one they saw for themselves in Gaza. “They went for treatment. Why would we send them there?” Mrs. Asfour said. “This country doesn’t care for them, and they are desperate. They were seeking a good life.”

Mr. Asfour said he spoke to one of the smugglers in Egypt on his son’s mobile phone. “I asked him to take care of Ahmed because of his special situation,” Mr. Asfour said. “The smuggler told me not to worry and said Ahmed should only bring with him boxes of bottled water and juice and a box of dried dates.”

Other Gazans described how relatives left through the tunnels at Rafah in groups organized by a smuggler, paying him $1,500 per person and $2,000 for the boat runners.

The International Organization for Migration, based in Geneva, says records show that around 2,900 Palestinians have reached Italy this year, most of them in July and August.

Only 11 people are known to have survived the sinking of the rammed vessel, eight of them Palestinians from Gaza, and accounts from relatives of others aboard the doomed ship suggest that most of the passengers were Gazans, according to Joel Millman, a spokesman for the migration organization. He said the office had received a constant stream of calls from Gazans desperately seeking news of family members.

Relatives in contact with some of the migrants as they prepared for the journey said they had been driven in buses carrying 90 to 100 people to an Egyptian port, Damietta. Those aboard the boat included around 100 children younger than 10 who were stuffed below the deck, the migration organization reported.

Some of the Palestinians on board may have already spent a few years in Egypt before leaving for Europe, according to Palestinians tracking the migration.

Majdi Abu Daqqa, a lawyer and human rights activist in Gaza, said most had been sailing to Italy with the intention of moving to Sweden, Belgium or Greece, where friends told them it was easier to stay. Mr. Abu Daqqa said some members of the security services in Gaza were colluding with the smugglers, taking a cut of their fees.

Now, amid the recriminations of relatives in Gaza, Hamas, which controls the border area on the Gaza side, says it is taking measures to prevent further illegal migration. Mr. Abu Daqqa said about 150 illegal migrants who had crossed through the tunnels were caught at Egyptian checkpoints and were being held in Egypt.

But the money-changing store in Khan Younis, on a street full of other currency exchange stores, was still open this week. When a reporter asked about transferring money to his wife in Egypt, a man behind the counter asked, “For immigration?” Asked how much it would cost, the man replied, “Two thousand dollars.” He then became suspicious and said the store handled only money transfers.

“We have nothing to do with the immigration,” he said.
 

Fares Akram reported from Abassan, and Isabel Kershner from Jerusalem. Nick Cumming-Bruce contributed reporting from Geneva.

A version of this article appears in print on September 20, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Fleeing Gaza, Only to Face Treachery and Disaster at Sea.

    Fleeing Gaza, Only to Face Treachery and Disaster at Sea,
    NYT, 19.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/world/middleeast/
    fleeing-gaza-only-to-face-treachery-and-disaster-at-sea-.html

U.S. to Commit Up to 3,000 Troops

to Fight Ebola in Africa

 

SEPT. 15, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER,

MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and DENISE GRADY

WASHINGTON — Under pressure to do more to confront the Ebola outbreak sweeping across West Africa, President Obama on Tuesday is to announce an expansion of military and medical resources to combat the spread of the deadly virus, administration officials said.

The president will go beyond the 25-bed portable hospital that Pentagon officials said they would establish in Liberia, one of the three West African countries ravaged by the disease, officials said. Mr. Obama will offer help to President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia in the construction of as many as 17 Ebola treatment centers in the region, with about 1,700 treatment beds.

Senior administration officials said Monday night that the Department of Defense would open a joint command operation in Monrovia, Liberia, to coordinate the international effort to combat the disease. The military will also provide engineers to help construct the additional treatment facilities and will send enough people to train up to 500 health care workers a week to deal with the crisis.

Officials said the military expected to send as many as 3,000 people to Africa to take charge of responding to the Ebola outbreak.

“We all recognize that this is such an extraordinary, serious epidemic,” a senior official told reporters, speaking on condition of anonymity ahead of Mr. Obama’s public remarks on Tuesday. The efforts should turn the tide from a high-transmission epidemic that continues to grow every day, other officials said.

The White House plan would increase the number of doctors and other health care workers being sent to West Africa from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other American agencies, officials said.

The American government will also provide 400,000 Ebola home health and treatment kits to Liberia, as well as tens of thousands of kits intended to test whether people have the disease. The Pentagon will provide some logistical equipment for health workers going to West Africa and what administration officials described as “command and control” organizational assistance on how to coordinate the overall relief work. The Army Corps of Engineers is expected to be part of the Defense Department effort.

Administration officials did not say how soon the 17 treatment centers would be built in Liberia; officials there, as well as international aid officials, have said that 1,000 beds are needed in Liberia in the next week alone to contain a disease that has been spreading exponentially.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease and public health expert at Vanderbilt University, praised the plan, calling it a “major commitment,” and said it was more extensive than he had expected.

“It seems coordinated and coherent,” Dr. Schaffner said. He added that “the real core” was the Defense Department’s logistical support “because the heart of any kind of epidemic containment concept is getting the goods to the right place, putting up the institution.”

Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said the plan was an important first step, “but it is clearly not enough.” The focus on Liberia, he said, is too limited, and more help should be extended to Sierra Leone and Guinea, the other countries at the center of the worst Ebola outbreak ever recorded.

“We should see all of West Africa now as one big outbreak,” Dr. Osterholm said. “It’s very clear we have to deal with all the areas with Ebola. If the U.S. is not able or not going to do it, that’s all the more reason to say the rest of the world has to do it.”

Dr. Jack Chow, a professor of global health at Carnegie Mellon University, also warned that “the virus does not recognize national borders and will continue to spread where health care is inadequate.”

Top White House aides on Monday rejected criticism from African officials, doctors and representatives from aid groups who said the United States had been slow to act in the face of the disease. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, said the government, including the C.D.C., had committed more than $100 million since the outbreak started in the early spring.

“The C.D.C. has responded commensurate to the seriousness” of the crisis, Mr. Earnest told reporters ahead of a trip Mr. Obama has planned to the agency’s headquarters in Atlanta on Tuesday afternoon. Mr. Earnest called the response “among the largest deployments of C.D.C. personnel ever.”

Senior administration officials conceded that the effort must expand further as the outbreak threatens to spread in Africa and, potentially, beyond the continent. Officials said medical experts in the government were genuinely worried about the possibility of a mutation that could turn the virus into a more contagious sickness that could threaten the United States.

The World Health Organization has issued a dire Ebola warning for Liberia, saying that the number of afflicted patients was increasing exponentially and that all new treatment facilities were overwhelmed, “pointing to a large but previously invisible caseload.” The description of the crisis in Liberia suggested an even more chaotic situation there than had been thought.

Ms. Johnson Sirleaf, who has implored Mr. Obama to do more to help her country battle the disease, traveled over the weekend through Monrovia, the Liberian capital, with the United States ambassador, Deborah R. Malac.

“What is needed is on a scale that is unprecedented,” a senior administration official said in an interview, speaking on the condition of anonymity because she was not allowed by the White House to talk on the record ahead of Mr. Obama’s announcement.

The United States, a second senior administration official said, also plans to send 400,000 home protective kits to the four counties in Liberia that have been hardest hit by Ebola. The kits will include protective gear for family members, gloves and masks, disinfectants, and fever-reducing drugs.

That is worrisome, Dr. Osterholm said, because it is difficult to care for Ebola patients without becoming infected, and there is no proof that the kits will work. “We are going to endanger family members more by providing the kits,” he said.

Helene Cooper and Michael D. Shear reported from Washington, and Denise Grady from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on September 16, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama to Call for Expansion of Ebola Fight.

    U.S. to Commit Up to 3,000 Troops to Fight Ebola in Africa,
    NYT, 15.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/16/world/africa/
    obama-to-announce-expanded-effort-against-ebola.html

Arabs Give Tepid Support

to U.S. Fight Against ISIS

SEPT. 11, 2014

The New York Times

By ANNE BARNARD

and DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Many Arab governments grumbled quietly in 2011 as the United States left Iraq, fearful it might fall deeper into chaos or Iranian influence. Now, the United States is back and getting a less than enthusiastic welcome, with leading allies like Egypt, Jordan and Turkey all finding ways on Thursday to avoid specific commitments to President Obama’s expanded military campaign against Sunni extremists.

As the prospect of the first American strikes inside Syria crackled through the region, the mixed reactions underscored the challenges of a new military intervention in the Middle East, where 13 years of chaos, from Sept. 11 through the Arab Spring revolts, have deepened political and sectarian divisions and increased mistrust of the United States on all sides.

“As a student of terrorism for the last 30 years, I am afraid of that formula of ‘supporting the American effort,’ ” said Diaa Rashwan, a scholar at the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a government-funded policy organization in Cairo. “It is very dangerous.”

The tepid support could further complicate the already complex task Mr. Obama has laid out for himself in fighting the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria: He must try to confront the group without aiding Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, or appearing to side with Mr. Assad’s Shiite allies, Iran and the militant group Hezbollah, against discontented Sunnis across the Arab world.

While Arab nations allied with the United States vowed on Thursday to “do their share” to fight ISIS and issued a joint communiqué supporting a broad strategy, the underlying tone was one of reluctance. The government perhaps most eager to join a coalition against ISIS was that of Syria, which Mr. Obama had already ruled out as a partner for what he described as terrorizing its citizens.

Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, told NBC News that Syria and the United States were “fighting the same enemy,” terrorism, and that his government had “no reservations” about airstrikes as long as the United States coordinated with it. He added, “We are ready to talk.”

Others were less than forthcoming. The foreign minister of Egypt — already at odds with Mr. Obama over the American decision to withhold some aid after the Egyptian military’s ouster last year of the elected president — complained that Egypt’s hands were full with its own fight against “terrorism,” referring to the Islamist opposition.

In Jordan, the state news agency reported that in a meeting about the extremists on Wednesday, King Abdullah II had told Secretary of State John Kerry “that the Palestinian cause remains the core of the conflict in the region” and that Jordan was focusing on the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip.

Turkey, which Mr. Kerry will visit on Friday, is concerned about attacks across its long border with ISIS-controlled Syria, and also about 49 Turkish government employees captured by the group in Iraq. Speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations, an official advised not to expect public support for the American effort.

At a meeting in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, to build a coalition for the American mission, at least 10 Arab states signed a communiqué pledging to join “in the many aspects of a coordinated military campaign,” but with the qualification “as appropriate” and without any specifics. Turkey attended the meeting but declined to sign.

Even in Baghdad and across Syria, where the threat from ISIS is immediate, reactions were mixed. Members of Iraq’s Shiite majority cheered the prospect of American help. But many Sunni Muslims were cynical about battling an organization that evolved from jihadist groups fighting American occupation.

“This is all a play,” said Abu Amer, 38, a government employee, who withheld his family name for his safety. “It is applying American political plans.”

The difficulties are all the more striking because ISIS has avowed enemies on both sides of the region’s Sunni-Shiite divide.

Sunni-led governments view it as a threat at home and believe it has aided Mr. Assad by attacking his more moderate Sunni opponents. For Shiites, whom ISIS views as apostates deserving death, the group poses an existential threat, yet Shiite-led Iran, a longtime foe of the United States, is excluded from the coalition.

Some Arab leaders appeared to fear a domestic backlash, perhaps like the attacks against Saudi Arabia by Osama bin Laden and others after the kingdom allowed American troops to use its territory as a staging ground during the Persian Gulf war in 1991. Also looming was a broader worry that airstrikes could increase soft support for, or reluctant tolerance of, the group.

Some background on goals, tactics and the potential long-term threat to the United States from the militant group known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

Most Sunnis are terrified of ISIS and its aim to impose a caliphate ruled by its brutal interpretation of Islamic law; they have borne the brunt of its beheadings and other atrocities. In an arc of Sunni discontent spanning the region, some say they feel abandoned enough to accept help “from Satan, not because we like Satan,” as one Sunni tribesman in the ISIS stronghold of Raqqa, Syria, put it on Thursday.

Sunnis have endured a decade of what are, from their perspective, catastrophic setbacks. In Iraq, the American ouster of Saddam Hussein ended centuries of Sunni dominance, ushered in years of sectarian conflict and increased the influence of Shiite Iran.

In Lebanon, the Shiite militant group Hezbollah has come to dominate since the Sunni patron Rafik Hariri was assassinated in 2005. More recently, in Egypt and Syria, revolts that Sunni Islamists saw as their chance at power have been rolled back or brutally thwarted.

“The Sunnis need to feel that they have a voice in their capitals,” said Ibrahim Hamidi, a Syrian correspondent for the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat and a critic of Syria’s government. “Otherwise, you push more Sunnis toward ISIS.”

Without a simultaneous effort to address the political environment that has disenfranchised many Sunnis, “I think that’s a real risk,” a Western diplomat working on Syria said in Beirut. “There are consequences to every action.”

A growing number of diplomats argue that fighting ISIS effectively requires a political settlement to Syria’s three-year civil war, perhaps allowing Mr. Assad to stay but insisting he cede some powers to a Sunni-inclusive national unity government. But Mr. Assad’s inner circle has given no sign of interest in any compromise.

Ryan C. Crocker, a former United States ambassador to Syria and Iraq, said that with “no good options,” hitting ISIS in Syria was essential to American security. Attacks, along with aid to relatively moderate insurgents who would be pressured to embrace an inclusive Syria, could open the door to a political solution there, he said.

But that, he said, would require fancy footwork from Mr. Obama to “make it clear this is about American security, not about favoring any side in the Syrian civil conflict.”

President Obama said that military strategy against ISIS will resemble U.S. efforts in Somalia and Yemen, where airstrikes and other operations have been reported since 2002. The scale of U.S. airstrike operations in Pakistan was much larger, though it has tapered in recent years.

Mr. Crocker said American attacks would “get people’s attention in Raqqa and elsewhere,” adding: “Where do you want to stand on this, with ISIS? If you think barrel bombs are bad, how about drones and F-16s?”

But such talk does not often play well in a region weary of disappointments from American policy, from the invasion of Iraq to the failure to curb the killing in Syria.

A longtime opponent of ISIS in Raqqa, Ibrahim al-Raqawi, said he had refused to give a caller from Washington information on ISIS positions because he feared civilian casualties. He said he opposed airstrikes if they did not also hit Mr. Assad’s forces and stop him from killing civilians.

Members of a range of Syrian insurgent groups that consider ISIS an enemy said they, too, opposed American strikes unless they also targeted the government.

And even those most supportive of the strikes — members of the American-vetted groups that stand to gain new aid to fight ISIS — complained that the United States had abetted the extremists’ rise by failing to help other insurgents earlier. They said the United States was attacking ISIS now only because the group threatened it as well as the broader world.

They said that they welcomed new American aid, but that it remained to be seen whether it would improve on smaller efforts in recent years that have failed to produce a unified, effective or consistently moderate opposition force.

A member of Hezbollah familiar with its thinking said that while coordination with Syria would be best, any attacks against ISIS would curb the group and help Syria’s government.

Um Taha, a 35-year-old Sunni in Baghdad who withheld her full name, captured the mixture of cynicism and tenuous hope that may pass for the prevailing mood in the Arab world now.

She said she hoped the coalition succeeded, “despite the fact that America was one of the reasons why this radical organization originally existed.”

Anne Barnard reported from Beirut, and David D. Kirkpatrick from Baghdad. Reporting was contributed by an employee of The New York Times from Raqqa, Syria; Hwaida Saad and Mohammad Ghannam from Beirut; Ali Hamza from Baghdad; Merna Thomas from Cairo; and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 12, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS.

    Arabs Give Tepid Support to U.S. Fight Against ISIS, NYT, 11.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/12/world/middleeast/
    arabs-give-tepid-support-to-us-fight-against-isis.html

Somali Militants

Confirm Leader’s Death

in U.S. Strike

 

SEPT. 6, 2014

The New York Times

By REUTERS

MOGADISHU, Somalia — The Shabab, the Qaeda-linked militant network in Somalia, confirmed on Saturday that its leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, had been killed in an American airstrike and named a replacement, promising “great distress” to its enemies.

American forces struck Mr. Godane’s encampment in south-central Somalia with Hellfire missiles and laser-guided munitions on Monday, but the Pentagon did not confirm his death until Friday. In a statement, the Shabab identified its new leader as Sheikh Ahmad Umar Abu Ubaidah and said that two of Mr. Godane’s companions had been killed in the attack.

The Pentagon said Friday that Mr. Godane’s killing was a “major symbolic and operational loss” for the Shabab.

Since taking charge of Shabab in 2008, Mr. Godane had raised the group’s profile, carrying out bombings and suicide attacks in Somalia and elsewhere in the region, including the September 2013 attack on the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya, in which 67 people were killed.

Mr. Godane claimed responsibility for the Westgate attack, saying it was revenge for Kenyan and Western involvement in Somalia and noting its proximity to the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States.

On Saturday, the Shabab said Mr. Godane had left behind a group of men who would continue to fight.

“Avenging the death of our scholars and leaders is a binding obligation on our shoulders that we will never relinquish or forget, no matter how long it takes,” the statement said.

Somalia’s government, with support from African peacekeepers and Western intelligence, has battled to curb the Shabab’s influence and to drive the group from areas it has continued to control despite being expelled from Mogadishu in 2011.

The United States had offered a reward of up to $7 million for information leading to his arrest. Somalia’s government said Friday night that it had credible intelligence that the Shabab is planning attacks after Mr. Godane’s death.

In a televised speech, Gen. Khalif Ahmed Ereg, Somalia’s national security minister, said possible targets included medical and educational institutions. He said that the government was vigilant and that its forces were prepared to prevent such attacks.

The killing of Mr. Godane was a “delightful victory,” General Ereg said.
 

The Associated Press contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on September 7, 2014, on page A14 of the New York edition with the headline:
Somali Militants Confirm Leader’s Death in U.S. Strike.

    Somali Militants Confirm Leader’s Death in U.S. Strike, NYT, 7.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/07/world/africa/
    somali-militants-confirm-leaders-death-in-us-strike.html

Strikes Killed Militant Chief in Somalia,

U.S. Reports

SEPT. 5, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER,

ERIC SCHMITT

and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

NEWPORT, Wales — After four days of monitoring cellphone traffic, questioning Somali officials on the ground and poring over reports from both American and British intelligence agencies, the Pentagon on Friday announced that American airstrikes against the Shabab, the Qaeda-linked militant network in Somalia, had succeeded in killing the group’s leader, Ahmed Abdi Godane, one of the most wanted men in Africa.

“We have confirmed that Ahmed Godane, the co-founder of Al Shabab, has been killed,” the Pentagon press secretary, Rear Adm. John Kirby, said in a statement. He called the death of Mr. Godane “a major symbolic and operational loss” to the Shabab.

Speaking at a news conference after the NATO summit meeting here, President Obama drew a direct link between the killing of Mr. Godane, who turned an obscure local militant group into one of the most fearsome Qaeda franchises in the world, and Mr. Obama’s plans for the leaders of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. The president vowed to hunt down ISIS leaders “the same way” the United States had found Mr. Godane.

Military officials had waited several days to confirm that Mr. Godane was killed in one of the two strikes — on an encampment and on a vehicle south of Mogadishu, the Somali capital. The strikes were carried out by Special Operations forces using both manned and unmanned aircraft, and they were undertaken, Pentagon officials said, based on intelligence that Mr. Godane was at the encampment.

The warplanes dropped Hellfire missiles and precision bombs on the encampment, and Pentagon officials said they believed everyone there was killed. But initially they were not sure that Mr. Godane had been present, and were wary of declaring victory only to have him emerge later, alive. Pentagon and intelligence officials have since been monitoring cellphone conversations and other intelligence to verify his death.

There was a debate, administration officials said, among intelligence and defense officials, both in the United States and Britain, over the evidence that Mr. Godane was dead. Administration officials said that they wrestled with conflicting assessments. “The bar for proof of death went way up,” one American official said, who spoke anonymously so as to discuss internal matters openly.

A senior defense official, also speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “Everybody understood how important it was to get this right, especially given who he was. This was about being careful and deliberate.”

Obama administration officials appeared eager to use the killing of Mr. Godane as a direct warning to ISIS and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and several officials pointedly echoed the president’s words linking the strikes to how the United States planned to treat extremist groups in general.

“Even as this is an important step forward in the fight against Al Shabab, the United States will continue to use the tools at our disposal — financial, diplomatic, intelligence and military — to address the threat that Al Shabab and other terrorist groups pose to the United States and the American people,” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, said.

Gen. Carter F. Ham, the retired head of the United States military’s Africa Command, said of Mr. Godane’s death, “The effect will be positive, but not decisive.”

“He has proven over the years to be an elusive figure, but one who has galvanized some elements within Al Shabab,” General Ham said. “His death will remove an effective terrorist leader from Al Shabab’s ranks, but it will not cause Al Shabab to suddenly crumble or, probably, to significantly alter course.”

Ken Menkhaus, a professor of political science at Davidson College, noted that Al Shabab had lost a leader before in an American airstrike but still continued as an organization.

“In 2008, Al Shabab’s leader, Aden Hashi Ayro, was killed by a U.S. missile strike, but that only led to Godane’s ascent to leadership,” he said. “If a bunch of Godane’s lieutenants were also killed in this strike, the likelihood increases that Shabab could fall into disarray, at least temporarily.” An American official said there had been strong intelligence indicating that several senior Shabab leaders, including Mr. Godane, had been meeting at a location targeted by American commandos.

At the height of its power, the Shabab, under Mr. Godane’s leadership, controlled more territory than just about any other Qaeda offshoot.

Mr. Godane, thought to be around 40 years old, had been one of the most wanted figures in Africa, widely believed to have orchestrated countless attacks on civilians, including the massacre of dozens of shoppers at a mall in Nairobi, Kenya, last year. He presided over a reign of fear and violence inside Somalia for several years, organizing the stoning of teenage girls and crude public amputations, all part of an effort to return Somalia to the Shabab’s vision of strict Islamic rule.

During Somalia’s famine in 2011, when more than 250,000 people died, Mr. Godane gave orders to block food supplies from reaching starving people. His fighters even diverted rivers from desperate farmers. Mr. Godane has also taken the Shabab’s violence across Somalia’s borders by organizing suicide attacks in Kenya and Uganda.

Mr. Godane was one of a number of terrorism suspects whom the military has standing orders to strike if the opportunity presents itself, administration officials said.

Analysts cautioned that the Shabab’s remaining leaders might retaliate, and said that the first to feel that retaliation might be Kenya, the scene of previous Shabab attacks. Another big question, they said, is whether the Shabab, now that Mr. Godane is gone, will be more willing to allow unimpeded international humanitarian access to areas of southern Somalia that are facing rising famine conditions.

In 2011, when Mr. Godane gave orders to block Western humanitarian agencies delivering aid, it caused a split within the Shabab.

Helene Cooper reported from Newport, Jeffrey Gettleman from Maroantsetra, Madagascar, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on September 6, 2014, on page A4 of the New York edition with the headline: Strikes Killed Militant Chief in Somalia, U.S. Reports.

    Strikes Killed Militant Chief in Somalia, U.S. Reports, NYT, 5.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/world/africa/somalia-shabab.html

Commitments on Three Fronts

Test Obama’s Foreign Policy

 

SEPT. 3, 2014

The New York Times

News Analysis

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — In vowing in Estonia on Wednesday to defend vulnerable NATO nations from Russia “for as long as necessary,” President Obama has now committed the United States to three major projections of its power: a “pivot” to Asia, a more muscular presence in Europe and a new battle against Islamic extremists that seems very likely to accelerate.

American officials acknowledge that these three commitments are bound to upend Mr. Obama’s plans for shrinking the Pentagon’s budget before he leaves office in 2017. They also challenge a crucial doctrine of his first term: that a reliance on high technology and minimal use of a “light footprint” of military forces can deter ambitious powers and counter terrorists. And the commitments may well reverse one of the critical tenets of his two presidential campaigns, that the money once spent in Iraq and Afghanistan would be turned to “nation-building at home.”

But the accumulation of new defensive initiatives leaves open the question of how forcefully Mr. Obama is committed to reversing the suspicion, from Europe to the Middle East to Asia, that the United States is in an era of retrenchment. In his travels in Europe this week and a lengthy tour of Asia planned this fall, the president faces a dual challenge: convincing American allies and partners that he has no intention to leave power vacuums around the globe for adversaries to fill, while convincing Americans that he can face each of these brewing conflicts without plunging them back into another decade of large military commitments and heavy casualties.

“There is a growing mismatch between the rhetoric and the policy,” said Richard N. Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a senior national security official as the war with Iraq loomed a dozen years ago. “If you add up the resources needed to implement the Asian pivot, recommit to the Middle East and increase our presence in Europe, you can’t do it without additional money and capacity. The world has proved to be a far more demanding place than it looked to this White House a few years ago.”

It is not a world that requires, at least for now, the kind of deployments that marked the Cold War, when the United States kept roughly 100,000 troops in Europe and only slightly fewer in Asia. But the prospect of drastically shrinking the military after the post-9/11 era, in which total national security spending more than doubled, now seems highly unlikely. And at a moment when Mr. Obama is still answering critics for saying last week that, “We don’t have a strategy yet,” to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, he now needs to articulate several strategies, each tailored to problems that in the last year have taken on surprising complexities.

In facing the more than 10,000 ISIS fighters, he must find a way to confront a different kind of terrorist group, one determined to use the most brutal techniques to take territory that the backwash from the Arab Spring has now put up for grabs. The American bombing campaign against ISIS targets in Iraq does not approach the costs of invading and occupying that country, but Pentagon officials say the weapons, fuel and other expenses of taking on the Islamic extremists are running up bills of about $225 million a month, a figure that will rise if Mr. Obama has to take that fight into Syria.

ISIS “is not invincible,” Matthew G. Olsen, the director of the National Counterterrorism Center, said in a talk at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday, and ISIS does not yet pose the kind of direct threat to the United States that Al Qaeda did before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is “brutal and lethal,” he said, and defeating it will require a long-term commitment of a kind Mr. Obama clearly did not anticipate earlier this year.

In the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, Mr. Obama faces a declining power, afflicted by a shrinking population, a strident nationalism and an economy vulnerable because of its extraordinary dependency on oil exports. Washington is betting that while sanctions are having little effect now, over time they will hollow out Mr. Putin’s poll ratings. But the short term is more complex. For months now, arguments inside the administration have been over how directly and where to draw the line. In Tallinn, Estonia’s capital, on Wednesday Mr. Obama drew it at NATO’s own boundaries. The question is whether Mr. Putin believes him.

In China, the president faces the opposite challenge: a rising power with growing resources and a sense that this is China’s moment to reassert influence in Asia in a way it has not in hundreds of years. Here, the surprise to Mr. Obama has been the aggressiveness shown by Xi Jinping, China’s president, in embracing efforts to press territorial claims against Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and the Philippines, rather than focusing on the domestic economy.

“We didn’t see this coming,” one former member of Mr. Obama’s national security team said this summer, “and there’s a lot of debate about how to counter it.”

The statement could be true for each of the challenges confronting Mr. Obama. It explains why the administration is having difficulty explaining how this combination will affect its future plans.

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was put in his job in part to find ways to shrink the military, on the assumption that America’s Iraq commitments were over and as the official combat mission in Afghanistan ends this year. But Mr. Hagel has been either unable or unwilling to articulate the long-term implications of the new commitments.

“There is a chronic disconnect, not just in this administration, between the policy, the budget guidance, and the classified strategies,” said Shawn Brimley, the director of studies at the Center for a New American Security, who served as the director of strategic planning at the National Security Council during Mr. Obama’s first term. That is what Mr. Obama needs to do for a “lasting legacy” of rethinking America’s defenses, Mr. Brimley said, but “if you don’t do it in the next six months, it’s too late.”

So far, the administration has twice delayed the publication of its second term report, “National Security Strategy of the United States” — events have overwhelmed it. There are still plans afoot to shift the American presence to the Pacific over the next six years, aiming toward the moment when 60 percent of America’s forces abroad are in the region. But many Asian leaders question whether Mr. Obama and his successor will carry through. Many Europeans and Middle Eastern leaders see those efforts and shudder.

Mr. Obama floated several American-led efforts to deter Russia in his speech in Tallinn, from NATO’s impending “rapid response” forces, to increased training missions, to “investing in capabilities like intelligence and surveillance and reconnaissance and missile defense.” The last was an interesting allusion, because in the past he was always careful to say that missile defense was aimed at deterring outlier states — clearly meaning Iran — rather than nuclear powers like Russia. This time, he made no such disclaimer.
 

A version of this news analysis appears in print on September 4, 2014, on page A9 of the New York edition with the headline: The Three-Headed Monster Challenging the President’s Foreign Policy.

    Commitments on Three Fronts Test Obama’s Foreign Policy,
    NYT, 3.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/04/world/europe/
    commitments-on-3-fronts-test-obamas-foreign-policy-doctrine.html

In Interviews,

3 Americans Held in North Korea

Plead for U.S. Help

 

SEPT. 1, 2014

The New York Times

By CHOE SANG-HUN

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea granted two United States news organizations interviews with three incarcerated Americans on Monday, with each prisoner apologizing for violating its laws and beseeching Washington to send a high-level emissary to negotiate their release.

The three had been interviewed before in orchestrated televised appearances in which they expressed contrition and asked the United States for help. But Monday was the first time the North Korean authorities permitted the two American news organizations, CNN and The Associated Press, to speak to all three in the same location.

The choreography of the interviews seemed to make increasingly clear that North Korea wanted to use the three Americans as bargaining leverage to pressure Washington to engage the country in dialogue. The United States, which has no diplomatic relations with North Korea, has led an effort to increasingly isolate the country over its nuclear and ballistic missile activities.

CNN and The A.P. said the interviews were conducted individually in different rooms. All said they were treated fairly by the North Korean authorities and had been allowed to contact their families. But they spoke while North Korean officials were present, suggesting they had been coached.

“I’ve been going back and forth from hospital to the labor camp for the last year and a half,” the longest-held prisoner, Kenneth Bae, told CNN, adding that he was working eight hours a day, six days a week at a labor camp.

Mr. Bae, 46, a Christian missionary, was arrested after having arrived in the North in late 2012. He was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor for the “anti-state” crime of trying to build an undercover proselytizing network within the North with the aim of toppling its government.

Mr. Bae complained in the interview of failing health, including diabetes, backaches and high blood pressure, maladies that have long afflicted him.

His sister, Terri Chung, emailed a statement to news organizations after she watched the CNN interview, saying that Mr. Bae was normally outgoing and cheerful, “larger than life — but I could not see that man today.”

It was clear, she said, that Mr. Bae’s back had been hurting him as he sought to sit for the interview. “Working eight hours a day of hard labor — his sentence — is the last thing his body needs,” Ms. Chung said. She implored North Korea: “Please have mercy. It is in your power to release my brother.”

The others, Jeffrey Edward Fowle, and Matthew Todd Miller, reiterated assertions made in earlier interviews that they expected to face trial soon. They said they still did not know what specific charges they faced, although they both said they had signed statements admitting their crimes.

Mr. Fowle, 56, an Ohio municipal worker, entered North Korea in April on a tourist visa and was arrested after he left a Bible behind in a hotel. The authorities may have interpreted that act as Christian proselytizing, which is deemed a crime of trying to undermine North Korea’s political system.

“Within a month I could be sharing a jail cell with Ken Bae,” Mr. Fowle told The A.P.

He confirmed that he had been allowed to communicate with his wife and three children, ages 9, 10 and 12, who live in Miamisburg, Ohio, a Dayton suburb, but that he had not spoken with them for three weeks.

“I’m desperate to get back to them,” he said.

Mr. Bae had been permitted previously to speak to outside media, including a pro-North Korean newspaper in Japan, to make appeals for the United States to send a high-level envoy to Pyongyang. In interviews with an A.P. television news crew a month ago, both Mr. Fowle and Mr. Miller made similar appeals.

Mr. Miller, 24, entered North Korea in April. But according to the North, he shredded his tourist visa upon arrival at the airport and demanded asylum. He was arrested for unruly behavior. In his interviews with The A.P. and CNN, he did not discuss whether he had sought to defect to North Korea.
Photo
Kenneth Bae Credit Wong Maye-E/Associated Press

He expressed frustration to CNN, saying that “there’s been no movement from my government.”

North Korea, regarded as one of the most repressive and impoverished countries, wants a direct dialogue with the United States in part to negotiate a peace treaty to bring a formal end to the 1950-53 Korean War, which was halted by an armistice agreement. But the United States has demurred, insisting that the North has repeatedly acted deceptively.

The United States relies on the Swedish Embassy in Pyongyang to represent the interests of its citizens held there. Washington has repeatedly offered to send its envoy for North Korean human rights issues, Robert King, to Pyongyang to appeal for the release of the Americans, but without success.

In contrast with the Americans’ treatment, North Korea quickly deported a detained Australian missionary in March after he apologized and requested forgiveness for proselytizing in Pyongyang.

In the past, North Korea had released detained Americans when prominent emissaries like former President Bill Clinton made trips to Pyongyang to ask for their release, a move Pyongyang then advertised at home as Washington’s recognition of it as a dialogue partner.

The State Department has strongly advised against American travel to North Korea, asserting that United States citizens face increased risk of arbitrary arrest.

Marie Harf, deputy spokeswoman for the State Department, said in a statement that the United States had requested that North Korea release Mr. Fowle and Mr. Miller so they could return home and reunite with their families. Ms. Harf also said the United States had requested that North Korea “pardon Kenneth Bae and grant him special amnesty, and immediate release so he may reunite with his family and seek medical care.”

She said all three had been visited by Swedish Embassy intermediaries, including Mr. Bae in a labor camp on Aug. 11.
Correction: September 2, 2014

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to Miamisburg, Ohio, Mr. Fowle’s hometown. It is a suburb of Dayton, not Akron. The article also misspelled Mr. Miller’s first name; it is Matthew, not Mathew.
 

Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, and Rick Gladstone from New York.

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2014, on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline:
In Interviews, 3 Americans Held in North Korea Plead
for U.S. Help.

    In Interviews, 3 Americans Held in North Korea Plead for U.S. Help,
    NYT, 1.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/asia/
    in-interviews-3-americans-held-in-north-korea-plead-for-us-help.html

U.S. Troops

Take Action On Militants

In Somalia

 

SEPT. 1, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

and ERIC SCHMITT

American military forces launched an operation in Somalia on Monday against the Qaeda-linked militant network the Shabab, defense officials said.

Rear Adm. John F. Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary, said that officials were still “assessing the results of the operation, and will provide additional information as and when appropriate.”

Admiral Kirby declined to go into further detail about the operation, which was first reported by CNN.

A senior American official, who asked not to be named because of the sensitivity of the operation, said it had been carried out with Somali partners against “a senior Shabab operative.”

The Pentagon and the State Department have been supporting a 22,000-member African force that has driven the Shabab from their former strongholds in Mogadishu, the capital, and other urban centers, and continues to battle the extremists in their mountain and desert redoubts.

The United States now has a total of about 100 Special Operations forces operating in different parts of the country, both in training-advisory roles and in an operational role. Most, if not all, of those forces are Navy SEALS.

Officials did not say where the operation on Monday occurred or how it was carried out. But last October, Navy SEALS descended on the port town of Baraawe, which is a Shabab stronghold.

Their target was a Kenyan of Somali origin known as Ikrimah, who was one of the Shabab’s top planners of attacks outside Somalia, officials said.

But instead of slipping away with the man they had come to capture, the SEALs found themselves under heavy fire as they approached a villa. They retreated after inflicting casualties on the Shabab defenders.

That raid occurred less than two weeks after Shabab militants slaughtered more than 60 people at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya. Though Mr. Ikrimah had not been tied directly to the Nairobi assault, fears of a similar attack against Western targets broke a deadlock among officials in Washington over whether to conduct the raid.
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2014, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Troops Take Action On Militants In Somalia.

    U.S. Troops Take Action On Militants In Somalia, NYT, 1.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/world/africa/
    us-undertakes-military-operation-against-shabab-in-somalia.html

Stop Dithering, Confront ISIS

John McCain and Lindsey Graham:

Confront ISIS Now

AUG. 29, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributors

By JOHN MCCAIN

and LINDSEY GRAHAM

AFTER more than three years, almost 200,000 dead in Syria, the near collapse of Iraq, and the rise of the world’s most sinister terrorist army — the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, which has conquered vast swaths of both countries — President Obama’s admission this week that “we don’t have a strategy yet” to deal with this threat is startling. It is also dangerous.

The president clearly wants to move deliberately and consult with allies and Congress as he considers what to do about ISIS. No one disputes that goal. But the threat ISIS poses only grows over time. It cannot be contained. It must be confronted. This requires a comprehensive strategy, presidential leadership and a far greater sense of urgency. If Mr. Obama changes course and adopts a strategic approach to defeat ISIS, he deserves support.

Such a strategy would require our commander in chief to explain to war-weary Americans why we cannot ignore this threat. ISIS is now one of the largest, richest terrorist organizations in history. It occupies a growing safe haven the size of Indiana spanning two countries in the heart of the Middle East, and its ranks are filled with thousands of radicals holding Western passports, including some Americans. They require nothing more than a plane ticket to travel to United States cities.

This is why the secretary of homeland security has called Syria “a matter of homeland security.” His warnings about ISIS have been echoed by the attorney general, the director of national intelligence and, now, the secretary of defense. Americans need to know that ISIS is not just a problem for Iraq and Syria. It is a threat to the United States. Doing too little to combat ISIS has been a problem. Doing less is certainly not the answer now.

It is a truism to say there is no military solution to ISIS. Any strategy must, of course, be comprehensive. It must squeeze ISIS’ finances. It requires an inclusive government in Baghdad that shares power and wealth with Iraqi Sunnis, rather than pushing them toward ISIS. It requires an end to the conflict in Syria, and a political transition there, because the regime of President Bashar al-Assad will never be a reliable partner against ISIS; in fact, it has abetted the rise of ISIS, just as it facilitated the terrorism of ISIS’ predecessor, Al Qaeda in Iraq. A strategy to counter ISIS also requires a regional approach to mobilize America’s partners in a coordinated, multilateral effort.

But ultimately, ISIS is a military force, and it must be confronted militarily. Mr. Obama has begun to take military actions against ISIS in Iraq, but they have been tactical and reactive half-measures. Continuing to confront ISIS in Iraq, but not in Syria, would be fighting with one hand tied behind our back. We need a military plan to defeat ISIS, wherever it is.

Such a plan would seek to strengthen partners who are already resisting ISIS: the Kurdish pesh merga, Sunni tribes, moderate forces in Syria, and effective units of Iraq’s security forces. Our partners are the boots on the ground, and the United States should provide them directly with arms, intelligence and other military assistance. This does not, however, mean supporting Iranian military forces, whose presence only exacerbates sectarian tensions that empower ISIS.

We should embed additional United States special forces and advisers with our partners on the ground — not to engage in combat, but to help our partners fight ISIS and direct airstrikes against it. Regional allies should play a key role in this effort. No one is advocating unilateral invasion, occupation or nation-building. This should be more like Afghanistan in 2001, where limited numbers of advisers helped local forces, with airstrikes and military aid, to rout an extremist army.

Still, we must face facts: A comprehensive strategy to defeat ISIS would require more troops, assets, resources and time. Such an undertaking should involve Congress. We have consistently advocated revising the Authorization for Use of Military Force that has provided congressional backing for counterterrorism operations since September 2001. Now could be the right time to update this authorization in light of evolving terrorist threats like ISIS. If Mr. Obama provides a coherent strategy and determined leadership, he could win Congress’s support.

Whether or not Mr. Obama listens to us, he should listen to leaders with a record of success in combating groups like ISIS, especially John R. Allen, Ryan C. Crocker, Jack Keane and David H. Petraeus, among others. He should consult with military and diplomatic experts like these, just as President George W. Bush did when rethinking the war in Iraq.

One of the hardest things a president must do is change, and history’s judgment is often kind to those who summon the courage to do so. Jimmy Carter changed his policy on the Soviet Union after it invaded Afghanistan. Bill Clinton changed his policy in the Balkans and stopped ethnic cleansing. And George W. Bush changed course in Iraq and saved America from defeat.

ISIS presents Mr. Obama with a similar challenge, and it has already forced him to begin changing course, albeit grudgingly. He should accept the necessity of further change and adopt a strategy to defeat this threat. If he does, he deserves bipartisan support. If he does not, ISIS will continue to grow into an even graver danger to our allies and to us.
 

John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, are United States senators.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 30, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
Stop Dithering, Confront ISIS.

    Stop Dithering, Confront ISIS, NYT, 29.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/opinion/
    john-mccain-and-lindsey-graham-confront-isis.html

To Defeat Terror,

We Need the World’s Help

John Kerry:

The Threat of ISIS Demands a Global Coalition

AUG. 29, 2014

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By JOHN KERRY

IN a polarized region and a complicated world, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria presents a unifying threat to a broad array of countries, including the United States. What’s needed to confront its nihilistic vision and genocidal agenda is a global coalition using political, humanitarian, economic, law enforcement and intelligence tools to support military force.

In addition to its beheadings, crucifixions and other acts of sheer evil, which have killed thousands of innocents in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon, including Sunni Muslims whose faith it purports to represent, ISIS (which the United States government calls ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) poses a threat well beyond the region.

ISIS has its origins in what was once known as Al Qaeda in Iraq, which has over a decade of experience in extremist violence. The group has amassed a hardened fighting force of committed jihadists with global ambitions, exploiting the conflict in Syria and sectarian tensions in Iraq. Its leaders have repeatedly threatened the United States, and in May an ISIS-associated terrorist shot and killed three people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels. (A fourth victim died 13 days later.) ISIS’ cadre of foreign fighters are a rising threat not just in the region, but anywhere they could manage to travel undetected — including to America.

There is evidence that these extremists, if left unchecked, will not be satisfied at stopping with Syria and Iraq. They are larger and better funded in this new incarnation, using pirated oil, kidnapping and extortion to finance operations in Syria and Iraq. They are equipped with sophisticated heavy weapons looted from the battlefield. They have already demonstrated the ability to seize and hold more territory than any other terrorist organization, in a strategic region that borders Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey and is perilously close to Israel.

ISIS fighters have exhibited repulsive savagery and cruelty. Even as they butcher Shiite Muslims and Christians in their effort to touch off a broader ethnic and sectarian conflict, they pursue a calculated strategy of killing fellow Sunni Muslims to gain and hold territory. The beheading of an American journalist, James Foley, has shocked the conscience of the world.

With a united response led by the United States and the broadest possible coalition of nations, the cancer of ISIS will not be allowed to spread to other countries. The world can confront this scourge, and ultimately defeat it. ISIS is odious, but not omnipotent. We have proof already in northern Iraq, where United States airstrikes have shifted the momentum of the fight, providing space for Iraqi and Kurdish forces to go on the offensive. With our support, Iraqi leaders are coming together to form a new, inclusive government that is essential to isolating ISIS and securing the support of all of Iraq’s communities.

Airstrikes alone won’t defeat this enemy. A much fuller response is demanded from the world. We need to support Iraqi forces and the moderate Syrian opposition, who are facing ISIS on the front lines. We need to disrupt and degrade ISIS’ capabilities and counter its extremist message in the media. And we need to strengthen our own defenses and cooperation in protecting our people.

Next week, on the sidelines of the NATO summit meeting in Wales, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and I will meet with our counterparts from our European allies. The goal is to enlist the broadest possible assistance. Following the meeting, Mr. Hagel and I plan to travel to the Middle East to develop more support for the coalition among the countries that are most directly threatened.

The United States will hold the presidency of the United Nations Security Council in September, and we will use that opportunity to continue to build a broad coalition and highlight the danger posed by foreign terrorist fighters, including those who have joined ISIS. During the General Assembly session, President Obama will lead a summit meeting of the Security Council to put forward a plan to deal with this collective threat.

In this battle, there is a role for almost every country. Some will provide military assistance, direct and indirect. Some will provide desperately needed humanitarian assistance for the millions who have been displaced and victimized across the region. Others will help restore not just shattered economies but broken trust among neighbors. This effort is underway in Iraq, where other countries have joined us in providing humanitarian aid, military assistance and support for an inclusive government.

Already our efforts have brought dozens of nations to this cause. Certainly there are different interests at play. But no decent country can support the horrors perpetrated by ISIS, and no civilized country should shirk its responsibility to help stamp out this disease.

ISIS’ abhorrent tactics are uniting and rallying neighbors with traditionally conflicting interests to support Iraq’s new government. And over time, this coalition can begin to address the underlying factors that fuel ISIS and other terrorist organizations with like-minded agendas.

Coalition building is hard work, but it is the best way to tackle a common enemy. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, the first President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III did not act alone or in haste. They methodically assembled a coalition of countries whose concerted action brought a quick victory.

Extremists are defeated only when responsible nations and their peoples unite to oppose them.
 

John Kerry is the secretary of state of the United States.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 30, 2014,
on page A21 of the New York edition with the headline:
To Defeat Terror, We Need the World’s Help.

    To Defeat Terror, We Need the World’s Help, NYT, 29.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/30/opinion/
    john-kerry-the-threat-of-isis-demands-a-global-coalition.html

American Fighting for ISIS

Is Killed in Syria

AUG. 26, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — Like many teenage boys who grew up in the Midwest in the 1990s, Douglas McAuthur McCain was a fan of Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls and loved to play basketball.

But as he grew older, he lost interest in basketball as he shuttled between two suburban Minneapolis high schools. He never graduated, and in his late teens, he began to have run-ins with the law. In the decade that followed, he was arrested or cited nine times on charges including theft, marijuana possession and driving without a license.

Mr. McCain moved back and forth from Minneapolis to San Diego and then abroad. Officials now know he ended up in Syria, where three days ago, Mr. McCain became the first American to die while fighting for the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. He was 33.

The rebels who killed him were fighting for the Free Syrian Army, a rival group backed by the United States, and they went on to behead six ISIS fighters — but not Mr. McCain — and then posted the photographs on Facebook.

Mr. McCain’s death provides new insight for the authorities as they try to learn more about ISIS and identify the Americans who have joined a group that has vowed to remake the Middle East and establish an Islamic caliphate. And it is a sign that ISIS, at least in this case, is willing to use Americans on the battlefield in the Middle East rather than sending them back to the United States to launch attacks, as Western officials have feared.

“His death is further evidence that Americans are going there to fight for ISIS rather than to train as terrorists to attack at home,” said Richard Barrett, a former British intelligence officer who is now a vice president at the Soufan Group, security consultants in New York. “Nor does it appear that ISIS regards Americans as assets that are too valuable to risk on the front line rather than to keep in reserve for terrorist attacks or propaganda purposes.”

“This incident,” Mr. Barrett added, “also confirms that American and presumably other foreign fighters are prepared to attack where directed by ISIS.” Some of those attacks, he said, will be aimed at the forces of President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, but not all of them.

“They are going to join ISIS, not the fight for the future of Syria,” Mr. Barrett said.

In recent weeks, ISIS has become one of the top national security preoccupations of the Obama administration. And the news of Mr. McCain’s death comes amid public anger over the beheading of the American journalist James Foley, an act that added urgency to the Obama administration’s deliberations to expand its air campaign against ISIS into Syria.

Senior administration officials and lawmakers have described ISIS as one of the most serious threats the United States has faced since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda, and some believe the group is determined to attack in the United States.

American officials said Tuesday that Mr. McCain’s case highlighted the difficulty of identifying Americans who want to travel to Syria to fight alongside rebels. When the United States faced a similar problem with Somalis several years ago, it was far easier for the authorities to identify those who wanted to travel there to fight because that conflict mostly attracted Somalis. And Somalis live in just a few cities in the United States.

But the Syrian conflict has attracted people from all different ages and parts of the United States — including many with no connection to Syria.

In May, Moner Mohammad Abusalha, a 22-year-old Florida man who had traveled to Syria to join the Nusra Front, died in a suicide bomb attack. He had an American mother and a Palestinian father. A year earlier, Nicole Lynn Mansfield, 33, of Flint, Mich., was killed with Syrian rebels in Idlib Province.

The federal authorities learned only after he arrived in the country that Mr. McCain had traveled to Syria, according to senior American officials. In response, the American authorities included him on a watch list of potential terrorism suspects maintained by the federal government. Had Mr. McCain tried to re-enter the country, he would have almost certainly faced an extra level of scrutiny before boarding any commercial airliner bound for the United States, the officials said.

It is not clear how Mr. McCain was recruited by ISIS and traveled to Syria. According to his Facebook page, he went to Canada and Sweden last year. Many Americans and Europeans who have ended up in Syria have tried to disguise their travels by passing through other countries before heading to Turkey and crossing over its porous border with Syria.

His posts on Twitter, where he went by the name Duale Khalid, give clues to his mind-set. In one message from December 2012, he said that the movie “The Help,” which is about black maids in the South, made him “hate white people.” Other posts disparaged Somalis and gays.

It was on Twitter that he also discussed religion. He said that he was a convert to Islam and that it was the “best thing” that had ever happened to him. “It’s funny to me how all these so call Muslim claim that they love Allah but always curse the one who try to implement his laws,” he said in one post.

According to SITE, an intelligence group that monitors jihadist websites, Mr. McCain also appeared to grow more comfortable with the idea of losing his life in battle. “Ya Allah when it’s my time to go have mercy on my soul have mercy on my bros,” he said on Twitter.

The Obama administration released a statement on Tuesday evening confirming his death.

The fight in which Mr. McCain was killed occurred in the northern city of Marea, where ISIS and the rebels had been fighting for control in recent weeks, according to members of the Free Syrian Army.

Mr. McCain and two other ISIS fighters — a Tunisian and an Egyptian — sneaked up on a group of Free Syrian Army rebels, killing two of them. The other militants responded, killing Mr. McCain and dozens of ISIS fighters. When the rebels went through Mr. McCain’s clothes, they found his American passport and several hundred dollars in cash. His death was first reported by NBC News.

Much of Mr. McCain’s childhood was spent in New Hope, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb where he lived in a three-bedroom apartment with his parents and two siblings, according to Isaac Chase, a longtime friend and neighbor.

Mr. McCain was the middle child, and his mother worked as a cashier at a nearby supermarket, Mr. Chase said. She attended church every week, he said.

As Mr. McCain grew older, he lost interest in basketball, got several tattoos and lost a tooth. “He stuck around here,” Mr. Chase said. “I don’t think he knew what he wanted to do.”

It was around that time that Mr. McCain’s father died. “He lost his anchor,” he said.

When Mr. Chase last saw Mr. McCain in 2008, he said that it was not clear that Mr. McCain was working, and he appeared as though he was using drugs. That was a far different person, he said, from the boy who had strong convictions about what was right and wrong.

When they were children, Mr. McCain reprimanded Mr. Chase after he stole from a gas station. “He told me who to hang out with,” he said. “He had a big heart.”

Reporting was contributed by Christina Capecchi from New Hope, Minn.; Ben Hubbard from Baghdad; Kristina Rebelo from San Diego; Hwaida Saad from Beirut, Lebanon; and Eric Schmitt from Washington. Kitty Bennett contributed research from Seattle.

A version of this article appears in print on August 27, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: American in ISIS Is Killed in Clash.

    American Fighting for ISIS Is Killed in Syria, NYT, 26.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/middleeast/
    american-fighting-for-isis-is-killed-in-syria.html

Arab Nations Strike in Libya,

Surprising U.S.

 

AUG. 25, 2014

The New York Times

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

and ERIC SCHMITT

CAIRO — Twice in the last seven days, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates have secretly launched airstrikes against Islamist-allied militias battling for control of Tripoli, Libya, four senior American officials said, in a major escalation of a regional power struggle set off by Arab Spring revolts.

The United States, the officials said, was caught by surprise: Egypt and the Emirates, both close allies and military partners, acted without informing Washington, leaving the Obama administration on the sidelines. Egyptian officials explicitly denied to American diplomats that their military played any role in the operation, the officials said, in what appeared a new blow to already strained relations between Washington and Cairo.

The strikes in Tripoli are another salvo in a power struggle defined by Arab autocrats battling Islamist movements seeking to overturn the old order. Since the military ouster of the Islamist president in Egypt last year, the new government and its backers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have launched a campaign across the region — in the news media, in politics and diplomacy, and by arming local proxies — to roll back what they see as an existential threat to their authority posed by Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Arrayed against them and backing the Islamists are the rival states of Turkey and Qatar.

American officials said the Egyptians and the Emiratis had teamed up against an Islamist target inside Libya at least once before. In recent months, the officials said, teams of “special forces” operating out of Egypt but possibly composed primarily of Emiratis had also successfully destroyed an Islamist camp near the eastern Libyan city of Derna, an extremist stronghold.

Several officials said in recent days that United States diplomats were fuming about the airstrikes, believing the intervention could further inflame the Libyan conflict as the United Nations and Western powers are seeking to broker a peaceful resolution. Officials said the government of Qatar has already provided weapons and support to the Islamist-aligned forces inside Libya, so the new strikes represent a shift from a battle of proxies to direct involvement. It could also set off an arms race.

“We don’t see this as constructive at all,” said one senior American official.

The strikes have also, so far, proved counterproductive. Islamist-aligned militias fighting for control of Tripoli successfully seized its main airport just hours after they were hit with the second round of strikes.

“In every arena — in Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Libya, even what happened in Egypt — this regional polarization, with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, or U.A.E., on one side and Qatar and Turkey on the other, has proved to be a gigantic impediment to international efforts to resolve any of these crisis,” said Michele Dunne, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former Middle East specialist at the State Department.
Continue reading the main story

Egypt’s role, the American officials said, was to provide bases for the launch of the strikes. The Egyptian president, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, and other officials have issued vigorous-sounding but carefully worded public statements denying any direct action by Egyptian forces in Libya.

“There are no Egyptian aircraft or forces in Libya, and no Egyptian aircraft participated in military action inside Libya,” Mr. Sisi said on Sunday, the state news agency reported.

In private, the officials said, the Egyptian denials had been more sweeping.

The officials said the U.A.E. — which boasts one of the most effective air forces in the Arab world, thanks to American equipment and training — provided the pilots, warplanes and aerial refueling planes necessary for the fighters to bomb Tripoli out of bases in Egypt. It was unclear if the planes or munitions were American-made.

The U.A.E. has not commented directly on the strikes but came close to denying a role. On Monday, an Emirati state newspaper printed a statement from Anwar Gargash, minister of state for foreign affairs, calling any claims about an Emirati role in the attacks “a diversion” from the Libyans’ desire for “stability” and rejection of the Islamists. The allegations, he said, came from a group that “wanted to use the cloak of religion to achieve its political objectives” and “the people discovered its lies and failures.”

The U.A.E. was once considered a sidekick to Saudi Arabia, a regional heavyweight and the dominant power among the Arab monarchies of the Persian Gulf. The Saudi rulers, who draw their own legitimacy from a puritanical understanding of Islam, have long feared the threat of other religious political movements, especially the well-organized and widespread Muslim Brotherhood.

But Western diplomats in the region say the U.A.E. is now far more assertive and aggressive than even the Saudis about the need to eradicate Islamist movements around the region, perhaps because the Emirati rulers perceive a greater domestic threat.

The issue has caused a rare schism among the Arab monarchies of the gulf because Qatar has taken the opposite tack. In contrast to its neighbors, it has welcomed Islamist expatriates to its capital, Doha, and supported their factions around the region, including in Libya.

During the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya three years ago, Qatar and the U.A.E. both played active roles, but each favored different clients among the rebels. While Qatar backed certain Islamists, the U.A.E. favored certain tribal or regional militias, including the militias from the Western mountain town of Zintan, said Frederic Wehrey, another associate at the Carnegie Endowment who specializes in Libya and the Persian Gulf.

The “proxy competition” between the two gulf states in Libya, he said, goes back to 2011.

Now it has extended to backing different sides in what threatens to become a civil war between rival coalitions of Libyan cities, tribes and militias. Although the ideological lines are blurry, the U.A.E. has backed its Zintani clients in what they describe as a battle against Islamist extremists. Qatar, its Islamist clients and loosely allied regional or tribal groups from the coastal city of Misurata have squared off from the other side; most insist that their fight has nothing to do with political Islam and seek to prevent an Egyptian-style “counterrevolution.”

The first strikes occurred before dawn a week ago, hitting positions in Tripoli controlled by militias on the side of the Islamists. The bombs blew up a small weapons depot, among other targets, and local authorities said they killed six people.

A second set of airstrikes took place south of Tripoli in the early hours on Saturday. The Islamist-allied militias were posed to capture the airport from Zintani militias allied with the U.A.E. who had controlled it since 2011, and the strikes may have been intended to slow the advance.

Striking again before dawn, jets bombed rocket launchers, military vehicles and a warehouse all controlled by Islamist-allied militia. At least a dozen people were killed, local authorities said. But within hours the Islamist-aligned forces had nonetheless taken the airport.

Responsibility for the airstrikes was initially a mystery. In both cases, anti-Islamist forces based in eastern Libya under a renegade former general, Khalifa Heftir, sought to claim responsibility. But the strikes, at night and from a long distance, were beyond the known capabilities of General Heftir’s forces.

The Islamist-allied militias, allied under the banner Libya Dawn, were quick to suspect Egypt and the U.A.E. But they offered no evidence or details.

American officials said after the first strike that signs pointed to the Emiratis. But some American officials found it hard to believe that the U.A.E. would risk a regional backlash. It was unclear how U.A.E. fighters could reach Tripoli without a base in the region, and Egypt denied any role.

On Monday, however, American officials said the second set of strikes over the weekend had provided enough evidence to conclude that the Emirates had carried out the strikes and even supplied the refueling ships necessary for fighters to reach Tripoli from Egypt.

Asked about an earlier version of this report posted on The New York Times website, a State Department spokesman declined to comment. “I’m not in a position to provide any additional information on these strikes,” the spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, told reporters at a State Department briefing.
 

Correction: August 25, 2014

An earlier version of this article misidentified the country where Egyptian and Emirates forces had previously teamed up to strike against Islamist targets, according to American officials. It was Libya, not Egypt.

Suliman Ali Zway contributed reporting from Tripoli, Libya, and Merna Thomas from Cairo.

A version of this article appears in print on August 26, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Arab Nations Strike in Libya, Surprising U.S..

    Arab Nations Strike in Libya, Surprising U.S., NYT, 25.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/world/africa/
    egypt-and-united-arab-emirates-said-to-have-secretly-carried-out-libya-airstrikes.html

Israel Kills 3 Top Hamas Leaders

as Latest Fighting Turns Its Way

AUG. 21, 2014

The New York Times

By JODI RUDOREN

JERUSALEM — Hamas is the party that keeps extending this summer’s bloody battle in the Gaza Strip, repeatedly breaking temporary truces and vowing to endlessly fire rockets into Israel until its demands are met. But the latest round of fighting appears to have given Israel the upper hand in a conflict that has already outlasted all expectations and is increasingly becoming a war of attrition.

Barrages of rockets from Gaza sailed into Israel nearly nonstop on Thursday, but they did little damage, and a Hamas threat against Ben-Gurion International Airport failed to materialize. Israel, meanwhile, killed three top commanders of Hamas’s armed wing in predawn airstrikes, and by afternoon had called up 10,000 reservists, perhaps in preparation for a further escalation but in any case a show of strength.

Israel’s advantage has never looked more lopsided. In contrast to the earlier phase of the war, Israel this week deployed its extensive intelligence capabilities and overwhelming firepower in targeted bombings with limited civilian casualties less likely to raise the world’s ire.

Hamas, the Islamist Palestinian faction that dominates Gaza, buried some of its most beloved and effective leaders while launching largely futile homemade rockets from its depleted stock.

“There’s a longstanding conventional wisdom that Israel doesn’t do well in wars of attrition,” said Michael B. Oren, an Israeli historian and a former ambassador to the United States. “That overlooks a broader historical view that Israel’s entire existence has been a war of attrition, and we’ve won that war.”

The long-term impact of the strikes against the Hamas commanders, which followed an attempted assassination of the head of the armed wing on Tuesday night, may be limited. Hamas waged its fiercest fight ever this summer despite Israel’s 2012 hit on the director of day-to-day military operations.

But in killing Hamas militant leaders responsible for years of headline-grabbing attacks, including the 2006 abduction of Sgt. Gilad Shalit, Israel dealt a profound psychological blow to the enemy while giving the home front something clear to celebrate.

“These are senior people,” said Michael Herzog, a retired Israeli brigadier general and fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “People in Gaza know exactly who they are, people in Israel know exactly who they are. In our bilateral context, it resonates strongly.”

Even more significant would be the death of Mohammed Deif, the shadowy figure who has survived several previous Israeli assassination attempts with severe injuries and was the target of Tuesday night’s attack. Mr. Deif’s fate remained unknown Thursday, though the body of his 3-year-old daughter, Sara, was recovered from the rubble of the Gaza City home where five one-ton bombs also killed Mr. Deif’s wife, baby son and at least three others.

Amos Yadlin, a former Israeli chief of military intelligence, called the killing of Mr. Deif’s three deputies “a very important operational achievement” and said that if Mr. Deif also turns up dead, “this will badly hurt Hamas’s military wing.”

“This is a complex campaign and there is no such thing as a knockout, or a silver bullet that will put Hamas out of commission,” cautioned Mr. Yadlin, director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. “We’re now going to a war of attrition that was a threat of Hamas. Israel basically turned it upside down and said, ‘You want attrition? You are welcome. You lost your strategic military tools against Israel. Our firepower and our intelligence and our capability to sustain more days is much bigger than yours.’ This is the strategy.”

The Gaza Health Ministry said Israeli airstrikes had killed at least 60 people since the collapse on Tuesday of cease-fire negotiations in Cairo and the resumption of violence after nearly nine days of quiet, bringing the Palestinian death toll in the operation that began July 8 close to 2,100.

Several of Thursday’s attacks targeted men on motorcycles or in cars who Israel said were militants, though Palestinian witnesses also reported that five people, three of them children, were killed while watering a Gaza City garden, and five others while digging a grave in the Sheikh Radwan cemetery.

Returning to a limited air campaign after weeks of a ground assault in which 64 of its soldiers were killed in surprisingly strong challenges by Hamas fighters, Israel was able to avoid the large-scale collateral damage that has provoked international outrage.

The Israeli military said that more than 300 rockets were fired from Gaza over 48 hours, one of the most intense barrages of the battle so far, sending rattled residents of southern cities once again scrambling for shelter. Though Israel’s education minister announced that school would start as scheduled Sept. 1, the mayor of Ashkelon, less than 10 miles from Gaza, said he would not allow schools in his city to open under fire.

With Israel and the Palestinians apparently still far apart on terms for a durable truce, analysts suggested settling in for days or even weeks more of cross-border air exchanges, after what is already the longest Israeli military operation in decades. Diplomatic pressure appeared to be easing, if only because the world’s attention seems focused on other crises including the rise of Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria, the Ebola outbreak in Africa and civil unrest in Ferguson, Mo.

As the conflict grinds on, Israelis see time as on their side. Experts estimate that Hamas began the summer with a stockpile of about 10,000 rockets. It has fired nearly 4,000, according to the Israeli military, which says it has taken out at least 3,000 more. So it cannot keep launching at this pace for long.

Israel has much vaster resources, though its politicians and people are increasingly fractured over the prosecution of the campaign. There are growing calls for a more aggressive ground invasion, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has resisted, and intense opposition to the idea of making concessions in a cease-fire agreement that might seem to reward Hamas.

“His hope is that he can avoid those two things by essentially continuing an air campaign while Hamas fires rockets,” said Nathan Thrall, co-author of a recent International Crisis Group report on Gaza. “Israel can play that game for a long time, certainly longer than Hamas can. That’s true on a purely military level, but the fact is, as the war drags on, it’s going to be harder and harder for Netanyahu not to do one of those two things.”

In Gaza, time is a liability. The number of displaced residents seeking shelter in United Nations schools swelled to nearly 300,000 as the violence resumed; officials have already given up any hope of classes starting Sunday as planned.

Analysts said the recent halt in hostilities had made the leaders of Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades vulnerable, as they left the safety of underground bunkers.

In a statement, Hamas said that the three commanders were part of Qassam’s “founding generation” and had “fed pain to the enemy for more than 20 years.” Killed were Mohammed Abu Shamalah, who was the head of Qassam’s southern division and known as “the Fox”; Raed Attar, nicknamed “the Blonde” and in charge of the Rafah brigade; and Mohammed Barhoum — “the White-Haired,” or “the Old” — who had been on Israel’s most-wanted list for two decades.

When Sergeant Shalit was exchanged for 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in October 2011 after Hamas held him in captivity for five years, it was Mr. Attar seen in a video ushering him from a pickup truck. Mr. Abu Shamalah, the Israeli military said, was also involved in a 2004 tunnel attack that killed six soldiers, and the 1994 murder of an Israeli officer in Rafah.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, called the killing of the Qassam commanders “a big Israeli crime that will not succeed in breaking our people’s will,” and promised, “Israel will pay the price.”

But a 39-year-old mourner who would identify himself only as Abu Nuqira acknowledged, “This is a painful loss — they are the symbols of resistance.”

In the Rafah refugee camp, a friend of Mr. Abu Shamalah’s said he had last seen him at the onset of the war, with Mr. Attar, and that he had said then he hoped to be a martyr.

“I told them, how do you stay together under these circumstances?” recalled the friend, who gave his name as Abu Mohammed and said he was 55. “He said that we lived together and we will die together.”
 

Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on August 22, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Israel Kills 3 Top Hamas Leaders as Latest Fighting Turns Its Way.

    Israel Kills 3 Top Hamas Leaders as Latest Fighting Turns Its Way,
    NYT, 21.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/22/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-strip.html

How Hamas Beat Israel in Gaza

AUG. 10, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By RONEN BERGMAN

Tel Aviv — If body-counts and destroyed weaponry are the main criteria for victory, Israel is the clear winner in the latest confrontation with Hamas. There’s no doubt that Israel could conquer the entire Gaza Strip and completely wipe out Hamas’s military apparatus. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen not to do so and now enjoys his highest approval ratings ever.

But counting bodies is not the most important criterion in deciding who should be declared the victor. Much more important is comparing each side’s goals before the fighting and what they have achieved. Seen in this light, Hamas won.

Hamas started the war because it was in dire straits; its relations with Iran and Egypt were severed. But soon enough Hamas was dictating the duration of the conflict by repeatedly refusing cease-fires. Furthermore, it preserved its capability of firing rockets and missiles at most of Israel’s territory, despite the immense effort the Israeli Air Force invested in knocking out launch sites.

Hamas also waged an urban campaign against Israeli ground forces, inflicting at least five times as many casualties as in the last conflict and successfully used tunnels to penetrate Israeli territory and sow fear and demoralization. It made Israel pay a heavy price and the I.D.F. eventually withdrew its ground troops from Gaza without a cease-fire.

Israeli leaders have now set the demilitarization of Gaza as one of their goals. But it’s difficult to picture how this could be achieved. Hamas would never agree to disarm unless faced with a protracted Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, which is something the Mr. Netanyahu has declared he won’t undertake.

So how did a terrorist guerrilla organization overcome the strongest army in the Middle East?

Hamas’s achievements on the battlefield are the fruit of a concerted effort to draw lessons from previous Israeli defeats.

In July 2006, Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers on the Israel-Lebanon border. In response, Israel sought to destroy the group. It failed — and even the more modest aims of returning of abducted men or demilitarizing southern Lebanon, proved unattainable. Israel came out of that war battered, leading to the departure of almost the entire top military command, and a number of hard-hitting internal inquiries.

Israel overhauled its intelligence and ground fighting capabilities and applied the lessons of Lebanon in two subsequent clashes with Hamas. Operation Cast Lead in 2008 began with the destruction of 1,200 targets in an immense aerial bombardment. And Hamas was stunned when it saw that Israel didn’t recoil from putting boots on the ground in Gaza.

In November 2012, Israel fired the opening shot by assassinating the Hamas military chief, Ahmad Jabari. Then it bombed most of Hamas’s rocket launching sites and staged a ground incursion. The Hamas forces were thrown into disorder and mostly fled.

Israel agreed to an early cease-fire, for a reason that has remained a closely-guarded secret: The Iron Dome anti-missile defense system, generously financed by the United States, had run out of ammunition. Israel learned the lesson and made sure that sufficient quantities of Iron Dome missiles were available this time around.

But Hamas didn’t walk away empty handed in 2012. It learned lessons and acted on them. First, Hamas took stringent counterintelligence measures to avoid Israeli electronic surveillance. Israel consequently knew much less than it should have about the increased range and payloads of Hamas rockets, the distribution of rocket storage depots and the firing of rockets by remote control.

Second, in order to prepare for an Israeli invasion, Hamas replaced its battalion commanders with new men who had undergone training in Lebanon or Iran. It developed a systematic urban warfare doctrine to ensure maximal Israeli casualties and to protect its high command from assassination.

Finally, Hamas invested in the construction of a vast and complex network of tunnels that reached into Israeli territory and formed units of frogmen to attack Israel from the sea. These were major advances.

Israel’s leaders are determined to represent Defensive Edge as a victory, and it is therefore unlikely that public inquiry panels will be set up as they were after the Lebanon war in 2006 or that heads will roll.

However, the I.D.F. will have to reinvent the way it counters guerrilla warfare. It will once again have to try to recruit agents in Gaza, now that it has become clear that electronic spying is insufficient because Hamas has become more careful.

Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, will now have to pay more attention to Hamas operatives in Qatar and Turkey and intercept Hamas’s communications from weapons suppliers, like North Korea.

Israel may also decide to focus on striking Hamas personnel outside Gaza, without taking responsibility. When the Mossad assassinated a top Hamas official in 2010 in Dubai, the large amount of negative publicity led to a cessation of such acts, but they may now be judged more effective than massive military action. Likewise, special operations will get more attention. Hamas surprised Israel, but Israel has carried out almost no imaginative or daring targeted operations in this latest war. Ehud Barak, the most prominent commando fighter in Israel’s history, proposed some such schemes when he was defense minister in 2010, but they were not adopted.

Finally, the defense ministry will be given unlimited funding to devise an underground electronic “fence” based on oil and gas prospecting technology, that will be laid all along the border between Israel and Gaza to detect tunnels as they are built.

For Israel, this round of fighting will probably end politically more or less at the point where it began but with significant damage to Israel’s deterrence.

And the feeble efforts at negotiation efforts between Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority and Israel now seem completely irrelevant, as military commanders on both sides go back to their drawing boards to plan the inevitable next round.

And as much as Israel is seeking to marginalize Hamas and empower the weakened Mr. Abbas, Hamas is, for the first time in its history, on the verge of being internationally recognized as an equal party in the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.
 

Ronen Bergman, a senior political and military analyst for the Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, is writing a history of the Mossad.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 11, 2014, in The International New York Times.

    How Hamas Beat Israel in Gaza, 10.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/11/opinion/how-hamas-beat-israel-in-gaza.html

Obama Says Iraq Airstrike Effort

Could Be ‘Long-Term’

 

AUG. 9, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

WASHINGTON — President Obama sought to prepare Americans for an extended presence in the skies over Iraq, telling reporters on Saturday that the airstrikes he ordered this week could go on for months as Iraqis try to build a new government.

“I don’t think we’re going to solve this problem in weeks,” Mr. Obama said before leaving for a two-week vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. “This is going to be a long-term project.”

The president repeated his insistence that the United States would not send ground combat troops back to Iraq. But he pledged that it and other countries would stand with the Iraqi leaders against militants if they built an inclusive government in the months ahead.

Mr. Obama said that the “initial goal” of the military intervention was to protect Americans in the country and to help the Iraqi minorities stranded on Sinjar Mountain. “We’re not moving our embassy anytime soon,” he said. “We are going to maintain vigilance and ensure that our people are safe.”

But he said the broader effort was intended to help Iraqis meet the threat from the militants over the long term. “The most important time table that I’m focused on right now is the Iraqi government getting formed and finalized,” the president said before boarding Marine One.

Mr. Obama described for the first time a more complicated effort to rescue Iraqis stranded on Sinjar Mountain, saying that the American military and others might have to create a safe corridor down the mountain. “The next step, which is going to be complicated logistically, is how can we give people safe passage,” Mr. Obama said.

He suggested that helping those people make it to safety would take time. He also said that getting an inclusive Iraqi government formed, and giving all Iraqis a reason to believe that they are represented by that government, would help give Iraqi military forces a reason to fight back against the militants.

“There has to be a rebuilding and an understanding of who it is the Iraqi security forces are reporting to, what they are fighting for,” he added.

Once that happens, Mr. Obama suggested, the American military, working with the Iraqi and Kurdish fighters, can “engage in some offense.”

The president said the military did not immediately required additional funding from Congress to conduct the airstrikes and humanitarian assistance that he had ordered. But he said that could change.

“If and when we need additional dollars,” he said, “then we will certainly make that request.”

    Obama Says Iraq Airstrike Effort Could Be ‘Long-Term’, NYT, 9.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/world/middleeast/
    us-airstrikes-on-militants-in-iraq.html

A World Desperate for a Little Good News

 

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Quick History

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

“The world is too much with us,” wrote the poet, a sentiment President Obama most likely shared this past week as he reluctantly ordered warplanes back over Iraq. As he did so, another Israeli-Palestinian cease-fire ended in resumed bombardment, Vladimir V. Putin defiantly ordered his own sanctions against the West and a terrible virus spread farther through West Africa.

A president who has taken great pains to pull the United States out of the world’s squabbles, Mr. Obama made no effort to conceal his distress at being pulled back in, for even a limited mission to protect minorities. “I will not allow the United States to be dragged into fighting another war in Iraq,” Mr. Obama said on Thursday night. But the old “slippery slope” cliché figured in more than one analysis of his decision.

Still, the markets somehow managed to find a hopeful note in a world that seemed totally out of tune. Though Russia was reported to be massing troops on the Ukrainian border, and the government imposed a ban on most food imports from the United States and its allies, American stocks rallied on Friday when the secretary of the Russian Security Council, Nikolai P. Patrushev, said in an interview that “Russia will continue to make all efforts for a very fast de-escalation of tensions.”

That “continue” carried the dubious suggestion that Russia had been making such efforts all along, but the fact that the markets latched on to the secretary’s statement testified 1) to the predominance of the Ukraine crisis over the Middle East in the minds of market strategists, and 2) that “the market is really tired of receiving one negative news item after another, and so is on the lookout for something positive,” as the Citigroup economist Ivan Tchakarov told Bloomberg.

Dragged Back Into Iraq

Following Mr. Obama’s authorization of the first significant military operation in Iraq since he pulled American ground troops out in 2011, the Air Force reported on Friday that two United States F-18 fighter jets had dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs onto an artillery target near Erbil, the Kurdish capital.

Mr. Obama’s hand in Iraq was forced by ISIS, the fanatical Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, and its advance in northern Iraq against the Kurds, reliable American allies who have maintained a modicum of order in their semiautonomous region. Thousands of Yazidis — an oft-persecuted religious minority — fled to remote Mount Sinjar, where they were stranded without food or water.

ISIS was left in control of a two-mile-wide hydroelectric dam on the Tigris River notorious for its structural instability. Even if ISIS did nothing, officials said, leaving the dam unattended could lead to its collapse, sending a 65-foot-high wall of water through Mosul.

Though Mr. Obama said he had ordered the strikes to protect American personnel, the fact that he did so only when the Kurds became threatened — and not earlier in the year when ISIS seized FallujaH? and marched through Mosul and on toward Baghdad — was bound to raise questions. One explanation was in Baghdad’s Green Zone, where Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki continued to resist all demands that he go away. The failure of Mr. Maliki, a Shiite, to include Sunnis, Kurds and others in a government of national unity is widely blamed for the disarray that made it possible for ISIS to rout the Iraqi Army. Even his lieutenants have urged Mr. Maliki to step down. But having made innumerable enemies, he is said to be demanding immunity and a security detail paid for by the state.

Mr. Obama has insisted that there is “no American military solution” to the mess, and he no doubt hoped that limited strikes would enable Iraqis to turn the tables on ISIS. But what if they fail? Will he be forced to further action?
 

Israeli Fire, Russian Threat

Faith in military solutions, however, seemed to prevail in the fight between Israel and Hamas. No sooner had a 72-hour truce expired than rockets began to rain on southern Israel, and Israeli warplanes and naval vessels opened up on targets in Gaza. The pause in hostilities had been the longest since they broke out on July 8.

The Palestinians insist that the blockade of Gaza be lifted, and about 100 prisoners held by Israel be freed, if there is to be a truce. The Israelis insist that Hamas disarm. The Egyptians have been trying to get both sides to lower their demands, and to leave more complex issues for subsequent talks.

In the meantime, the Palestinian death toll stands at almost 1,900, mostly civilians, while Israel has lost 64 soldiers and three civilians.

On the Ukrainian front, forces loyal to Kiev continued tightening their ring around Donetsk, the seat of secessionists armed by Russia.

There was no evidence that Mr. Putin was prepared to back down. On the contrary, his prime minister, Dmitri A. Medvedev, announced on Thursday, in retaliation against Western sanctions, a one-year ban on many food imports from the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia and Norway — a move that is likely to reduce food supplies and raise inflation in Russia. So far, his efforts to “de-escalate tensions,” to use Mr. Patrushev’s words, have consisted of insisting that Kiev stop attacking the rebels and that the West stop helping Kiev. And there remains the chilling possibility that Mr. Putin could send troops into eastern Ukraine on a “humanitarian mission” to the besieged denizens of Donetsk.
 

Ebola Spreads in Africa

Wars were not the only scourge making the news last week. With the death toll from an outbreak of the Ebola virus approaching 1,000 in West Africa, the World Health Organization on Friday declared an international public health emergency. And Doctors Without Borders called for a “massive deployment” of medical workers to Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the countries hit worst by the outbreak.

The Ebola virus causes a severe and often fatal illness, and while some drugs are being tested, there is no vaccine or treatment yet available to prevent or cure the disease. The virus is caught through close contact with the bodily fluids of infected people or animals.

Because it is not “spread through the air,” said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, the W.H.O.’s head of health security, it can be contained.

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 10, 2014,
on page SR2 of the National edition with the headline:
A World Desperate for a Little Good News.

    A World Desperate for a Little Good News, NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/10/opinion/sunday/
    a-world-desperate-for-a-little-good-news.html

Obama on the World

President Obama Talks to Thomas L. Friedman
About Iraq, Putin and Israel

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist
 

President Obama’s hair is definitely grayer these days, and no doubt trying to manage foreign policy in a world of increasing disorder accounts for at least half of those gray hairs. (The Tea Party can claim the other half.) But having had a chance to spend an hour touring the horizon with him in the White House Map Room late Friday afternoon, it’s clear that the president has a take on the world, born of many lessons over the last six years, and he has feisty answers for all his foreign policy critics.

Obama made clear that he is only going to involve America more deeply in places like the Middle East to the extent that the different communities there agree to an inclusive politics of no victor/no vanquished. The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction. Despite Western sanctions, he cautioned, President Vladimir Putin of Russia “could invade” Ukraine at any time, and, if he does, “trying to find our way back to a cooperative functioning relationship with Russia during the remainder of my term will be much more difficult.” Intervening in Libya to prevent a massacre was the right thing to do, Obama argued, but doing it without sufficient follow-up on the ground to manage Libya’s transition to more democratic politics is probably his biggest foreign policy regret.

At the end of the day, the president mused, the biggest threat to America — the only force that can really weaken us — is us. We have so many things going for us right now as a country — from new energy resources to innovation to a growing economy — but, he said, we will never realize our full potential unless our two parties adopt the same outlook that we’re asking of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds or Israelis and Palestinians: No victor, no vanquished and work together.

“Our politics are dysfunctional,” said the president, and we should heed the terrible divisions in the Middle East as a “warning to us: societies don’t work if political factions take maximalist positions. And the more diverse the country is, the less it can afford to take maximalist positions.”

While he blamed the rise of the Republican far right for extinguishing so many potential compromises, Obama also acknowledged that gerrymandering, the Balkanization of the news media and uncontrolled money in politics — the guts of our political system today — are sapping our ability to face big challenges together, more than any foreign enemy. “Increasingly politicians are rewarded for taking the most extreme maximalist positions,” he said, “and sooner or later, that catches up with you.”

I began by asking whether if former Secretary of State Dean Acheson was “present at the creation” of the post-World War II order, as he once wrote, did Obama feel present at the “disintegration?”

“First of all, I think you can’t generalize across the globe because there are a bunch of places where good news keeps coming.” Look at Asia, he said, countries like Indonesia, and many countries in Latin America, like Chile. “But I do believe,” he added, “that what we’re seeing in the Middle East and parts of North Africa is an order that dates back to World War I starting to buckle.”

But wouldn’t things be better had we armed the secular Syrian rebels early or kept U.S. troops in Iraq? The fact is, said the president, in Iraq a residual U.S. troop presence would never have been needed had the Shiite majority there not “squandered an opportunity” to share power with Sunnis and Kurds. “Had the Shia majority seized the opportunity to reach out to the Sunnis and the Kurds in a more effective way, [and not] passed legislation like de-Baathification,” no outside troops would have been necessary. Absent their will to do that, our troops sooner or later would have been caught in the crossfire, he argued.

With “respect to Syria,” said the president, the notion that arming the rebels would have made a difference has “always been a fantasy. This idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth, and that they were going to be able to battle not only a well-armed state but also a well-armed state backed by Russia, backed by Iran, a battle-hardened Hezbollah, that was never in the cards.”

Even now, the president said, the administration has difficulty finding, training and arming a sufficient cadre of secular Syrian rebels: “There’s not as much capacity as you would hope.”

The “broader point we need to stay focused on,” he added, “is what we have is a disaffected Sunni minority in the case of Iraq, a majority in the case of Syria, stretching from essentially Baghdad to Damascus. ... Unless we can give them a formula that speaks to the aspirations of that population, we are inevitably going to have problems. ... Unfortunately, there was a period of time where the Shia majority in Iraq didn’t fully understand that. They’re starting to understand it now. Unfortunately, we still have ISIL [the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant], which has, I think, very little appeal to ordinary Sunnis.” But “they’re filling a vacuum, and the question for us has to be not simply how we counteract them militarily but how are we going to speak to a Sunni majority in that area ... that, right now, is detached from the global economy.”

Is Iran being helpful? “I think what the Iranians have done,” said the president, “is to finally realize that a maximalist position by the Shias inside of Iraq is, over the long term, going to fail. And that’s, by the way, a broader lesson for every country: You want 100 percent, and the notion that the winner really does take all, all the spoils. Sooner or later that government’s going to break down.”

The only states doing well, like Tunisia, I’ve argued, have done so because their factions adopted the principle of no victor, no vanquished. Once they did, they didn’t need outside help.

“We cannot do for them what they are unwilling to do for themselves,” said the president of the factions in Iraq. “Our military is so capable, that if we put everything we have into it, we can keep a lid on a problem for a time. But for a society to function long term, the people themselves have to make decisions about how they are going to live together, how they are going to accommodate each other’s interests, how they are going to compromise. When it comes to things like corruption, the people and their leaders have to hold themselves accountable for changing those cultures.... ... We can help them and partner with them every step of the way. But we can’t do it for them.”

So, I asked, explain your decision to use military force to protect the refugees from ISIL (which is also known as ISIS) and Kurdistan, which is an island of real decency in Iraq?

“When you have a unique circumstance in which genocide is threatened, and a country is willing to have us in there, you have a strong international consensus that these people need to be protected and we have a capacity to do so, then we have an obligation to do so,” said the president. But given the island of decency the Kurds have built, we also have to ask, he added, not just “how do we push back on ISIL, but also how do we preserve the space for the best impulses inside of Iraq, that very much is on my mind, that has been on my mind throughout.

“I do think the Kurds used that time that was given by our troop sacrifices in Iraq,” Obama added. “They used that time well, and the Kurdish region is functional the way we would like to see. It is tolerant of other sects and other religions in a way that we would like to see elsewhere. So we do think it’s important to make sure that that space is protected, but, more broadly, what I’ve indicated is that I don’t want to be in the business of being the Iraqi air force. I don’t want to get in the business for that matter of being the Kurdish air force, in the absence of a commitment of the people on the ground to get their act together and do what’s necessary politically to start protecting themselves and to push back against ISIL.”

The reason, the president added, “that we did not just start taking a bunch of airstrikes all across Iraq as soon as ISIL came in was because that would have taken the pressure off of [Prime Minister Nuri Kamal] al-Maliki.” That only would have encouraged, he said, Maliki and other Shiites to think: " ‘We don’t actually have to make compromises. We don’t have to make any decisions. We don’t have to go through the difficult process of figuring out what we’ve done wrong in the past. All we have to do is let the Americans bail us out again. And we can go about business as usual.’ ”

The president said that what he is telling every faction in Iraq is: “We will be your partners, but we are not going to do it for you. We’re not sending a bunch of U.S. troops back on the ground to keep a lid on things. You’re going to have to show us that you are willing and ready to try and maintain a unified Iraqi government that is based on compromise. That you are willing to continue to build a nonsectarian, functional security force that is answerable to a civilian government. ... We do have a strategic interest in pushing back ISIL. We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq, but we can only do that if we know that we’ve got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void. So if we’re going to reach out to Sunni tribes, if we’re going to reach out to local governors and leaders, they’ve got to have some sense that they’re fighting for something.” Otherwise, Obama said, “We can run [ISIL] off for a certain period of time, but as soon as our planes are gone, they’re coming right back in.”

“It is amazing to see what Israel has become over the last several decades,” he answered. “To have scratched out of rock this incredibly vibrant, incredibly successful, wealthy and powerful country is a testament to the ingenuity, energy and vision of the Jewish people. And because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival. ... I think the question really is how does Israel survive. And how can you create a State of Israel that maintains its democratic and civic traditions. How can you preserve a Jewish state that is also reflective of the best values of those who founded Israel. And, in order to do that, it has consistently been my belief that you have to find a way to live side by side in peace with Palestinians. ... You have to recognize that they have legitimate claims, and this is their land and neighborhood as well.”

Asked whether he should be more vigorous in pressing Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen, to reach a land-for-peace deal, the president said, it has to start with them. Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “poll numbers are a lot higher than mine” and “were greatly boosted by the war in Gaza,” Obama said. “And so if he doesn’t feel some internal pressure, then it’s hard to see him being able to make some very difficult compromises, including taking on the settler movement. That’s a tough thing to do. With respect to Abu Mazen, it’s a slightly different problem. In some ways, Bibi is too strong [and] in some ways Abu Mazen is too weak to bring them together and make the kinds of bold decisions that Sadat or Begin or Rabin were willing to make. It’s going to require leadership among both the Palestinians and the Israelis to look beyond tomorrow. ... And that’s the hardest thing for politicians to do is to take the long view on things.”

Clearly, a lot of the president’s attitudes on Iraq grow out the turmoil unleashed in Libya by NATO’s decision to topple Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, but not organize any sufficient international follow-on assistance on the ground to help them build institutions. Whether it is getting back into Iraq or newly into Syria, the question that Obama keeps coming back to is: Do I have the partners — local and/or international — to make any improvements we engineer self-sustaining?

“I’ll give you an example of a lesson I had to learn that still has ramifications to this day,” said Obama. “And that is our participation in the coalition that overthrew Qaddafi in Libya. I absolutely believed that it was the right thing to do. ... Had we not intervened, it’s likely that Libya would be Syria. ... And so there would be more death, more disruption, more destruction. But what is also true is that I think we [and] our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you’re going to do this. Then it’s the day after Qaddafi is gone, when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying, ‘Thank you, America.’ At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn’t have any civic traditions. ... So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene, militarily? Do we have an answer [for] the day after?’ ”


A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A19 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama on the World.

    Obama on the World, NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/
    opinion/president-obama-thomas-l-friedman-iraq-and-world-affairs.html

While Offering Support,

Obama Warns That U.S.

Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’

 

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR

and JULIE HIRSCHFELD DAVIS

WASHINGTON — President Obama said Friday that he was open to supporting a sustained effort to drive Sunni militants out of Iraq if Iraqi leaders form a more inclusive government, even as he vowed that the United States had no intention of “being the Iraqi air force.”

Mr. Obama spoke as he ordered American fighter pilots back into the skies over Iraq, a decision that he said he reached after concluding that the United States needed to protect the Kurdish regions in the north and “bolster” an Iraqi leadership that was panicked in the face of advances by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.

The president said he was confident that the Iraqi leaders understand that “the cavalry is not coming to the rescue” with ground forces. But he insisted that the United States has a “strategic interest in pushing back” ISIS, suggesting a potentially broader mission than the one he described in Thursday’s White House address: to protect American personnel and prevent mass killings of religious minorities.

“We’re not going to let them create some caliphate through Syria and Iraq,” the president said in an hourlong interview with Thomas L. Friedman, a New York Times columnist, as American planes and drones began dropping bombs in Iraq. “But we can only do that if we know that we have got partners on the ground who are capable of filling the void.”

Lawmakers offered tempered support for the president’s actions in Iraq, but he also drew criticism from Republicans and Democrats for a mission that some called too limited and others worried would draw the United States more deeply back into Iraq.

Mr. Obama offered his justifications for his latest use of military force in Iraq while lamenting the outcome of a similar decision he made to intervene militarily in Libya in 2011. He defended the desire to help oust the Libyan dictator, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, with American air power, but he acknowledged that he had “underestimated” the chaos that would follow after American forces left.

“So that’s a lesson that I now apply every time I ask the question, ‘Should we intervene militarily?’ ” Mr. Obama said. “Do we have an answer the day after?”

In the case of the current fighting in Iraq, he suggested that the outcome would be different than chaos in Libya because efforts to form a government that could help rebuild Iraqi society are moving forward, albeit haltingly.

“They’ve now elected a president, they’ve elected a speaker of the house,” Mr. Obama said. “The final step is to elect a prime minister and to allow that prime minister to form a government.” He added that Iraqis are “recognizing that they have to make accommodations in order to hold the country together.”

A day before leaving for a two-week vacation with his family on Martha’s Vineyard, Mr. Obama discussed many of the most vexing problems that his administration is confronting on the world stage.

In the Middle East, where fighting began Friday morning as a 72-hour cease-fire between Israel and Hamas expired, Mr. Obama said that neither Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, known as Bibi, nor the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, have the political will to come to terms on a lasting peace agreement.

“In some ways Bibi’s too strong, in some ways Abbas is too weak to bring them together and make the kind of bold decisions that a Sadat or a Begin or a Rabin were willing to make,” Mr. Obama said, referring to Anwar el-Sadat, the former president of Egypt, and Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin, two previous Israeli prime ministers.

The president said his own ability to broker a peace deal was limited by the lack of desire on the part of Israeli and Palestinian leaders. “You can lead folks to water, they’ve got to drink,” Mr. Obama said. “And so far at least, they haven’t been willing.”

The president rejected criticism that the military advances by ISIS in Iraq could have been prevented if he had been willing months ago to provide heavy armaments to the Syrian rebels who were fighting against ISIS and the forces of President Bashar al-Assad in that country.

“It’s always been a fantasy,” he said, “this idea that we could provide some light arms or even more sophisticated arms to what was essentially an opposition made up of former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth.”

Mr. Obama, hinting at some strain from the summer’s international crises, said the prospects for a diplomatic agreement that would prevent President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia from invading Ukraine were real, but dimming.

“A deal should be possible,” Mr. Obama said. However, he added, “we are at a dangerous time, in part because the position of the separatists has weakened. I think Putin does not want to lose face, and so the window for arriving at that compromise continues to narrow.”

On Iran, the president said the chance that American efforts to strike a deal on nuclear weapons is “a little less than 50-50,” in part because some Islamic leaders may fear such a pact would loosen their grip on power.

“That may prevent us from getting a deal done,” Mr. Obama said. “It is there to be had. Whether ultimately Iran can seize that opportunity — we will have to wait and see, but it is not for lack of trying on our part.”

Some of the criticism of Mr. Obama’s Iraq announcement came from his own party. Democrats and the antiwar groups that make up a crucial part of their political base said they were concerned about “mission creep,” cautioning that their opposition to committing ground forces in Iraq was resolute.

“I hope and I have to believe the president when he said that it is limited and strictly for the purpose of protecting U.S. personnel and a humanitarian mission to prevent genocide,” Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat who is one of the party’s leading antiwar voices on Capitol Hill, said in an interview. “My concern is for mission creep and escalation into a larger military conflict. The American people don’t have the appetite for sending combat troops and engaging in another war in Iraq.”

At the same time, some Republicans suggested that the president had acted too slowly and timidly to confront ISIS, and now was moving too cautiously against the group.

“If this is the beginning of a real effort to push back ISIS and destroy them, then I definitely support that,” said Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, an Air Force veteran and Air National Guardsman who sits on the Foreign Affairs Committee. “Unfortunately, he did not have the intensity to come out and say that we have to destroy them. I think the president is frightened of re-engaging in Iraq, and I don’t think he really knows how to sell the reality of re-engaging to the American people.”

Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Georgia Republican on the Armed Services and Intelligence Committees, said he told Mr. Obama last week that he did not believe he was acting aggressively enough to counter the threat from ISIS.

“It’s important that we do carry out some strong military missions inside of Iraq,” he said. He added that it was important to let ISIS “know we’re here in support of our people, and we are not Maliki’s air force, but we are going to protect the Iraqi people,” referring to Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq. “His advisers were glad to know that there are some of us out there who are willing to stand behind the president.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A6 of the New York edition with the headline:
While Offering Support, Obama Warns That U.S. Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’.

    While Offering Support, Obama Warns That U.S. Won’t Be ‘Iraqi Air Force’,
    NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/
    while-offering-support-obama-warns-that-us-wont-be-iraqi-air-force.html

Fear of ‘Another Benghazi’

Drove White House to Airstrikes in Iraq

By MARK LANDLER,

ALISSA J. RUBIN,

MARK MAZZETTI

and HELENE COOPER

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Mr. Obama’s limousine.

The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide.

With American diplomats and business people in Erbil suddenly at risk, at the American Consulate and elsewhere, Mr. Obama began a series of intensive deliberations that resulted, only a day later, in his authorizing airstrikes on the militants, as well as humanitarian airdrops of food and water to the besieged Iraqis.

Looming over that discussion, and the decision to return the United States to a war Mr. Obama had built his political career disparaging, was the specter of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president.

President Obama spoke about actions taken by his administration in Iraq, including airdrops of humanitarian supplies and the authorization of airstrikes against ISIS forces.
Video Credit By whitehouse.gov on Publish Date August 7, 2014. Image CreditDoug Mills/The New York Times

As the tension mounted in Washington, a parallel drama was playing out in Erbil. Kurdish forces who had been fighting the militants in three nearby Christian villages abruptly fell back toward the gates of the city, fanning fears that the city might soon fall. By Thursday morning, people were thronging the airport, desperate for flights out of town.

“The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the White House’s internal deliberations. “We didn’t want another Benghazi.”

For weeks, intelligence officials had been watching the militant group, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, gain in strength, replenishing its arsenals with weapons captured both in Syria and in Iraq. But interviews with multiple officials at the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department and other agencies paint a portrait of a president forced by the unexpectedly rapid deterioration of security in Iraq to abandon his longstanding reluctance to use military force.

Mr. Obama, in a speech late Thursday announcing his decision, insisted this was not a return to war — that Iraq’s fate still ultimately rested in the hands of its three main groups, the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But he made clear that he would take action to protect Americans in Erbil and Baghdad.

“We have an embassy in Baghdad, we have a consulate in Erbil, and we have to make sure that they are not threatened,” Mr. Obama said in an interview on Friday with Thomas L. Friedman of The New York Times. “Part of the rationale for the announcement yesterday was an encroachment close enough to Erbil that it would justify us taking shots.”

Still, his decision to order F-18 fighter jets from the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush to carry out bombing raids on militants dramatically raises the risks for Mr. Obama. Unlike other times when he has made the decision to commit American forces — the 2009 troop surge in Afghanistan, for example — Mr. Obama acted within hours.

With nearly 50 African leaders converging on Washington, the president was fully occupied with a week of diplomacy and salesmanship on behalf of American companies — not to mention a White House dinner featuring entertainment by Lionel Richie. On Saturday, he and his wife, Michelle, were to leave town for two weeks of vacation on Martha’s Vineyard.

While Mr. Obama discussed security and governance with the leaders, his national security aides were huddling in the Situation Room, getting increasingly dire briefings from embassy officials in Baghdad and the Pentagon’s Central Command, which oversees Iraq.

“Things reached a tipping point on Wednesday,” said a senior official. “We saw that on the mountain, the Iraqis were not able to resupply and provide food and water.”

Back at the White House that evening, Mr. Obama and General Dempsey continued talking in the Oval Office, joined by the chief of staff, Denis McDonough; the national security adviser, Susan E. Rice; and other officials. The discussion moved toward military action, one official said, though Mr. Obama had not yet decided on anything, beyond airdrops.

About 8 p.m., the meeting broke up and Mr. Obama again left the White House, an hour late, for a dinner date with his wife and a close confidante, Valerie Jarrett, at an Italian restaurant in Georgetown.

Six thousand miles away, in Erbil, Thursday morning broke with news that two towns just 27 miles west of the Kurdish capital, Mahmour and Gwer, had fallen to the militants, and that Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, had withdrawn. “That was a real problem,” said a former Kurdish official who closely tracks security issues.

In villages and small towns outside the city, even places well north of Erbil and farther from the militant forces, people were frantically piling into cars to flee. The pesh merga were helping to evacuate hundreds of people in large flatbed trucks. When people heard a gunshot, rumors would spread of an ISIS advance.

Americans officials on the ground said they feared that if Erbil emptied, the city would be vulnerable to a militant attack. And if it fell, they feared, not only would Americans be at risk, but it would be a second seismic event for the region — after the June 10 fall of Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city — with dangerous consequences for Turkey and a potential for enormous loss of life in Kurdistan.

A look at who the pesh merga are, their history as Iraq’s most formidable force, and why President Obama has now authorized airstrikes against ISIS to support them.
Video Credit By Quynhanh Do and Emily B. Hager on Publish Date August 8, 2014. Image CreditSafin Hamed/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As if that were not enough, the militants had seized a critical dam in Mosul, which controls water levels on the Tigris River as far south as Baghdad. The capture of the dam shook Kurdish officials and fueled the sense of crisis during Thursday’s meetings, with officials worried that the militants could either blow it up or use it to cut off water supplies or as a bargaining chip in negotiating anything they wanted.
Continue reading the main story

“That was one of the trip wires we looked at,” said another senior official. “We look at that dam as a potential threat to our embassy in Baghdad.”

At a 90-minute meeting in the Situation Room on Thursday morning, Mr. Obama was briefed again about the plight of the Iraqis stranded on Mount Sinjar. Members of an ancient religious sect known as Yazidi, they were branded as devil worshipers by the militants. The women were to be enslaved; the men were to be slaughtered.

Officials told Mr. Obama there was a real danger of genocide, under the legal definition of the term. “While we have faced difficult humanitarian challenges, this was in a different category,” said an official. “That kind of shakes you up, gets your attention.”

At 11:20 a.m., Mr. Obama left the meeting to travel to Fort Belvoir, Va., where he signed a bill expanding health care for veterans. He had all but made up his mind to authorize airstrikes, officials said, and while he was away, his team drafted specific military options.

When the president returned to the White House barely an hour later, he went back into meetings with his staff. By then, there were news reports of airdrops and possible strikes. But the White House “hunkered down,” an official said, refusing to comment on the reports for fear of endangering a nighttime airdrop over Mount Sinjar.

Mr. Obama did not announce the operations until dawn had broken in Iraq, a delay of several hours that added to the panic in Erbil. Reports of explosions near the city at dusk on Thursday night sowed confusion after Kurdish officials said the United States had begun airstrikes on the militants. The Pentagon flatly denied the reports.

American officials said the United States was closely coordinating with the Iraqi Air Force, which has been carrying out its own strikes on the militants, though officials did not confirm that the explosions reported on Thursday evening were from Iraqi raids. On Friday, an administration official said there had been no airstrikes the previous evening.

Struggling to stanch the fear, keep the fighters at their posts and slow the exodus out of the city, Kurdish officials put out a series of brave-sounding but misleading statements.

The Kurdish prime minister, Necherven Barrzani, sent a letter to Kurdish citizens, posted on a government website, saying: “The pesh merga are going ahead and terrorists are being beaten. Don’t be skeptical.”

Also writing a letter to the Kurdish people was Kosrat Rassoul, deputy to President Massoud Barzani, who said: “There are rumors among the people, which make citizens feel skeptical. Here I want to reassure everyone we in Erbil are ready in the best way to defend the Kurdish territory.”

What they did not say was that the pesh merga were demoralized, uncertain, underequipped and facing a formidable foe along several hundred miles of border between the Kurdistan region and Iraq’s Nineveh and Kirkuk Provinces, where the militants are now the dominant force.

Several fighters who had fought ISIS said they were daunted when they discovered the militants were traveling in bulletproof vehicles that left the pesh merga’s bullets doing little more than pockmarking the metal.

“It’s our business to see the faces of the soldiers and know how they feel,” said Halgurd Hekmat, the head of media for the pesh merga fighters. “I wouldn’t say they were afraid, but they were a bit nervous,” he admitted. Since the fall of Mosul, the pesh merga leadership had warned the Americans and the Iraqi government that they were ill equipped to hold the militants at the border separating Nineveh Province from Kurdistan.

“We told them: ‘We cannot hold it for very long. We are not a country; we don’t have an army; we don’t have aircraft,’ ” said Lt. Gen. Jaber Yawer Manda, the secretary general of the pesh merga ministry. “I said: ‘We are fighting in the front lines now. You have to help us.’ ”
 

On Thursday evening, after a long day in the West Wing, Mr. Obama had a message for Iraqis: “Today, America is coming to help.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: White House Saw ‘Another Benghazi’ Looming.

    Fear of ‘Another Benghazi’ Drove White House to Airstrikes in Iraq,
    NYT,  8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/
    fear-of-another-benghazi-drove-white-house-to-airstrikes-in-iraq.html

U.S. Jets and Drones Attack Militants

in Iraq, Hoping to Stop Advance

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By ALISSA J. RUBIN,

TIM ARANGO

and HELENE COOPER

DOHUK, Iraq — The United States launched a series of airstrikes against Sunni militants in northern Iraq on Friday, using Predator drones and Navy F-18 fighter jets to destroy rebel positions around the city of Erbil, the American military said Friday.

The strikes were aimed at halting the advance of militants with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria toward Erbil, the Kurdish capital, which is home to a United States Consulate and thousands of Americans.

The action marked the return of the United States to a direct combat role in a country it left in 2011. Warplanes dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a number of targets: a mobile artillery piece that was being towed from a truck and had begun shelling Erbil, a stationary convoy of seven vehicles, and a mortar position.

The military also used a remotely piloted drone to strike another mortar position on Friday afternoon. After the first strike, it said in a statement, ISIS militants “returned to the site moments later” and “were attacked again and successfully eliminated.”

Defense officials expressed confidence that they could achieve within a few days one of President Obama’s stated goals: stopping the advance of the militants on Erbil.

Less certain was whether the other objectives Mr. Obama had announced — breaking the siege on tens of thousands of refugees stranded on Sinjar Mountain and protecting Americans in Baghdad — could be achieved as quickly, given the instability of Iraq’s internal politics and the difficulty of protecting and eventually evacuating the stranded people.

While Mr. Obama said Thursday night that he had authorized military strikes, if necessary, to help liberate the refugees on Sinjar Mountain, all of the military attacks on Friday were directed toward stopping the ISIS militants’ advance on Erbil.

The leader of ISIS sent a defiant message to the Americans in an audio statement posted on YouTube in June and recirculated on Twitter on Friday.

“This is the message of the leader of the faithful,” the leader, known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, wrote in a message addressed to “America, the defender of the cross.”

“You should know, you defender of the cross, that getting others to fight on your behalf will not do for you in Syria as it will not do for you in Iraq,” he said. “And soon enough, you will be in direct confrontation — forced to do so, God willing. And the sons of Islam have prepared themselves for this day. So wait, and we will be waiting, too.”

ISIS fighters had come within 25 miles of Erbil in a rapid advance that took American military planners by surprise.

Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman, said in a statement that ISIS fighters near the mortar positions had been “successfully eliminated,” although he did not say exactly how many had been killed. Another Defense Department official said that the precision of the laser-guided bombs dropped was such that in the case of the strike on the stationary convoy, “you know that vehicle and the people in it don’t exist anymore.”

The Navy fighters launched from the aircraft carrier George H. W. Bush, which has been deployed in the Arabian Sea.

Kurdish officials said the first round of American bombs struck on Friday afternoon in and around Mahmour, a town near Erbil. They reported an airstrike in the same location on Thursday, before Mr. Obama’s announcement; the Pentagon denied that American warplanes carried out that earlier attack.

Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, have been pressed hard in recent days by the militants, who have seized several towns near Erbil from the Kurds and taken the Mosul Dam, one of the most important installations in the country.

“The airstrikes are being led by the U.S.A., and pesh merga are attacking with Katyusha,” said Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for the Kurdish fighters, referring to a type of Russian-made tactical rocket.

Many members of religious minorities in northern Iraq, including Christians, have fled to Kurdish territory to escape the advancing militants, who have imposed harsh fundamentalist rule in areas they control. Others — including tens of thousands of Yazidis, who follow an ancient faith linked to Zoroastrianism and are stranded in a mountainous area to the west — have been trapped and besieged by the militants. Delivering humanitarian aid to that group is one of the purposes of the American operations in Iraq, Mr. Obama said.

Britain, a close ally and coalition partner of the United States in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Friday that it would not take part in the current military action but would provide humanitarian aid and technical help.

“What we have decided today is to assist the United States in the humanitarian operations that started yesterday,” the British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, said in London on Friday.

Turkey, a NATO ally that borders northern Iraq, said on Friday that it, too, would increase humanitarian aid to the region, news agencies reported.

Nikolay Mladenov, the United Nations’ top envoy in Iraq, said airdrops of aid on Friday had reached a fraction of the 100,000 people trapped on Sinjar Mountain. Mr. Mladenov has proposed a humanitarian corridor that would allow civilians to travel from the mountain to a safe zone in a Kurdish-controlled area. Late Friday, the United States military said it had made a second round of airdrops of food and water.

But the civilians are currently trapped between front lines. The fighting would have to stop to open such a corridor, or the warring parties would have to agree to let people pass into safety. Mr. Mladenov said negotiations were underway. “It’s a matter of days,” he said. “It depends on two things. First, how successful the airdrops can be — they’ve been there for a few days; there’s no access to water, food, medicine. Secondly, it depends on the security situation on the ground.”

While Kurds welcomed Mr. Obama’s announcement of American assistance, the reaction in Baghdad was mixed.

“Obama’s speech did not delight Iraqis,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a leader of a main Shiite bloc in Parliament, the Sadr faction, who were among the strongest opponents of American involvement in Iraq. “They are looking out for their own interests, not for ours.”

“They should have provided Iraq with weapons,” Mr. Zamili added, possibly alluding to the United States’ suspension of deliveries of F-16 fighter jets and combat aircraft to Iraq.

Another Shiite leader, Sami al-Askari, who is close to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, said Mr. Obama’s call for airstrikes had come “too late.”

“They should have made this decision when hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis were being killed every day,” Mr. Askari said.

Mr. Askari accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”

“Iraqis must rely on themselves and their genuine friends, like Iran and Russia, who have supported Iraq in its battle against ISIS,” he said. Russia has sent Sukhoi aircraft to the Iraqi forces, and Iran has trained and financed militia forces and sent advisers.

The decision to announce American air operations on Thursday appeared to reflect a view among American, Kurdish and Iraqi military leaders that a crippling attack by the militants was more imminent than had been widely recognized. The militants’ seizure of two towns within 20 miles of Erbil stoked panic and the beginnings of an exodus of residents to Sulaimaniya, the largest city to the southeast.

Military leaders believed that if the city emptied, it would be more vulnerable to a militant attack, officials said privately, asking not to be quoted because they did not want to shake morale.

The airstrikes appeared to improve the mood in Erbil on Friday, at least temporarily, according to people there. Fewer cars were at the city gates trying to leave, they said.

“The bombing changed the mood of the people,” a pesh merga officer said.

Correction: August 8, 2014

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated when Turkey said it would step up humanitarian aid to northern Iraq. The announcement was made Friday, not Thursday.

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Dohuk, Iraq, Tim Arango from Baghdad and Helene Cooper from Washington. Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, Somini Sengupta from the United Nations and Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura from London.

A version of this article appears in print on August 9, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
U.S. Jets and Drones Attack Militants in Iraq.

    U.S. Jets and Drones Attack Militants in Iraq, Hoping to Stop Advance,
    NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/iraq.html

U.S. Warplanes Strike Militants in Iraq

AUG. 8, 2014

The New York Times

By ALISSA J. RUBIN,

TIM ARANGO

and HELENE COOPER

DOHUK, Iraq — American warplanes struck Sunni militant positions in northern Iraq on Friday, the Pentagon and Kurdish officials said. The action returned United States forces to a direct combat role in a country it withdrew from in 2011.

Two F-18 fighters dropped 500-pound laser-guided bombs on a mobile artillery target near Erbil, according to a statement by Rear Adm. John Kirby, the Pentagon press secretary. Militants of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria were using the artillery to shell Kurdish forces defending Erbil, “near U.S. personnel,” Admiral Kirby said.

The strike followed President Obama’s announcement Thursday night that he had authorized limited airstrikes to protect American citizens in Erbil and Baghdad, and, if necessary, to break the siege of tens of thousand of refugees who are stranded on Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq.

“As the president made clear, the United States military will continue to take direct action against ISIL when they threaten our personnel and facilities,” Admiral Kirby said, referring to the Islamic militants by another translation of their Arabic name.

Kurdish officials said the American bombs struck on Friday afternoon in and around Makhmour, a town near Erbil. They reported an airstrike in the same location on Thursday, before the president’s announcement; the Pentagon denied that American warplanes carried out that earlier attack.

Kurdish fighters, known as pesh merga, have been hard pressed in recent days by the militant fighters, who have seized several towns near Erbil from the Kurds and took the Mosul Dam, one of the most important installations in the country. The airstrike appeared intended to help stem the tide.

“The airstrikes are being led by the U.S.A., and pesh merga are attacking with Katyusha,” said Halgurd Hekmat, a spokesman for the Kurdish fighters, referring to a type of Russian-made tactical rocket.

Many members of religious minorities in northern Iraq, including Christians, have fled to Kurdish territory to escape the advancing militants, who have imposed harsh fundamentalist rule in areas they control. Others have been trapped and besieged by the militants, including tens of thousands of Yezidis, who follow an ancient faith linked to Zoroastrianism and are stranded in a mountainous area to the west. Delivering humanitarian aid to that group is one of the purposes of the American operations in Iraq, Mr. Obama said.

Britain, a close ally and coalition partner of the United States in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Friday that it would not take part in military action there now but would provide humanitarian aid and technical assistance.

“What we have decided today is to assist the United States in the humanitarian operations that started yesterday,” the British defense secretary, Michael Fallon, said in London on Friday. “We are offering technical assistance in that, in terms of refueling and surveillance. We are offering aid of our own, which we hope to drop over the next couple of days in support of the American relief effort, particularly to help the plight of those who are trapped on the mountain.”

Turkey, a NATO ally that borders northern Iraq, said on Thursday that it, too, would step up humanitarian aid to the region, news agencies reported.

The Federal Aviation Administration, citing “the hazardous situation created by armed conflict,” instructed American air carriers on Thursday not to fly in Iraqi airspace until further notice. Turkish Airlines said it had suspended service to and from Erbil indefinitely.

The leader of the militant group sent a defiant message to the Americans in an audio statement posted on Twitter.

“I address this message to America, the holder of the Cross,” wrote the leader, known as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

“Listen up, those who fight on your behalf will not give you any gains in Iraq and Syria. Soon enough, you will find yourself in a direct confrontation with the sons of Islam, who have prepared themselves well for the day we will fight you.”

While Kurds welcomed Mr. Obama’s announcement of American assistance, the reaction in Baghdad was mixed.

“Obama’s speech did not delight Iraqis,” said Hakim al-Zamili, a leader of a main Shiite bloc in Parliament, the Sadr faction, who were among the strongest opponents of American involvement in Iraq. “They are looking out for their own interests, not for ours,” he said.

“They should have made this decision when hundreds of Shiites and Sunnis were being killed every day,” he said.

Mr. Askeri accused the Obama administration of being interested only in “protecting the Kurdish regional government and Christians, not the rest of Iraq.”

“Iraqis must rely on themselves and their genuine friends like Iran and Russia, who have supported Iraq in its battle against ISIS,” he said. Russia has sent Sukhoi helicopters to the Iraqi forces, and Iran has trained and financed militia forces and sent advisers.

The decision to announce American air operations on Thursday appeared to reflect a view among Kurdish, Iraqi and American military leaders that a crippling attack by the militants was more imminent than was widely recognized. The militants’ seizure of two towns within 20 miles of Erbil, which serves as the Kurdish capital, precipitated panic in the capital and the beginnings of an exodus of residents to Sulaimaniya, the largest city to the north.

Military leaders believed that if the city emptied, it would be much more vulnerable to an militant attack, officials said privately, asking not to be quoted because they did not want to shake morale.

The bombing appeared to bolster morale in Erbil on Friday, at least temporarily, according to people there. Fewer cars could be seen at the city gates attempting to leave, they said.

“The bombing changed the mood of the people,” said a pesh merga officer.
 

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Dohuk, Iraq, Tim Arango from Baghdad and Helene Cooper from Washington. Omar Al-Jawoshy contributed reporting from Baghdad, and Kimiko De Freytas-Tamura from London.

    U.S. Warplanes Strike Militants in Iraq, NYT, 8.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/iraq.html

Preventing a Slaughter in Iraq

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The catastrophe of Iraq has been growing steadily worse for weeks, but by Thursday, it became impossible for the United States and other civilized nations to ignore it. Iraq’s bloodthirsty Sunni extremists were threatening the extermination of tens of thousands of members of religious minorities who have refused to join the fundamentalist Islamic state the terrorist forces want to create.

The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, known as ISIS, drove Christians, Yazidis and other minorities from their homes by giving them a choice between religious conversion or slaughter. There have been reports of scores of civilians being killed. Many of these frightened and desperate people have surged toward the Turkish border and some 40,000 are estimated to be suffering from heat and thirst on Mount Sinjar in northeast Iraq.

So it was not surprising to hear President Obama announce Thursday night that the United States was dropping food and water supplies in northeast Iraq and that he had authorized targeted airstrikes against ISIS, if needed. Mr. Obama made a wise policy call, and showed proper caution, by keeping his commitment not to reintroduce American ground troops in Iraq, but humanitarian assistance for the imperiled civilians was necessary.

Turkey’s foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, said his government had begun providing aid to these Iraqis, including dropping supplies at Sinjar from Iraqi helicopters. Turkey, already inundated with refugees from the Syrian civil war, is building a refugee camp in northern Iraq. An American official told The Times that fear of a “humanitarian catastrophe” had prompted Mr. Obama to consider the airdrops of emergency supplies and airstrikes against militants besieging the mountain.

From a political viewpoint, Mr. Obama created credibility problems for himself last year when he raised the strong possibility of military retaliation against Syria for using chemical weapons in the civil war there, then reneged in favor of a diplomatic deal with Russia that forced Syria to give up its stocks of chemical weapons. He ran the danger of compounding that problem if he did not act now.

Mr. Obama shaped the issue in terms of a humanitarian crisis — he said ISIS had talked of the destruction of the Yazidis, an ancient sect, and said that would be genocide. He voiced alarm over the rapid gains of ISIS, a brutal former affiliate of Al Qaeda that aims to establish a caliphate across Syria and Iraq that would be governed by a harsh interpretation of Islamic law, and he showed determination to protect American diplomats and other personnel at the consulate in Erbil and at the embassy in Baghdad.

The militant forces, battle-hardened, flush with money and weapons, have racked up stunning victories against the well-trained and highly motivated Kurdish pesh merga forces. They were reported to be controlling a checkpoint at the border of the semiautonomous Kurdish region, which is only 30 miles from the government headquarters in Erbil. ISIS also appeared to have captured the Mosul dam, the largest in Iraq, which provides electricity for Mosul and controls the water supply for a large territory. Should that structure fail, or be damaged in the conflict, it could flood with catastrophic consequences.

Iraqi Kurds were vital allies in the American-led war that toppled Saddam Hussein and continue to have close ties to the American government. Their semiautonomous region — peaceful, prosperous, reasonably well governed and an oil producer — has been the consistent bright spot in Iraq’s tumultuous postinvasion history. It would be a huge blow for the Kurds, Iraq and Turkey, a NATO ally, if ISIS took over the region.

Speaking at the White House, President Obama again pressed Iraqi politicians to resolve their differences. A move by Iraq’s government to appoint a prime minister who could credibly unify the country and lead the counterattack against the extremists has stalled. That division, Mr. Obama said, plays into the terrorists’ hands.

After so many years in Iraq, Americans are justifiably skeptical about what military involvement can accomplish anywhere — and the Middle East is so complicated that even seemingly benign decisions can have unintended consequences.

The United States, Turkey and other allies should move quickly to meet the Kurds’ needs for ammunition and weapons as well as advice on more effectively deploying the pesh merga and integrating Kurdish operations with Iraqi security forces. Under pressure from the United States, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki of Iraq finally agreed this week to cooperate with the Kurds and to provide air support, and should continue to do so.

That will still leave Mr. Obama with the task of framing a broader strategy that involves Saudi Arabia, the Arab League and the United Nations, just to start.


A version of this editorial appears in print on August 8, 2014, on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: Preventing a Slaughter in Iraq.

    Preventing a Slaughter in Iraq, NYT, 7.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/opinion/preventing-a-slaughter-in-iraq.html

Obama Allows Limited Airstrikes on ISIS

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER,

MARK LANDLER

and ALISSA J. RUBIN

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday announced he had authorized limited airstrikes against Islamic militants in Iraq, scrambling to avert the fall of the Kurdish capital, Erbil, and returning the United States to a significant battlefield role in Iraq for the first time since the last American soldier left the country at the end of 2011.

Speaking at the White House on Thursday night, Mr. Obama also said that American military aircraft had dropped food and water to tens of thousands of Iraqis trapped on a barren mountain range in northwestern Iraq, having fled the militants, from the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, who threaten them with what Mr. Obama called “genocide.”

“Earlier this week, one Iraqi cried that there is no one coming to help,” Mr. Obama said in a somber statement delivered from the State Dining Room. “Well, today America is coming to help.”

The president insisted that these military operations did not amount to a full-scale re-engagement in Iraq. But the relentless advance of the militants, whom he described as “barbaric,” has put them within a 30-minute drive of Erbil, raising an immediate danger for the American diplomats, military advisers and other citizens who are based there.

“As commander in chief, I will not allow the United States to be dragged into another war in Iraq,” said Mr. Obama, who built his run for the White House in part around his opposition to the war in Iraq.

While Mr. Obama has authorized airstrikes, American officials said there had not yet been any as of late Thursday. In addition to protecting Americans in Erbil and Baghdad, the president said he had authorized airstrikes, if necessary, to break the siege on Mount Sinjar, where tens of thousands of Yazidis, a religious minority group closely allied with the Kurds, have sought refuge.

The aircraft assigned to dropping food and water over the mountainside were a single C-17 and two C-130 aircraft. They were escorted by a pair of F-18 jet fighters, the administration official said. The planes were over the drop zone for about 15 minutes, and flew at a relatively low altitude. They flew over the Mount Sinjar area for less than 15 minutes, Pentagon officials said, and dropped a total of 5,300 gallons of fresh drinking water and 8,000 meals ready to eat. Mr. Obama, officials said, delayed announcing the steps he intended to take in Iraq until the planes had safely cleared the area.

A senior administration official said that the humanitarian effort would continue as needed, and that he expected further airdrops. “We expect that need to continue,” he said.

The official said that as conditions in Iraq deteriorated in recent days, the United States had worked with Iraqi security forces and Kurdish fighters to coordinate the response to militant advances. The official said the cooperation had included airstrikes by Iraqi forces against militant targets in the north.

Kurdish and Iraqi officials said that airstrikes were carried out Thursday night on two towns in northern Iraq seized by ISIS — Gwer and Mahmour, near Erbil. Earlier on Thursday, The New York Times quoted Kurdish and Iraqi officials as saying that the strikes were carried out by American planes.

While the militants are not believed to have surface-to-air missiles, they do have machine guns that could hit planes flying at a low altitude, said James M. Dubik, a retired Army lieutenant general who oversaw the training of the Iraqi Army in 2007 and 2008.

“These are low and slow aircraft,” General Dubik said. At a minimum, he said, the United States must be prepared for “some defensive use of air power to prevent” the militants from attacking American planes, or going after the humanitarian supplies.

For Mr. Obama, who has steadfastly avoided being drawn into the sectarian furies of the Middle East, the decision raises a host of difficult questions, injecting the American military into Iraq’s broader political struggle — something Mr. Obama said he would not agree to unless Iraq’s three main ethnic groups agreed on a national unity government.

The decision could also open Mr. Obama to charges that he is willing to use American military might to protect Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities but not to prevent the slaughter of Muslims by other Muslims, either in Iraq or neighboring Syria.

Will Parks, the United Nations Children’s Fund chief field officer in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq, discussed the crisis in Sinjar, where 40,000 people are still stuck in the mountains.

But the president said the imminent threat to Erbil and the dire situation unfolding on Mount Sinjar met both his criteria for deploying American force: protecting American lives and assets, and averting a humanitarian disaster.

“When we have the unique capacity to avert a massacre, the United States cannot turn a blind eye,” he said.

Mr. Obama has been reluctant to order direct military action in Iraq while Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki remains in office, but in recent weeks there have been repeated pleas from the Kurdish officials for weapons and assistance as ISIS militants have swept across northwestern Iraq. The militants, an offshoot of Al Qaeda, view Iraq’s majority Shiite and minority Christians and Yazidis as infidels.

Deliberations at the White House went on all day Thursday as reports surfaced that administration officials were considering either humanitarian flights, airstrikes or both.

Shortly after 6 p.m., the White House posted a photo of Mr. Obama consulting his national security team in the Situation Room. To his right was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey. Watching from across the table were Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, and her principal deputy, Antony J. Blinken. On the wall behind them, the clock recorded the time: 10:37 a.m.

Mr. Obama made only one public appearance, a rushed visit to Fort Belvoir, Va., where he signed into law a bill expanding access to health care for veterans. But aides suggested he might make a statement Thursday night. Before getting into his limousine, Mr. Obama was observed holding an intense conversation with his chief of staff, Denis R. McDonough, stabbing his finger several times for emphasis.

Later, Mr. McDonough telephoned the House speaker, John A. Boehner, to inform him of the president’s plans, and other White House officials spoke with lawmakers — all in an effort to avoid bruised feelings like those that followed the prisoner swap for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

Administration officials said on Thursday that the crisis on Mount Sinjar in northwestern Iraq had forced their hand. Some 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, according to Unicef, while as many as 40,000 people have been sheltering in the bare mountains without food, water or access to supplies.

Still, offensive strikes on militant targets around Erbil and Baghdad would take American involvement in the conflict to a new level — in effect, turning the American Air Force into the Iraqi Air Force.

“The White House is going to recognize that the need to commit air power to Iraq, even for a purely humanitarian mission, is going to open them up to greater criticism for their disengagement from Iraq,” said Kenneth M. Pollack, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “So they will do their damnedest not to get further involved in Iraq because that would just further validate those criticisms.”

Ever since Sunni militants with ISIS took over Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city, on June 10, Iraqis have feared that Baghdad, to the south, was the insurgents’ ultimate goal. But in recent weeks, the militant group has concentrated on trying to push the Kurds back from areas where Sunnis also live along the border between Kurdistan and Nineveh Province.

It has taken on the powerful Kurdish militias, which were thought to be a bulwark against the advance, and which control huge oil reserves in Kurdistan and broader parts of northern Iraq. An administration official said the United States would expedite the delivery of weapons to the Kurds.

For Mr. Obama, the suffering of the refugees on the mountainside appeared to be a tipping point. He spoke in harrowing terms about their dire circumstances, saying thousands of people were “hiding high up on the mountain, with little but the clothes on their backs.”

“They’re without food, they’re without water,” he said. “People are starving. And children are dying of thirst. These innocent families are faced with a horrible choice: descend the mountain and be slaughtered, or stay and slowly die of thirst and hunger.”
 

Helene Cooper and Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Alissa J. Rubin from Dohuk, Iraq. Thom Shanker, Michael D. Shear and Julie Hirschfeld Davis contributed reporting from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 8, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Obama Allows Airstrikes Against Iraq Rebels.

    Obama Allows Limited Airstrikes on ISIS, 7.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/world/middleeast/
    obama-weighs-military-strikes-to-aid-trapped-iraqis-officials-say.html

Obama Weighs Airstrikes or Aid

to Help Trapped Iraqis, Officials Say

 

AUG. 7, 2014

The New York Times

By HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — President Obama is considering airstrikes or airdrops of food and medicine to address a humanitarian crisis among as many as 40,000 religious minorities in Iraq who have been dying of heat and thirst on a mountaintop after death threats from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, administration officials said on Thursday.

The president, in meetings with his national security team at the White House on Thursday morning, has been weighing a series of options ranging from dropping humanitarian supplies on Mount Sinjar to military strikes on the fighters from ISIS now at the base of the mountain, a senior administration official said.

“There could be a humanitarian catastrophe there,” a second administration official said, adding that a decision from Mr. Obama was expected “imminently — this could be a fast-moving train.”

The White House declined to say whether Mr. Obama was weighing airstrikes or airdrops in Iraq, but the press secretary, Josh Earnest, said the United States was disturbed by what he described as “cold and calculated” attacks by ISIS on religious minorities in Iraq.

“These actions have exacerbated an already dire crisis, and the situation is nearing a humanitarian catastrophe,” Mr. Earnest told reporters. The campaign of attacks by ISIS, he said, “demonstrates a callous disregard for human rights and is deeply disturbing.”

Asked specifically about military options, Mr. Earnest said, “I’m not in a position to rule things on the table or off the table.” But he reiterated that there would be no American combat troops in Iraq and that any military action would be extremely limited.

“There are many problems in Iraq,” he said. “This one is a particularly acute one, because we’re seeing people persecuted because of their ethnic or religious identities.”

Mr. Earnest added: “There are no American military solutions to the problems in Iraq. These problems can only be solved with Iraqi political solutions.”

Mr. Obama made no mention of imminent military action as he traveled to Fort Belvoir in the Virginia suburbs on Thursday to sign legislation to overhaul the troubled Department of Veterans Affairs. Top officials were in the meantime gathering at the White House to discuss the possible Iraq action.

The administration had been delaying taking any military action against ISIS until there is a new Iraqi government. Both White House and Pentagon officials have said privately that the United States would not intervene militarily until Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki stepped down.

But administration officials said on Thursday that the crisis on Mount Sinjar may be forcing their hand. About 40 children have already died from the heat and dehydration, according to Unicef, while as many as 40,000 people have been sheltering in the bare mountains without food, water or access to supplies.

The administration officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. One official said that any military action would be “limited, specific and achievable,” noting that Mr. Maliki’s political party was supposed to announce a new candidate for prime minister on Thursday, but had not yet.

Mark Landler and Peter Baker contributed reporting.

    Obama Weighs Airstrikes or Aid to Help Trapped Iraqis, Officials Say,
    NYT, 7.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/08/world/middleeast/
    obama-weighs-military-strikes-to-aid-trapped-iraqis-officials-say.html

Start With Gaza

AUG. 5, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Columnist

Roger Cohen

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a ritualistic obscenity. It offends the conscience of humankind. The Oslo accords are dead. The “peace process” initiated through them is a farce. It is time to rethink everything.

In Gaza, an open-air prison for 1.8 million people, more than 300 children are dead, killed in the almost month-long Israeli bombardment. Each of those children has a name, a family. Several were killed in the recent shelling of a United Nations school, an act that the United States called “disgraceful.” The many civilian casualties in Gaza cannot be waved away as the “human shields” of Hamas. They were not human shields; they were human beings. When the guns die down, Israel will begin a difficult accounting.

But, yes, Hamas used these human beings, used them in the sense that the organization has no objective in the real world. Israel, which it says it is bent on annihilating, is not going away. Hamas manipulates and subjugates the Palestinians it governs in the name of a lost cause. To send rockets into Israel is to invite a certain response whose result, over time, is to reinforce a culture of paralyzing Palestinian victimhood. Hamas is criminal. It is criminal in its sacrifice of the Palestinian national cause to a fantasy, in its refusal to accept the Palestine Liberation Organization’s recognition of Israel’s right “to exist in peace and security,” in its determination to kill Jews, and in its willingness to see the blood of its people shed for nothing.

A Jewish homeland was voted into existence by United Nations Resolution 181 of 1947 calling for the creation of two states in the Holy Land, one Jewish and one Arab. That homeland was defended through Arab-initiated wars aimed at reversing the world’s post-Holocaust mandate. Israel’s existence is irreversible. It is grounded in that U.N. decision, won on the battlefield, expressed in the forging of a vibrant society; and it represents the rightful resolution of the long Jewish saga of exclusion and persecution.

Except that the resolution is incomplete. Israel’s denial of a Palestinian state, its 47-year occupation of the West Bank, its highly “capricious control regime” (in the words of the former Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad) over the lives of Palestinians, its expansion of settlements — all this creates an unacceptable “status quo” in which every lull is pregnant with violence. The occupation must end one day. Without two states Israel will lurch from one self-inflicted wound to the next, growing ever angrier with its neighbors and a restive world from which it feels alienated.

With nearly 2,000 dead, including 64 Israeli soldiers, the victors of this latest Gaza mini-war are apparently Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hamas. Support for Netanyahu is overwhelming. A vast majority of Israelis back his actions; many believe he has not gone far enough. Hamas, meanwhile, has hurt Israel; it has endured; it has exercised command-and-control under prolonged attack; it has embodied Palestinian resistance.

But these are Pyrrhic victories. Deeper currents are at work. Surely even Netanyahu must take from this horrific episode the conviction that something must change. He has long pooh-poohed peace. He compared Yitzhak Rabin to Neville Chamberlain, and Israelis somehow forgave him. He came very late and very lamely to the idea of two states for two peoples, only to set impossible conditions for that goal, undermine moderate Palestinians, and waste U.S. mediators’ time.

He seized a few months ago on the formation of a Hamas-Fatah unity government to say “the pact with Hamas kills peace.” Now Netanyahu would like nothing more than for the Palestinian Authority, representing the Fatah faction, to take control of Gaza. In effect he would like the Palestinian unity he lambasted to work. He knows demilitarization of Gaza, the stated Israeli objective, can only be attained by remilitarizing it with an Israeli tank on every corner. Nobody wants that. Israel is already running the lives of enough Palestinians — or trying to.

As for Hamas, its victory is also illusory, adrenalin before the fall. It can offer its people nothing. The place to start now is with ending the divisions in the Palestinian movement that the unity government papered over — Gaza first, instead of West Bank first. A Palestinian national consensus is the prerequisite for anything, including the rebuilding and opening-up of Gaza.

Real reconciliation can only come on the basis of an ironclad commitment to nonviolence and to holding of free and fair elections, the first since 2006. Good Palestinian governance, unity and nonviolence constitute the path to making a free state of Palestine irrefutable. The longer Hamas fights this, the greater its betrayal of its people.

Netanyahu has fought Palestinian statehood all his life. But it is the only way out of his labyrinth. In the end his sound bites yield to reality. That reality is bitter indeed.


A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 6, 2014,
in The International New York Times.

    Start With Gaza, NYT, 5.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/opinion/roger-cohen-start-with-gaza.html

U.S. Diplomacy on Gaza

Has Little Sway on Israel

AUG. 4, 2014

The New York Times

By MARK LANDLER

WASHINGTON — When the State Department condemned Israel’s strike on a United Nations school in Gaza on Sunday, saying it was “appalled” by this “disgraceful” act, it gave full vent to what has been weeks of mounting American anger toward the Israeli government.

The blunt, unsparing language — among the toughest diplomats recall ever being aimed at Israel — lays bare a frustrating reality for the Obama administration: the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has largely dismissed diplomatic efforts by the United States to end the violence in Gaza, leaving American officials to seethe on the sidelines about what they regard as disrespectful treatment.

Even as Israel agreed to a new cease-fire with Hamas, raising hopes for an end to four weeks of bloodshed, its relationship with the United States has been bruised by repeated clashes, from the withering Israeli criticism of Secretary of State John Kerry’s peacemaking efforts to Mr. Netanyahu’s dressing down of the American ambassador to Israel.

“This is the most sustained period of antagonism in the relationship,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel who now teaches at Princeton. “I don’t know how the relationship recovers as long as you have this president and this prime minister.”

With public opinion in both Israel and the United States solidly behind the Israeli military’s campaign against Hamas, no outcry from Israel’s Arab neighbors, and unstinting support for Israel on Capitol Hill, President Obama has had few obvious levers to force Mr. Netanyahu to stop pounding targets in Gaza until he was ready to do it.

On Monday, the Israeli prime minister signaled that moment had come. Amid signs it was prepared to wind down the conflict unilaterally, Israel announced it would accept a 72-hour cease-fire, effective Tuesday, and send a delegation to Cairo to negotiate for a lasting end to the violence.

Even as the White House harshly criticized the Israeli strike on the school, the Pentagon confirmed that last Friday it had resupplied the Israeli military with ammunition under a longstanding military aid agreement. Mr. Obama swiftly signed a bill Monday giving Israel $225 million in emergency aid for its Iron Dome antimissile system.

For all its outrage over civilian casualties, the United States steadfastly backs Israel’s right to defend itself and shares Israel’s view that Hamas is a terrorist organization. In a world of bitter enmities, the Israeli-American dispute is more akin to a family quarrel.

The White House seems determined to tamp down the latest eruption in tensions. “The nature of our relationship is strong and unchanged,” the press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters on Monday, pointing to comments by Mr. Netanyahu over the weekend, in which he said, “I think the United States has been terrific.”

The two statements are part of a recurring pattern for this administration: an angry outburst, followed by calmer words and the grudging recognition that little is going to change in the fundamental relationship between the United States and its closest ally in the Middle East.

Disputes between the United States and Israel are hardly new. President Ronald Reagan sold Awacs surveillance planes to Saudi Arabia over Israel’s fierce objections. George H.W. Bush held up loan guarantees because of Israeli settlement construction. Bill Clinton fumed after his first Oval Office encounter with a newly elected Israeli prime minister, Mr. Netanyahu.

But the chronic nature of this tension is unusual — and, according to current and former officials, rooted in ill will at the very top. “You have a backdrop of a very acrimonious relationship between the president and the prime minister of Israel,” said Robert M. Danin, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations.

While tensions between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu only occasionally spill into the open, Mr. Kerry became the subject of very public and vitriolic — albeit anonymous — criticism from Israeli officials for his efforts two weeks ago to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. His proposal, the officials said, was tilted in favor of Hamas and did not do enough to protect Israel’s security.

Mr. Kerry, American officials responded, based his efforts on an Egyptian cease-fire proposal that had already been accepted by the Israelis. He submitted his ideas to the Israelis, anticipating that they would have concerns. Whatever the precise circumstances, Mr. Kerry found himself excoriated across the political spectrum in Israel.

At the White House, officials were incensed by what they saw as shabby treatment of Mr. Kerry, a loyal friend of Israel. In addition to the cease-fire and the peace talks, they noted, Mr. Kerry went to bat for Israel with the Federal Aviation Administration after it imposed a ban on commercial flights to Tel Aviv following a rocket attack near Ben-Gurion International Airport.

Susan E. Rice, the national security adviser, voiced her anger to her Israeli counterpart, while Mr. Obama held a tense telephone call with Mr. Netanyahu last week, during which he demanded that Israel agree to a cease-fire.

“I cannot for the life of me understand why the Israelis would do this to Kerry,” said a senior administration official, who was not authorized to comment publicly on the matter and spoke on condition of anonymity. “If it was designed to pressure us, I don’t know to what end.”

Adding to the tensions was a report in the German magazine Der Spiegel that Israel wiretapped Mr. Kerry’s telephone during his peace negotiations. A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, declined to comment but said Mr. Kerry took pains to protect his communications.

Although Mr. Netanyahu has insisted he will not end the operation in Gaza until Israel has shut down the tunnels that Hamas uses to launch attacks on Israel, a senior American official predicted that the tough State Department statement would “box them in internationally.”

Mr. Netanyahu, however, has shown little evidence of wavering. American officials said that after the previous cease-fire fell apart on Friday, Mr. Netanyahu scolded the American ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, saying the United States should not “ever second-guess him again” on how to deal with Hamas.

Responding to the White House’s outrage, Mr. Netanyahu dispatched his ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, to defend Mr. Kerry, saying the attacks on him were “unwarranted.” But Mr. Dermer insisted that the harsh words did not reveal a deeper dysfunction in Israel’s relationship with the United States.

“It’s a lack of appreciation of how Israeli discourse works,” he said. “It’s your average Jewish Friday night family meal, taken to the hundredth power.”

Still, after a hectic week of television interviews to defend Israel’s operation in Gaza, Mr. Dermer acknowledged that the United States and Israel would never perceive the threat from Hamas exactly the same way.

“When you’re thinking about your survival every day,” he said, “you tend to think about these issues differently.”
 

Helene Cooper contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on August 5, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
Gaza Is Straining U.S. Ties to Israel.

    U.S. Diplomacy on Gaza Has Little Sway on Israel, NYT, 4.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/05/world/middleeast/
    gaza-is-straining-us-ties-to-israel.html

Questions of Weapons and Warnings

in Past Barrage on a Gaza Shelter

AUG. 3, 2014

The New York Times

By BEN HUBBARD

and JODI RUDOREN

JABALIYA, Gaza Strip — An examination of an Israeli barrage that put a line of at least 10 shells through a United Nations school sheltering displaced Palestinians here last week suggests that Israeli troops paid little heed to warnings to safeguard such sites and may have unleashed weapons inappropriate for urban areas despite rising alarm over civilian deaths.

Inspection of the damage, a preliminary United Nations review that collected 30 pieces of shrapnel, and interviews with two dozen witnesses indicate that the predawn strikes on Wednesday, July 30, that killed 21 people at the school, in the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp, were likely to have come from heavy artillery not designed for precision use.

Israeli officials have argued throughout their 27-day air-and-ground campaign against Hamas, the militant group that dominates Gaza, that it is the enemy’s insistence on operating near shelters and other humanitarian sites that endangers civilians. But in the Jabaliya case, they provided no evidence of such activity and no explanation for the strike beyond saying that Palestinian militants were firing about 200 yards away.

“It was clear that they were not aiming at a specific house, but fired lots and it fell where it fell,” said Abdel-Latif al-Seifi, whose three-story villa just beyond the school’s north wall ended up with two large holes in its roof.

The Jabaliya strike has already opened Israel to a new level of global scrutiny. International criticism ratcheted up another notch on Sunday after a missile the Israelis say was meant for three militants on a motorcycle also killed people waiting in line for food outside a United Nations school in Rafah that had been turned into a shelter.

Though Israeli military leaders have declared definitively that no United Nations facility was targeted, Rafah was the sixth shelter struck during the operation. Such strikes have renewed sharp questions about the tactics Israel uses in dense neighborhoods and, especially, near shelters that are supposed to provide refuge to people who follow Israel’s own orders to leave areas of fierce fighting.

“Why aren’t the safe zones working?” asked Robert Turner, the Gaza director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which is sheltering nearly 260,000 people in 90 schools and emails the Israeli authorities with their exact locations twice a day. “Why are the military decisions being made that are leading to these tragedies?”

The Israeli general who heads a committee charged with investigating the civilian impact of ground operations said that he did not know the details of what happened in Jabaliya because the troops involved were still fighting and therefore had not been interviewed. Speaking on the condition of anonymity under military protocol, the general said in an interview that “Hamas people were shooting at” a group of soldiers working to destroy a tunnel in the area. No Israelis were killed or wounded.

The New York Times emailed Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, a military spokesman, a map of where the strikes hit and asked him to point out where Israeli forces were operating, and from where in the 200-yard radius around the school they saw enemy fire; he did not respond. Colonel Lerner and the general refused to say what ordnance was deployed.

Asked whether artillery would be appropriate in such a situation, the general said “the question is whether or not they were under great or imminent risk.”

“The sheer orders are you are not allowed to fire artillery or mortar shells into urban areas unless there are imminent risks for human lives — meaning only if you are under deadly fire or under great risk,” he said. “The orders are clear. But I find it very difficult to judge those fighters under fire and tell them, ‘Look, please open your textbook and read out loud what we told you.’ ”

 

A Matter of Precision

The continuing war makes it impossible to determine exactly what happened that morning in Jabaliya, a refugee camp of 100,000 residents in northern Gaza, where the 24-room school was sheltering 3,220 people who had fled from homes closer to the border. But the number, trajectory and blast marks of the shells all point to artillery. United Nations officials said shrapnel from the site had codes matching unexploded shells recovered from other schools that munitions experts identified as 155-millimeter artillery shells.

Damage indicated the shells came from the northeast — where Israeli artillery units are stationed on the hills outside Gaza’s border. Artillery is a “statistics weapon,” not a “precision weapon,” experts said, generally fired from up to 25 miles away and considered effective if it hits within 50 yards of its target.

“Heavy artillery shelling into a populated area would be inherently indiscriminate,” said Bill Van Esveld, a Jerusalem-based Human Rights Watch lawyer who investigates war crimes. “You just can’t aim that weapon precisely enough in that environment because it’s so destructive.”

Gadi Shamni, a retired Israeli general who once commanded the Gaza division, agreed that “smart weapons” were more appropriate than artillery in such places but said that “to rescue forces that are getting into trouble, sometimes you have to use a little more firepower.”

“In any war, there are malfunctions and mistakes,” General Shamni said. Hamas militants “usually do things in order to attract” Israeli fire, he added, “and hope that some mistake will cause a disaster in order to delegitimize Israel.”

It was about 4:40 a.m., not long after the muezzin’s call for the dawn prayer, when the shells started, witnesses said. They stopped five minutes later.

The first three shells collapsed roofs and walls in a row of simple cinder-block homes across from the Jabaliya Elementary A & B Girls’ School, on a busy residential street dotted with ground-floor barbershops, pharmacies and groceries. Another killed a group of horses and donkeys tied up about 25 yards from the school entrance. At least three landed on the three-story villa.

Two shells slammed the roof of a second-story classroom filled with sleeping women and children, and one exploded in the school courtyard, where men were bowed in prayer among the eucalyptus trees.

“That was the one that took the people,” said Mohammed Abu al-Anzein, 35, who dragged a wounded man into a classroom and put a diaper on his head to stanch the bleeding.
Continue reading the main story

The school, which runs morning and afternoon shifts each of 880 students, opened as a shelter on July 16, and two days later had 1,428 residents. By July 29, more than twice that number were packed into classrooms, on balconies and under a large metal hangar still holding two banners with the smiling faces of last year’s pupils.

On the surrounding streets, where some walls bear faded posters lauding so-called martyrs from Hamas and other militant factions, no one interviewed said they had seen either Palestinian fighters or Israeli soldiers in the area. A few houses and apartments had been ruined by munitions fired from afar, but there were no bullet holes or empty casings suggesting close clashes.

In the hours before the strikes, explosions and shelling kept many people awake.

“The whole night was terror,” Mr. Abu al-Anzein said. “My chest was sore from smoking so many cigarettes.”

Ibrahim al-Najjar said he was returning from the mosque when a shell took down the wall of his home across from the school, wounding his sister. Two relatives injured by other blasts raced to the school to summon ambulances, and ended up among the dead in the courtyard.

Mike Cole, the United Nations agency’s field legal officer, was awakened by a call from the shelter at 5:55 a.m. The initial report, which he recorded longhand in a spiral notebook, was 16 dead.

At 6:04 a.m., Mr. Cole wrote, it was 20 dead with 45 wounded at two hospitals. Fourteen minutes later, he was told that a United Nations guard was among those killed. By 7:15, shelling in the area had started up again, and people were panicking about whether to stay or go. So Mr. Turner called his contact at Israel’s Coordination and Liaison Administration, the go-between for international organizations and the Israeli military.

“My impression was that he hadn’t heard about the first incident,” Mr. Turner said. “The immediate feedback of the C.L.A. was that it wasn’t them.”

 

Sensitive Sites

The C.L.A. always has on hand a list of the United Nations’ 250 installations across Gaza, each of them topped with a United Nations flag. During the war, Mr. Turner’s agency has supplemented that with lists of the schools serving as shelters, accompanied by a reminder that international law requires “all necessary actions and precautions that will prevent any damage to U.N. facilities.”

Jabaliya was No. 11 on the three-page list emailed at 8:48 p.m. the day before the strikes.

“We really do have good relations with these people, but what is happening after they get the information?” Mr. Turner asked. “Our concern is the lack of coordination between C.L.A. and the kinetic forces in the field.”

Requests to interview C.L.A. representatives were not granted, and detailed written questions about the Jabaliya episode were not answered.

In a broader briefing before the strike, an official who oversees the agency pointed out several times where rockets were launched from some of the 523 “sensitive sites” on its list. Rockets have also been found in three empty United Nations schools. “Terrorists shooting on our soldiers, our soldiers reacting,” he said. “This is a combat situation. It needs to be investigated.”

In Israel’s last ground invasion of Gaza, in 2009, mortar shelling outside a shelter at Al Fakhura School — also in Jabaliya — killed up to 40 people in what a United Nations panel led by Richard Goldstone found was “indiscriminate in violation of international law.” While Mr. Goldstone later retracted his report’s most explosive accusation — that Israel had intentionally killed civilians — he did not specifically change his assessment on Al Fakhura.

In that case, Israel at first claimed that militants were firing mortar shells from the school just before the strike, but after a preliminary inquiry, said that the fire was 80 meters away. The Goldstone report could not determine whether there had been Palestinian fire from the school or nearby, but concluded that the attack “cannot meet the test of what a reasonable commander would have determined to be an acceptable loss of civilian life for the military advantage sought.”

The first deadly strike at a shelter during the current Israel-Hamas battle was in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, where 16 people were killed on July 24 even as the United Nations was preparing to pull out its staff and curtail food service there after three days of Israeli warnings that the site was no longer safe.

Colonel Lerner, the Israeli military spokesman, said Palestinians had fired antitank missiles from near the Beit Hanoun school, and that the only ordnance to hit the site was a mortar shell nearly an hour before the fatal blasts. The military published a video clip in which the courtyard looked empty at the time.

“Why just show us the 14 seconds that shows the empty courtyard? Why not show us the antitank fire? Why not show us the response?” asked Mr. Turner, the United Nations official. “There are desks in the courtyard, there are trees in the courtyard — none of that is clear in the video, because the video is so poor. If you can’t see a desk, a pile of desks, how can you tell if there are people?”

The Israeli general in charge of the after-action investigations said more evidence would be forthcoming — eventually.

“We’re going to analyze one by one,” he said. “The question is could you do it differently, and if yes, why didn’t you, and if not, O.K., then you have to show us. We will know why they did what they did.”

The United Nations sent photographs of the munitions it recovered in Jabaliya, details about what was hit and what they had determined to be the trajectories of incoming rounds to the C.L.A. at 11:39 a.m. on the day of the strike. It has sealed the shrapnel in evidence bags, ready to hand over, along with a list of more than 3,000 potential witnesses, their identification numbers and contact information.

Most are still staying in the shelter. On Wednesday night, Asma Ghabin, who had 10 stitches in her thigh where doctors had removed shrapnel, lay with her two toddler sons on a thin mattress, in the same spot where she had been wounded hours before.

Ben Hubbard reported from Jabaliya, and Jodi Rudoren from Jerusalem. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2014,
on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Questions of Weapons and Warnings in Past Barrage
on a Shelter.

    Questions of Weapons and Warnings in Past Barrage on a Gaza Shelter,
    NYT, 3.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world/middleeast/
    international-scrutiny-after-israeli-barrage-strike-in-jabaliya-
    where-united-nations-school-shelters-palestinians-in-gaza.html
 

Why Americans

See Israel the Way They Do

AUG. 2, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

Roger Cohen

TO cross the Atlantic to America, as I did recently from London, is to move from one moral universe to its opposite in relation to Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza. Fury over Palestinian civilian casualties has risen to a fever pitch in Europe, moving beyond anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism (often a flimsy distinction). Attacks on Jews and synagogues are the work of a rabid fringe, but anger toward an Israel portrayed as indiscriminate in its brutality is widespread. For a growing number of Europeans, not having a negative opinion of Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience. The deaths of hundreds of children in any war, as one editorial in The Guardian put it, is “a special kind of obscenity.”

In the United States, by contrast, support for Israel remains strong (although less so among the young, who are most exposed to the warring hashtags of social media). That support is overwhelming in political circles. Palestinian suffering remains near taboo in Congress. It is not only among American Jews, better organized and more outspoken than their whispering European counterparts, that the story of a nation of immigrants escaping persecution and rising from nowhere in the Holy Land resonates. The Israeli saga — of courage and will — echoes in American mythology, far beyond religious identification, be it Jewish or evangelical Christian.

America tends toward a preference for unambiguous right and wrong — no European leader would pronounce the phrase “axis of evil” — and this third Gaza eruption in six years fits neatly enough into a Manichaean framework: A democratic Jewish state, hit by rockets, responds to Islamic terrorists. The obscenity, for most Americans, has a name. That name is Hamas.

James Lasdun, a Jewish author and poet who moved to the United States from England, has written that, “There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism: the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.” Certainly, European anti-Semitism has adapted. It used to be mainly of the nationalist right. It now finds expression among large Muslim communities. But the war has also suggested how the virulent anti-Israel sentiment now evident among the bien-pensant European left can create a climate that makes violent hatred of Jews permissible once again.

In Germany, of all places, there have been a series of demonstrations since the Gaza conflict broke out with refrains like “Israel: Nazi murderer” and “Jew, Jew, you cowardly pig, come out and fight alone” (it rhymes in German). Three men hurled a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in Wuppertal. Hitler’s name has been chanted, gassing of Jews invoked. Violent demonstrations have erupted in France. The foreign ministers of France, Italy and Germany were moved to issue a statement saying “anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews” have “no place in our societies.” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister, went further. What Germany had witnessed, he wrote, makes the “blood freeze in anybody’s veins.”

Yes, it does. Germany, Israel’s closest ally apart from the United States, had been constrained since 1945. The moral shackles have loosened. Europe’s malevolent ghosts have not been entirely dispelled. The continent on which Jews went meekly to the slaughter reproaches the descendants of those who survived for absorbing the lesson that military might is inextricable from survival and that no attack must go unanswered, especially one from an organization bent on the annihilation of Israel.

A strange transference sometimes seems to be at work, as if casting Israelis as murderers, shorn of any historical context, somehow expiates the crime. In any case it is certain that for a quasi-pacifist Europe, the Palestinian victim plays well; the regional superpower, Israel, a militarized society through necessity, much less so.

Anger at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is also “a unifying element among disparate Islamic communities in Europe,” said Jonathan Eyal, a foreign policy analyst in London. Moroccans in the Netherlands, Pakistanis in Britain and Algerians in France find common cause in denouncing Israel. “Their anger is also a low-cost expression of frustration and alienation,” Eyal said.

Views of the war in the United States can feel similarly skewed, resistant to the whole picture, slanted through cultural inclination and political diktat. It is still hard to say that the killing of hundreds of Palestinian children represents a Jewish failure, whatever else it may be. It is not easy to convey the point that the open-air prison of Gaza in which Hamas has thrived exists in part because Israel has shown a strong preference for the status quo, failing to reach out to Palestinian moderates and extending settlements in the West Bank, fatally tempted by the idea of keeping all the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.

Oppressed people will respond. Millions of Palestinians are oppressed. They are routinely humiliated and live under Israeli dominion. When Jon Stewart is lionized (and slammed in some circles) for “revealing” Palestinian suffering to Americans, it suggests how hidden that suffering is. The way members of Congress have been falling over one another to demonstrate more vociferous support for Israel is a measure of a political climate not conducive to nuance. This hardly serves America’s interests, which lie in a now infinitely distant peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and will require balanced American mediation.

Something may be shifting. Powerful images of Palestinian suffering on Facebook and Twitter have hit younger Americans. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center found that among Americans age 65 or older, 53 percent blame Hamas for the violence and 15 percent Israel. For those ages 18 to 29, Israel is blamed by 29 percent of those questioned, Hamas by just 21 percent. My son-in-law, a doctor in Atlanta, said that for his social group, mainly professionals in their 30s with young children, it was “impossible to see infants being killed by what sometimes seems like an extension of the U.S. Army without being affected.”

I find myself dreaming of some island in the middle of the Atlantic where the blinding excesses on either side of the water are overcome and a fundamental truth is absorbed: that neither side is going away, that both have made grievous mistakes, and that the fate of Jewish and Palestinian children — united in their innocence — depends on placing the future above the past. That island will no doubt remain as illusory as peace. Meanwhile, on balance, I am pleased to have become a naturalized American.


A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 3, 2014,
on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline:
Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do.

    Why Americans See Israel the Way They Do, NYT, 2.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/opinion/sunday/
    roger-cohen-why-americans-see-israel-the-way-they-do.html

Airstrike Near U.N. School

Kills 10 as Israel Shifts Troops in Gaza

 

AUG. 3, 2014

tHE nEW yORK tIMES

By STEVEN ERLANGER

and FARES AKRAM

JERUSALEM — As Israel began to redeploy significant numbers of its troops away from populated areas of Gaza on Sunday, an Israeli Air Force missile struck near the entrance of a United Nations school sheltering displaced Palestinians in Rafah, killing 10 people and wounding 35 others and drawing a new round of international condemnation.

The growing civilian death toll has stirred outrage in Europe and large parts of the Arab world and, combined with Sunday’s strike near the Rafah school, prompted Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations to call the attack a “moral outrage and a criminal act” and to demand that those responsible for the “gross violation of international humanitarian law” be held accountable.

The State Department also condemned in harsh terms what it called “today’s disgraceful shelling” outside the school in Rafah. Witnesses near the school, where about 3,000 Palestinians had sought shelter, said that those killed or hurt were waiting in line for food supplies when a missile hit. A State Department spokeswoman, Jen Psaki, said that “the suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”

The Israeli Army said that it had targeted with the missile three members of Islamic Jihad on a motorcycle near the school, not the school itself, and was investigating a possible secondary explosion when the motorcycle was hit.

Even as Israel moved unilaterally to reduce military contact with Palestinians on the ground in Gaza, while waiting to see how the militant groups Hamas and Islamic Jihad would respond, it continued to fight around Rafah, near the border with Egypt. On Sunday, 71 Palestinians died, raising the total to 1,822, with 9,370 injured, according to the Palestinian Ministry of Health.

Estimates of the number of Palestinian combatants killed varied widely, with some Israeli officials suggesting that number was more than 700. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said Saturday that of the 1,525 dead Palestinians to that point, “at least 1,033 are civilians, of whom 329 are children and 187 are women.”

On the Israeli side, 64 soldiers and three civilians have died. Israeli officials confirmed Sunday that one of the fallen soldiers was a relative of Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon.

With its stated task of destroying Hamas’s tunnel network into Israel within days of being finished, Israel seemed to be trying to de-escalate the war without negotiating with Hamas, much as it did at the end of the last major Gaza operation, in 2009, when Israel declared a unilateral cease-fire. Large numbers of Israeli troops were moving to positions just inside Gaza, while others were redeploying to Israel.

Early Monday, the Israel Defense Forces announced a “temporary humanitarian window,” or cease-fire, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., though it said it did not apply to areas where soldiers are “currently operating,” like Rafah.

Earlier, Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli Army spokesman, said that there were “substantial redeployments of the troops on the ground who will be regrouping, receiving further orders.” Some forces were still operating inside Gaza, especially around Rafah, he said, and the air force was continuing to bomb Gaza.

“It’s changing gears, but it’s still ongoing,” he said. Israel has never said precisely how many troops are operating in Gaza, only that there are “thousands.”

Mohammed Muafai, who works for the United Nations, said that he was inside the school when the missile hit. In a telephone interview, he said there were bodies on the ground, including two guards and a sanitation worker. He said seven more people from displaced families also died, including one selling flavored ice.

Last Wednesday, 21 Palestinians who sought refuge in a school run by the United Nations in the Jabaliya refugee camp were killed, health ministry officials said, in a series of predawn strikes. The Israeli military has said that it did not target the school and that Palestinian fighters were operating within 200 yards that morning. After an earlier strike on a school serving as a shelter in Beit Hanoun killed 16, the Israelis acknowledged that they fired a mortar round that hit the courtyard, but insisted that it had been empty at the time.

Earlier on Sunday, airstrikes killed at least 30 Palestinians, medics and witnesses said.

Ashraf al-Qedra, a spokesman for the Palestinian Health Ministry, said that nine members of a family were killed in an air attack in Rafah. Earlier Sunday, six Palestinians were killed in separate airstrikes on houses in the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Israel said that 55 rockets were fired from Gaza on Sunday, and that its troops killed eight Hamas fighters in southern Gaza.

Israeli officials on Sunday defended their decision to announce the death of a missing Israeli soldier at 2 a.m., only hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went on national television to say that he had no new information about the case.

Army spokesmen said Sunday that the declaration of the death of the soldier, Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, was made as soon as possible and that DNA tests had been carried out on partial remains. The lieutenant and two colleagues were attacked by a Hamas squad that emerged from a tunnel on Friday, the army said. One of the Hamas fighters had exploded a suicide belt.

“We can’t determine if he was killed on the ground or from the blast,” said Colonel Lerner, the army spokesman. “The indications on the ground are that he was killed in the initial attack.”

He said that the tests had been carried out during the Sabbath because it was an emergency. The relatives of Lieutenant Goldin had made emotional appeals earlier on Saturday, before Mr. Netanyahu spoke, that Israel and its army not leave the lieutenant behind, and they said that they believed he was still alive.

The family buried him on Sunday in an emotional funeral attended by thousands at the military cemetery in Kfar Saba, near Tel Aviv.

Zmira Saar, 65, a nurse, said she attended the funeral to honor Israel’s soldiers. “I came not because of this soldier but to show my pain and thanks to all the soldiers who gave their lives for us” in what she called “a no-choice war.” She said she felt “pain for the children and innocent people in Gaza,” and as a nurse, she said, “it is an ongoing pain” for all “the children that we bury here.”

Hamas’s military wing, while taking responsibility for the operation, said Saturday that it had no information about the lieutenant and had lost contact with its squad, suggesting that all involved were dead.

Lieutenant Goldin is a relative of Mr. Yaalon, the defense minister. Mr. Yaalon’s grandfather and the grandmother of the lieutenant’s father were brother and sister. Mr. Yaalon lectured at Lieutenant Goldin’s school.

Israel’s military censor had blocked publication of that detail of their family relationship until the death was announced Sunday, concerned that Hamas might try to profit from that knowledge. International journalists must agree in writing to comply with the censorship system to work in Jerusalem; Friday was the first time in more than six years that the censor had contacted The New York Times.

Later Sunday, Mr. Yaalon posted on Twitter in Hebrew: “Hadar Goldin of blessed memory was a member of my family. I have known him since he was born. He and I.D.F. fighters who fell went to battle to return the quiet and the security to Israel. I embrace the families.”
 

Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Fares Akram from Gaza. Jodi Rudoren and Rina Castelnuovo contributed reporting from Kfar Saba, Israel.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: MISSILE STRIKE NEAR U.N. SCHOOL IN GAZA KILLS 10;

    Airstrike Near U.N. School Kills 10 as Israel Shifts Troops in Gaza,
    NYT, 3.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html

Missing Soldier Killed in Battle,

Israel Confirms

 

AUG. 2, 2014

The New York Times

By STEVEN ERLANGER

and JODI RUDOREN

JERUSALEM — The Israeli military said early Sunday morning that an officer thought to have been captured by Palestinian militants during a deadly clash Friday morning, which shattered a planned 72-hour cease-fire, was now considered to have been killed in battle.

The announcement came just hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to continue Israel’s military campaign in the Gaza Strip as long as necessary to stop Hamas attacks, while suggesting a de-escalation of the ground war in Gaza may be near.

The case of the missing soldier, Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, became the latest flash point in the conflict, prompting a fierce Israeli bombardment and calls from leaders around the world for his release. His disappearance came after Hamas militants ambushed Israeli soldiers near the southern border town of Rafah, at the start of what was supposed to have been a pause in the fighting.

As the death toll mounted Saturday to more than 1,650 Palestinians, many of them women and children, and images of homes, mosques and schools smashed into rubble filled the media, Mr. Netanyahu was under considerable international pressure, from Washington and Europe, to end the conflict. The United Nations warned of “an unfolding health disaster” in Gaza with little electricity, bad water and a lack of medical supplies.

At the same time, Mr. Netanyahu was under political pressure at home to deliver on his promises to crush Hamas, particularly with 64 Israeli soldiers dead. He insisted Saturday that Hamas had been severely hurt and he warned that it would pay “an intolerable price” if it continues to fire rockets at Israel.

His former deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, who was fired by Mr. Netanyahu for public criticism of the government, said in a statement Saturday that “the cabinet is gravely mistaken in its decision to withdraw forces from Gaza. This is a step in the wrong direction.”

But Mr. Netanyahu, in a nationally televised speech with his defense minister beside him, insisted that Israel was achieving its goals and could alter its tactics. “We promised to return the quiet to Israel’s citizens, and we will continue to act until that aim is achieved,” Mr. Netanyahu said. “We will take as much time as necessary, and will exert as much force as needed.”

Israel was not ending its operation unilaterally, he said, adding: “We will deploy in the places most convenient to us to reduce friction on I.D.F. soldiers, because we care about them.” There were Israeli television reports on Saturday that some Israel Defense Forces troops were pulling out of Gaza, and Israel informed Palestinians in Beit Lahiya and al-Atatra, in northern Gaza, that it was now safe to return to their homes. Israeli officials have said that the army’s effort to destroy the elaborate tunnel system from Gaza into Israel would be finished in the next day or two.

Israeli officials suggested that the army would leave built-up areas and some forces would redeploy inside Gaza, closer to the border fence, to respond to attacks if necessary. Other units will return to southern Israel.
Continue reading the main story

Hamas, for its part, vowed to continue fighting. Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, told the news agency Maan that “a unilateral withdrawal or redeployment by Israel in the Strip will be answered by a fitting response by the Hamas military arm.” He said that “the forces of occupation must choose between remaining in Gaza and paying the price or retreating and paying the price or holding negotiations and paying the price.”

Mr. Netanyahu thanked the United States, which along with the United Nations appeared to support Israel’s position that Hamas’s actions violated the cease-fire, and he asked for international help to rebuild Gaza on the condition of its “demilitarization.” Israel appears to be hoping that with the support of Egypt and the international community, President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority can control Gaza through a unity government agreed upon with Hamas and take responsibility for security there and for the Rafah crossing to Egypt.

Mr. Netanyahu repeated that his goal was to restore “peace and calm” to Israel and that he intended to do so by whatever means — diplomatically or militarily. “All options are on the table,” he said. But he indicated that Israel would not get caught up again in talk about a negotiated cease-fire with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and would act in its own interests, while seeking support from Mr. Abbas and the international community for what Mr. Netanyahu described vaguely as “a new reality” in Gaza.

Israel has decided not to send a delegation to cease-fire talks hosted by Egypt, at least not now, Israeli officials said. In Washington, Jen Psaki, a State Department spokeswoman, said: “In the end, this particularly bloody chapter will ultimately require a durable solution so that all the fundamental issues, including Israel’s security, can be negotiated, and we will keep working with Israel and other partners to achieve that goal.” She said that Israel had a right to defend itself.

Similarities and differences in the last three major conflicts between Israel and Hamas.

Hours before the military announced that Lieutenant Goldin had died, his parents called on the prime minister and the army not to leave their son behind.

The circumstances surrounding his death remained cloudy. A military spokeswoman declined to say whether Lieutenant Goldin had been killed along with two comrades by a suicide bomb one of the militants exploded, or later by Israel’s assault on the area to hunt for him; she also refused to answer whether his remains had been recovered.
Continue reading the main story

As word spread on Saturday that Israel’s leaders were considering pulling all ground forces from Gaza, Lieutenant Goldin’s family spoke to journalists outside their home in Kfar Saba, a Tel Aviv suburb. “I demand that the state of Israel not leave Gaza until they bring my son back home,” said his mother, Hedva. His sister, Ayelet, 35, added, “If a captive soldier is left in Gaza, it’s a defeat.”

The family said they were convinced that Lieutenant Goldin was alive.

“I hope and believe in human kindness, that the world will do anything to bring Hadar with a smile back home,” his brother Chemi, 32, said in an interview.

When his mother called him on Friday, Chemi said, he knew something terrible had happened, but did not know whether it involved Lieutenant Goldin or his twin, Tzur, who was also fighting in Gaza. Chemi said the twins, who attended kindergarten in Cambridge, England, did not talk much about their military service. In Gaza, the armed wing of Hamas said early Saturday that it was not holding the Israeli officer. The Qassam Brigades suggested in a statement that the officer might have been killed along with his captors in an Israeli assault that followed a suicide-bomb attack by Palestinian militants, who emerged from a tunnel that Israeli troops were trying to destroy near Rafah.

“Until now, we have no idea about the disappearance of the Israeli soldier,” the statement said. Saying the leadership had lost touch with its “troops deployed in the ambush,” the statement added, “Our account is that the soldier could have been kidnapped and killed together with our fighters.”

The Israeli Army continued to pound Rafah in its search for Lieutenant Goldin, striking more than 200 targets across Gaza in the 24 hours since the Rafah confrontation, including what it described as a “research and development” lab for weapons manufacturing at the Islamic University, run by Hamas. Five mosques that the military said concealed weapons or Hamas outposts were also hit, the Israelis said.

Around noon, a barrage of rockets flew into southern Israel.

The Gaza-based health ministry, which had reported 70 people killed in Rafah on Friday, said the casualties had continued there overnight, including seven members of one family who died when their home was bombed.

 

Steven Erlanger reported from Jerusalem, and Jodi Rudoren from Kfar Saba, Israel. Fares Akram contributed reporting from Gaza City, and Michael R. Gordon from Washington.

A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Missing Soldier Killed in Battle, Israel Confirms.

    Missing Soldier Killed in Battle, Israel Confirms, NYT, 2.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html

This Time, a Different Kind of War

Between Israel and Hamas

 

AUG. 1, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Quick History

By SERGE SCHMEMANN

THE collapse of a 72-hour cease-fire in the Gaza fighting only two hours after it began marked a new phase in the violence, as the reported capture of an Israeli officer by Hamas gave the Palestinian militants a powerful bargaining lever and fired an all-out effort by Israel to get its soldier back.

One of Israel’s cardinal principles is to do everything possible to secure the release of any captured Israeli. The last Israeli soldier to be captured by Hamas, Gilad Shalit, was freed after more than five years of captivity in exchange for 1,027 Palestinian and other prisoners.

The latest development added to the maze of political struggles around the Gaza fighting — among Arabs, among American factions, between Israel and Washington — that had already severely constrained Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to mediate a cease-fire.

In other major developments of the past week, the C.I.A.’s inspector general found that C.I.A. officers had hacked computers of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The internal report confirmed charges leveled by Senator Dianne Feinstein last March, prompting a furious outcry from many senators on both sides of the divide.

On the Ukrainian front, Russia began to take stock of serious economic sanctions against its banking, energy and military sectors ordered by the European Union and the United States. Though long reluctant to take action that would hurt their own economies, the Europeans were galvanized into action by Russia’s cynical response to the downing of a Malaysian jet by the secessionist rebels the Kremlin actively supports in eastern Ukraine.

 

A New Calculus

This miniwar between Israel and Hamas is very different from previous ones.

A central difference is in the way the “Arab spring” has altered the political calculations of the Arab states and their feelings toward Hamas. Egypt, now back under military rulers hostile to Islamists, along with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf autocracies, have not-so-secretly welcomed Israel’s campaign to crush Hamas. That has reduced the ranks of mediators Washington can draw on to lean on the Islamic militants. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader in the West Bank, has little sway over Hamas, despite a purported political alliance formed in April; the United Nations, which joined Washington in seeking a cease-fire, has no credibility with Israel after decades of lopsided votes against the Jewish state. So Mr. Kerry has been compelled to work through Qatar and Turkey, two states that can still communicate with Hamas.

But Hamas itself has no urgent reason to end the fighting. As in the past, the huge toll in civilian lives, along with the tragic strikes on schools, beaches and homes, have roused an international outcry against Israel. Hamas evidently believes that sustaining the fighting can eventually rouse enough international pressure on Israel to compel it to open Gaza and release Palestinian prisoners.

Israel, for its part, appears convinced that it can crush, or at least severely weaken, Hamas through sanctions and force. Though Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was reluctant to order an incursion into Gaza, since it began he has been intent on continuing long enough to destroy Hamas tunnels and rockets and batter the Hamas leadership. The Israelis, moreover, have succeeded in sharply blunting Hamas’s rockets with the Iron Dome missile defense system, which has intercepted a number of rockets headed for population centers.

It is also no secret that Mr. Netanyahu and President Obama have strained relations, and Mr. Kerry’s mediating efforts have been sharply assailed in Washington for pressing Israel to end its attack. The best Mr. Kerry was able to achieve against these obstacles was a 72-hour cease-fire. Now that has collapsed, and if Second Lt. Hadar Goldin is indeed in the hands of Hamas, it is even more difficult to see how the bloodshed can be stopped.

 

Spy vs. Senator

The acknowledgment by the C.I.A. that its officers had in fact snooped on the computers of a Senate committee investigating the C.I.A.’s controversial “enhanced interrogation” and secret-prisons program under the George W. Bush administration further escalated the feud between Congress and the spy agency. It also led to demands for the ouster of the agency’s director, John O. Brennan.

At the heart of the long-running dispute is a 6,000-page report by the Senate Intelligence Committee that is still classified. But it is known that the report is highly critical of the secret program, and a 600-page summary of the report that is in the process of being declassified is said to conclude that the C.I.A.’s use of methods like waterboarding after 9/11 failed to produce any significant information. The investigation was stormy from the outset, with Republicans withdrawing from the investigation and the C.I.A. disputing many findings.

Last March, Senator Feinstein publicly lashed out at the C.I.A. over its monitoring of her committee’s investigators. On Thursday, the C.I.A. effectively vindicated her when the agency’s inspector general, David B. Buckley, said his investigation found that five agency members “improperly accessed or caused access” to a computer network used by the committee staff.

Mr. Brennan apologized to Senator Feinstein and the ranking Republican on the committee, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. But that was not enough to dispel the anger among lawmakers, who viewed the snooping as a major violation of the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches.

A footnote on the spy front: Edward J. Snowden’s one-year temporary political asylum in Russia ran out on Thursday, and there was no confirmation that it was being extended.

 

Sanctions Galore

On the Ukrainian front, the announcement of stern new sanctions on Tuesday by the European Union and the United States was followed by defiant declarations from Moscow and more fighting in eastern Ukraine. But international inspectors were finally able to reach the site of the Malaysian jetliner that was shot down on July 17.

While insisting that the European Union and American sanctions would not hurt Russia, Moscow contributed to its own sanctions on Ukraine, adding fruit juice to the list of Ukrainian products banned from Russia. A Russian official said sunflower seeds, sunflower oil, soybeans and cornmeal were next on the list.

Correction: August 2, 2014

An earlier version of a picture credit with this article incorrectly attributed the photograph. It is by Charles Dharapak/Associated Press, not Agence France-Presse — Getty Images.

Serge Schmemann is a member of the editorial board of The New York Times.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 3, 2014,
on page SR2 of the New York edition with the headline:
This Time, a Different Kind of War Between Israel and Hamas.

    This Time, a Different Kind of War Between Israel and Hamas,
    NYT, 1.8.2014, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/
    opinion/sunday/this-time-a-different-kind-of-war-between-israel-and-hamas.html
 

Hospitals in Gaza Overwhelmed

as Attacks Continue

 

AUG. 2, 2014

The New York Times

By BEN HUBBARD and FARES AKRAM

RAFAH, Gaza Strip — It was clear from the bodies laid out in the parking lot of the maternity hospital here that it had assumed new duties: No longer a place that welcomed new life, it was now a makeshift morgue.

Other bodies lay in hallways and on the floor of the kitchen at Hilal Emirati Maternity Hospital. In the walk-in cooler, they were stacked three high, waiting for relatives to claim them for burial.

Saturday was the second day of heavy bombardment by Israeli forces on this city on Gaza’s border with Egypt after Israel’s announcement that one of its officers had been captured by Palestinian militants here during a clash.

But early Sunday morning, the Israeli military announced that the officer, Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, was now considered to have been killed in battle.

Israel’s offensive had emptied neighborhoods, shuttered the city’s central hospital and killed more people than its remaining health facilities could keep up with. But for the residents of this dusty city of 150,000 people — until recently famous as the endpoint for hundreds of smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt — the assault had unleashed such a wave of terror and death that Lieutenant Goldin, whose fate was unknown when the assault began on Friday, was scarcely considered.

“It is just an excuse,” said Dr. Abdullah Shehadeh, director of the Abu Yousef al-Najjar Hospital, the city’s largest. “There is no reason for them to force the women and children of Gaza to pay the price for something that happened on the battlefield.”

After two days of Israeli shelling and airstrikes, central Rafah appeared deserted on Saturday, with shops closed and residents hiding in their homes. The presence of Israeli forces east of the city had caused many to flee west, crowding in with friends and relatives in neighborhoods by the Mediterranean.

More than 120 Palestinians were killed in Rafah alone on Friday and Saturday — the deadliest two days in the city since the war began 25 days ago. Those deaths, and hundreds of injuries, overwhelmed the city’s health care facilities.

Making matters worse, Israeli shells hit the central Najjar hospital on Friday afternoon, Dr. Shehadeh said, leading its employees and patients to evacuate.

To continue receiving patients, his staff members moved to the smaller Kuwaiti Specialized Hospital, although it was ill equipped to handle the large number of people seeking care.

Ambulances screamed into the hospital’s parking lot, where medics unloaded cases onto stretchers sometimes bearing the blood of previous patients. Since the hospital had only 12 beds, the staff members had lined up gurneys outside to handle the overflow.

The city’s central hospital had also housed its only morgue, so its closure created a new problem as the casualties mounted: where to put the bodies.

At the Kuwaiti Specialized Hospital, they were put on the floor of the dental ward under a poster promoting dental hygiene. In a back room lay the bodies of Sadiah Abu Taha, 60, and her grandson Rezeq Abu Taha, 1, who had been killed in an airstrike on their home nearby.

Few people approached the main entrance to the pink-and-white maternity hospital, instead heading around back, where there was a constant flow of bodies. Nearly 60 had been left in the morgue of the central hospital when it closed, so ambulance crews who had managed to reach the site brought back as many bodies as they could carry. Other bodies came from new attacks or were recovered from damaged buildings.

New arrivals were laid out in the parking lot or carried down a ramp to the kitchen, featuring a large walk-in cooler. Some were kept on the ground, and those not claimed right away were added to the pile in the cooler.

Word had spread that the dead were at the maternity hospital, so people who had lost relatives came to talk to the medics or look in the cooler for their loved ones.

One short, sunburned man pointed to the body of a woman wearing pink sweatpants and said she was his sister Souad al-Tarabin.

The medics pulled her out, laid her on a table and wrapped her in white cloth and plastic. Some teenagers helped the man carry her body upstairs and lay it in the back of a yellow taxi. A man in the front seat cradled a small bundle containing the remains of the woman’s 4-year-old son, Anas.

Sitting nearby, Asma Abu Jumain waited for the body of her mother-in-law, who she said had been killed the day before and was in the morgue at the central hospital when it was evacuated.

“She is an old woman,” Ms. Abu Jumain said. “She did nothing wrong.”

The movement of bodies made record-keeping impossible, although Arafat Adwan, a hospital volunteer, tried to jot down names in a small red notebook he kept in his pocket.

He worried that some bodies would remain there for days, because families had been scattered and might not know that their relatives had been killed.

“There are people in here whose families have no idea what happened to them,” he said.

Others knew they had lost relatives but could not find them.

Mohammed al-Banna said an airstrike the morning before had killed nine of his in-laws, including his wife’s father and four of her brothers.

“The aggression here is creating a new generation of youth who want revenge for all the crimes,” he said.

He had looked at the central hospital the day before, to no avail. Then, on Saturday, he received a message sent to local cellphones telling those who had lost relatives to retrieve them from the maternity hospital. He had come right away, but had not found them.

“I’ll keep waiting for their bodies to come in so we can take them home and bury them,” he said.

Mr. Banna added that he had been too worried to tell his wife what had happened to her family and wanted to break the news to her gradually. Earlier that day, she had told him that she was starting to worry because her father’s cellphone had been switched off all day.

“I told her maybe he has no electricity and his phone is dead,” Mr. Banna said.

A version of this article appears in print on August 3, 2014,
on page A12 of the New York edition with the headline: Hospitals in Gaza Overwhelmed as Attacks Continue.

    Hospitals in Gaza Overwhelmed as Attacks Continue, NYT, 2.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/03/world/middleeast/
    hospitals-in-gaza-overcrowded-on-second-day-of-heavy-bombardment-
    by-israeli-forces.html

Gaza Fighting Intensifies

as Cease-Fire Falls Apart

AUG. 1, 2014

By JODI RUDOREN

and ISABEL KERSHNER

JERUSALEM — Palestinian militants sprang from the ground and confronted Israeli soldiers Friday morning, as they have repeatedly in recent days. This time, Israeli officials said, one exploded a suicide belt while another unleashed machine-gun fire. This time, two Israeli soldiers were killed and the militants apparently escaped with a third.

The attack, at the start of what was supposed to be a 72-hour pause in the fighting, escalated the deadly 25-day battle between Israel and Hamas, the Islamist faction that dominates the Gaza Strip.

Israel said the attack, from under a house near the southern border town of Rafah, took place at 9:20 a.m., soon after the 8 a.m. onset of the temporary truce secured by the Obama administration and the United Nations, whose leaders squarely blamed the breakdown on Hamas.

Hamas’s account was confused. One leader was quoted claiming responsibility for the soldier’s capture, then backtracked. Others contended that the clash unfolded at 7 a.m., before the cease-fire, although Palestinian reports of fighting near Rafah came three hours later. And one said that in any case, the Hamas gunmen acted only to counter “Zionist incursions.”

What was clear was that the episode dimmed prospects for curtailing a conflict that has killed more than 1,600 Palestinians, many of them women and children, and plunged Gaza into a humanitarian crisis. Israel responded with an assault that killed 70 people and injured 350 around Rafah alone as troops sealed the area to hunt for the missing officer amid mounting pressure from Israeli politicians and the public to expand the military mission.

The deadly attack and counterattack sharpened a sense that intensive diplomacy is proving ineffective and irrelevant to the asymmetrical combat on the ground. Secretary of State John Kerry had made clear in announcing the cease-fire that Israel would be allowed to continue operating against tunnels from Gaza into its territory, something one Hamas spokesman indicated Friday was contrary to “the Palestinian understanding with mediating parties.”

The events renewed command-and-control questions about Hamas, a guerrilla group torn by rivalries and communication snags between its military and political rulers in Gaza and abroad. They also suggested neither side is ready for an exit ramp until its goals are met: for Israel, destruction of the tunnels and a halt to rocket fire from Gaza, and for Hamas, a score that can be leveraged to change the social and economic conditions of Gaza’s 1.7 million beleaguered people.

“It’s going to be very hard to put a cease-fire back together again if Israelis and the international community can’t feel confident that Hamas can follow through,” President Obama said on Friday at the White House. He called the killing of civilians in Gaza “heartbreaking” and said, “It’s possible we may be able to arrive at a formula that spares lives and also ensures Israel’s security, but it’s difficult, and I don’t think we should pretend otherwise.”

Both Mr. Kerry and Ban Ki-moon, the secretary general of the United Nations, demanded an immediate and unconditional release of the Israeli officer. Mr. Ban described the attack as “a grave violation of the cease-fire” that called “into question the credibility of Hamas’s assurances to the United Nations.”

Israeli fears about kidnapping have been palpable since Hamas fighters used a tunnel under the border to enter Israeli territory near a kibbutz outside Gaza on July 17. Later that night, Israel launched a ground invasion to accompany the air campaign that began on July 8. Several similar attempts to infiltrate Israel have been thwarted; after one, Israel found plastic hand-ties and tranquilizers. For Hamas, which in 2006 abducted Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit and five years later traded him for more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails, a live hostage is perhaps its most powerful weapon.

After an intense predawn battle in the Gaza City neighborhood of Shejaiya on July 20, Hamas announced that it had captured Staff Sgt. Oron Shaul and broadcast his identification number, prompting celebrations across Gaza and the West Bank. Israel later said Sergeant Shaul had been killed in action, but no remains had been recovered.

Israeli military officials said they were uncertain of the condition of the officer captured on Friday. They identified him as Second Lt. Hadar Goldin, 23, of the elite Givati Brigade. Lieutenant Goldin has a twin brother who until Friday was also fighting at the front, according to Israeli news reports, and he had proposed to his girlfriend during the war, scheduling the wedding in two months.

His father, Simcha Goldin, said the family was confident the Israeli military would “not stop under any circumstances until they have turned over every stone in Gaza and have brought Hadar home healthy and whole.”

Israel’s military censor informed The New York Times that material related to the missing officer had to be submitted for review, the first such notification in more than six years. International journalists must agree in writing to the censorship system in order to work in Israel. The Times did not send the censor a draft of this article before publication, but summarized over the phone its biographical references to Lieutenant Goldin.

The attack near Rafah brought to 63 the number of Israeli service members slain; two citizens and a Thai farmworker have also been felled by rocket and mortar fire. The military said more than 60 rockets had been launched by 8 p.m. Friday from Gaza, bringing the total during the conflict to 3,025.

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, an Israeli military spokesman, said the Givati force had been working to decommission a tunnel under a home inside Gaza more than an hour into the cease-fire when at least two Palestinians emerged from another shaft. “One came out shooting after the other one blew himself up,” Colonel Lerner said. “We were in defensive positions. They clearly abused the situation to carry out the attack, under the cover of the humanitarian window.”

Israel sent text messages to area residents to remain in their homes as forces rushed farther into Rafah, bombarding it from the ground and air to block the captors’ escape.

Safa, a Gaza-based news agency that has run a live blog during the war, first reported artillery fire in Rafah at 9:55 a.m. The Health Ministry spokesman announced new fatalities there at 10:10 a.m. The Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing, issued a statement hours later, denying that the clash occurred after the cease-fire, but also suggesting it may not have truly accepted the terms.

“We emphasize that any Zionist forces violating our liberated land would be subject to our holy fighters and a legitimate target,” the statement said.

Separately, Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said, “According to the Palestinian understanding with mediating parties, it is important for the resistance to defend our people, and itself, in the case of any renewed Israeli incursions.”

Mkhaimer Abusaada, a political scientist at Al-Azhar University in Gaza City, said that the military wing may have been purposely defying the political team’s accession to the agreement, or at least saying that if the Israelis were allowed to keep destroying tunnels, Hamas should be permitted to try to stop them.

“It’s definitely a mess,” he said. “I think we’re going to see much worse days than those that are behind us.”

The escalation was strong and sustained, with reports in Rafah of airstrikes and heavy artillery shelling past midnight, as Israel’s top ministers met for hours to consider next steps. Colonel Lerner said the operation “now has three components, not two: it’s rockets, tunnels and an abduction now.”

Daniel Nisman, a former combat soldier who now runs a Tel Aviv geopolitical security company, said Israeli troops are taught that preventing an abduction is the highest priority, even if it means risking a captive soldier’s life by firing at a getaway vehicle. Protocol changed after Sergeant Shalit’s capture, Mr. Nisman said, “so a low-level commander on the ground can act” without awaiting orders, which had delayed action in that case.

“It’s to prevent a strategic setback that would ultimately impact the entire county,” he explained. “It sounds terrible, but you have to consider it within the framework of the Shalit deal. That was five years of torment for this country, where every newscast would end with how many days Shalit had been in captivity. It’s like a wound that just never heals.”

But some Israeli analysts noted that Sergeant Shalit, who was then a corporal, was taken from Israeli territory during a calm period, while Lieutenant Goldin should be considered a prisoner of war, a potential cost of any military campaign.

Still, Michael Herzog, a retired general and Israel-based fellow of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said any cease-fire discussions would be off the agenda until more information emerges about the officer’s situation.

“Right now, decision-making is more tactical by nature, until we have a better feel or clue of what exactly happened to him — is he really in their hands or not,” Mr. Herzog said.

“This complicates everything,” he added. “I don’t think we are in for any more so-called humanitarian cease-fires unless we see on the ground that they are holding their fire.”

Reporting was contributed by Fares Akram from Gaza, Peter Baker from Washington, Michael R. Gordon from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, and Somini Sengupta from the United Nations.

A version of this article appears in print on August 2, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls.

    Gaza Fighting Intensifies as Cease-Fire Falls Apart, NYT, 1.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/02/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html

Destroyed buildings in front of a mosque in Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip.

Marco Longari/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Airstrike Near U.N. School Kills 10, Gaza Officials Say

By STEVEN ERLANGER and FARES AKRAM        NYT        AUG. 3, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/04/world/middleeast/israel-gaza-conflict.html