Category Archives: Human Rights Violations United Nations

Hillary Fails with Myanmar, 1000’s Coming Here

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Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have visited Burma (Myanmar), Hillary in 2011 and Barack in 2014. Clearly, this country is not a diplomatic achievement for either of them.

The U.S. has not had any contact or relations with Myanmar in 50 years.

The promise of a free and democratic Myanmar is rapidly receding as sectarian violence escalates and the government backslides on a number of past reforms. That’s causing genuine alarm on Capitol Hill among lawmakers from both parties. The House Foreign Affairs Committee unanimously passed a resolution this week calling on Myanmar’s government to respect the human rights of all minority groups in the country and end the persecution of the Rohingya people, an essentially stateless and largely Muslim ethnic group that has been singled out by both Rakhine Buddhists and the government of Myanmar.

“As the government of Burma transitions from decades-long military rule to a civilian government, it is important to hold them accountable for persistent human rights abuses,” New York Congressman Eliot Engel, the most senior Democrat on the House panel, said Tuesday.
What happens in Myanmar has implications for Clinton as she prepares for a potential presidential bid for the White House in 2016. Until now, the Myanmar portfolio has been widely viewed as the “one clear-cut triumph” of her tenure as secretary of state — a tenure in danger of being viewed as underwhelming and overly cautious when compared to that of her successor, John Kerry, who has taken on the Gordian knot of the Mideast peace process.

Now, as the civilian regime that replaced Myanmar’s military junta embraces increasingly brutal tactics against Muslim minority populations, the jewel in the crown of Clinton’s tenure risks vanishing into thin air. “Things have gone from bad to worse,” said Tom Andrews, president of United to End Genocide, a group that monitors violence between Buddhists and Muslims in the country.

Since Oct. 1, the U.S. has resettled more than 1,000 Rohingya

(WASHINGTON) — The United States is willing to take in Rohingya refugees as part of international efforts to cope with Southeast Asia’s stranded boat people, the State Department said Wednesday.

Spokeswoman Marie Harf said that the U.S. is prepared to take a leading role in any multicountry effort, organized by the United Nations refugee agency, to resettle the most vulnerable refugees.

BANGKOK (AP) — The decision by Indonesia and Malaysia to give temporary shelter to thousands of migrants stranded at sea appears to have defused a potential Southeast Asian humanitarian catastrophe, but the root causes of the crisis remain. Here’s a look at still-unanswered questions surrounding the Rohingya Muslim migrants who are persecuted at home in Myanmar and have found scant welcome anywhere else.
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A FIRST STEP, BUT WHAT’S NEXT?
The Indonesian-Malaysian offer to shelter migrants for up to a year was hailed as a breakthrough, and marks a major reversal after navies from the two countries and Thailand pushed boatloads of desperate migrants away. But it is just the first of many steps needed to solve the crisis. Groups such as the International Organization of Migration say time is running out for vessels still at sea and call for countries to urgently launch operations to find and rescue drifting boats believed to be crammed with people in need of food, water and medical treatment.
HOW MANY MIGRANTS ARE THERE?
Nobody knows, but the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR estimated as of Thursday that more than 3,000 could still be at sea.
“Having said that, there could be more that we don’t know about,” Bangkok-based UNHCR spokeswoman Vivian Tan said.
When the crisis first came to international attention early this month, aid agencies estimated 6,000 or more migrants were abandoned on boats after a regional crackdown on human trafficking prompted smugglers to flee. Since then more than 3,000 ethnic Rohingya Muslims and Bangladeshis have landed in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.
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HOW MANY BOATS ARE AT SEA?
This is another mystery. Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak tweeted Thursday that he had ordered the navy and coast guard to comb the sea to look for stranded migrants, becoming the first country to announce it will actively search for refugees instead of waiting for them to wash up on the region’s shores. Navy chief Abdul Aziz Jaafar said it has deployed four vessels, and three helicopters and three other vessels are on standby. Thailand and Indonesia have not announced any similar operations to search their sections of the Andaman Sea. The countries have also expressed concerns that offering temporary shelter could encourage an exodus of even more refugees.
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WHAT HAPPENS IN A YEAR?
Malaysia and Indonesia have made clear that their offer to house migrants is temporary. Both said their hospitality expires in one year. It is unclear what happens after that. Indonesian Vice President Jusuf Kalla said his government is ready to shelter Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar, while Bangladeshis would be sent back home. “A year is (the) maximum,” he said. “There should be international cooperation.” Malaysia has set the same time limit, saying in a joint statement that the international community must take responsibility for repatriating or resettling the migrants in third countries within that period.
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“THE ROOT CAUSE” AND THE R-WORD
Southeast Asian governments say the key to solving the migrant crisis is addressing the “the root cause” — which is code for Myanmar. The Rohingya Muslim minority has been boarding rickety boats to escape Myanmar for years due to state-sanctioned discrimination in the predominantly Buddhist country where they are openly despised. They are denied citizenship, have limited access to education and medical care and cannot practice their religion freely. The Rohingya have faced repeated outbreaks of violence, the latest of which have been occurring since 2012, with hundreds killed and 140,000 displaced. So they try to flee abroad, most hoping to reach Muslim-majority Malaysia in search of jobs and security. Myanmar has said it does not want to be blamed for the problem but agreed Thursday to join regional talks on the crisis to be held in Bangkok next week. Observers are eager to see how the countries will discuss the issue, given the Myanmar government’s distaste for the word “Rohingya,” which is taboo in Myanmar, where they are referred to as Bengalis — migrants from neighboring Bangladesh — even though many have lived in Myanmar for generations.

U.S. Ships 1000 missiles to Iraq, Palmyra Falls

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Islamic State now controls half of the Syrian territory. Control of Palmyra, a 2000 year old archeological site which predates Islam is in the hands of less than 1000 Islamic State fighters.

Palmyra is also the site of a prison and a military air base along with an Assad regime intelligence center. An estimated 65,000 residents of Palmyra are in peril as under 2000 have been able to flee.

Inside Palmyra, the Ancient City ISIS Just Sacked

Hours after the terror group grabbed its second city in a week, Palmyra was pitch-black and silent. But residents are bracing for bloody reprisals—and the destruction of historic sites.
by: Michael Weiss

Palmyra holds a dual significance to Syrians as being home to some of the world’s most celebrated ruins and one of the Assad regime’s most feared detention and torture facilities. Both, as it happens, will gain new prominence in the days ahead, as ISIS has just swept through the desert tableland, sacking its second city in the course of a week in which a few hundreds of its militants stormed Ramadi, the provincial capital of al-Anbar, largely uncontested by skedaddling Iraqi Security Forces. That sacking put ISIS in firm control of strategic foothold some 70 miles north of Baghdad, and well within striking distance of the Iraqi capital, where suicide and car bombings have spiked recently.

Similarly, the taking of Palmyra puts ISIS on a theoretically straight trajectory for mounting an incursion into Homs—once the cradle of Syria’s revolution and now mostly retaken by the Assad regime—and then possibly onto Damascus, where the terror organization had briefly conquered the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp last month. The loss of Palmyra is a clear threat to Syria’s cultural patrimony, consisting as it does of the standing remnants of 2,000 year-old temples and tombs, because of ISIS’s designation of “idolatrous” pre-Islamic art and architecture—or anything too big for ISIS to hawk on the black market—as worthy only of powdering.

“The fighting is putting at risk one of the most significant sites in the Middle East,” Irina Bokova, the director-general of UNESCO, said in a statement, while Syria’s chief of antiquities, Mamoun Abdulkarim, told AFP that many statues and artifacts in Palmyra’s museum been relocated already but that immovable monuments were now helpless.

The same can practically be said for the evaporated Syrian army. So desperate were Assad’s troops that they resorted to freeing Palmyra’s prisoners to get them to fortify the city in a last-ditch and pathetically unsuccessful attempt to hang on, one local resident told The Daily Beast.

According to Khaled Omran, a member of the Palmyra’s anti-Assad Coordinating Committee, the regime tried to reinforce its collapsing front lines Wednesday with detainees from the notorious Tadmour Prison. Most, however, ran away from the ISIS onslaught rather than stay and fight for their jailers. “I saw about 10 busloads of prisoners being driven to the front,” Omran said Wednesday evening via Skype. “Maybe 1,000 men.” They added to the regime’s “thousands” of soldiers and forcibly conscripted tribal militias who were used, in Omran’s words, as “cannon fodder.”

Assad’s military were stationed throughout the city and its outlying districts, which are home to several security installations, including an important airbase that Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has used in the past to deliver resupplies to its overstretched and attrited ally, and the Syrian air force has used to wage sorties on mostly civilian and non-ISIS targets in the war-torn country. However, the use of prisoners to defend against ISIS stands as an interesting contrast to how the terror army did the jailbreaking in Ramadi earlier in the week in order to swell their own ranks.

“Four days ago, ISIS started their preparations to storm” Palmyra, Omran explained. “Regime forces called in reinforcements, mainly to the military security branch and the citadel, but relied heavily on their air force. The number of ISIS fighters was quite small—they were in the hundreds. They weren’t very heavily equipped, save for antiaircraft guns mounted on trucks in six positions around the city.” These rudimentary air defenses were enough to deter to the fighter planes and attack helicopters. “I didn’t see them down any jets, but the guns were enough to deter most of the aerial assaults.”

Video footage uploaded by activists does show what appear to be some aerial bombing.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition-linked monitor, claimed that the regime withdrew or evacuated its forces on Wednesday, though Omran insisted that many of these also deserted because of fear of inevitable ISIS atrocities, such as beheadings, photographs of which were circulated on social media as the militants invaded in a now characteristic form of psychological warfare. “Regime troops were fleeing left and right,” he said. “Most of the senior Alawite officers in the army fled earlier and left their men—Sunnis—to their own devices.” Assad’s forces also evidently pulled away from the phosphate mines abutting the main M3 highway system, theoretically giving ISIS a straight shot to Homs and Damascus.

If Omran’s account is true, it would signal a uncanny replay of another ignominious regime defeat in August 2014, at Tabqa Airbase in the eastern province of Raqqa, when ISIS seized the installation and captured or executed hundreds of Syrian soldiers, some of whose heads were cut off and stuck on pikes. A video later posted online by Assad loyalists accused the regime of treason after Syrian generals reassured their rank-and-file that helicopters were en route to deliver 50 tons of ammunition and resupplies when in fact those aircraft turned up only to spirit away the generals, leaving the rank-and-file to perish. The video also accused Syrian Information Minister Omran al-Zoubi of covering up this betrayal of Syrian soldiers and led many pro-Assad activists to begin to seriously question the competence and willingness of the dictator to combat terrorism.

Mohammed Ghanem, the director of government relations at the Washington D.C.-based Syrian American Council, said he could not understand how an imminent ISIS advance wasn’t stopped by either regime or coalition aircraft. “We are mystified as to how ISIS columns with hundreds of fighters were able to traverse the Syrian desert and reach Palmyra without suffering a single air raid,” he told The Daily Beast. “The areas between ISIS-controlled cities and Palmyra are sparsely populated, and any significant military convoy should have been extremely easy to spot. Yet neither Assad nor the coalition conducted raids against ISIS.”

For now, Palmyra remains “calm,” but the mood is undeniable anxious. The departing army destroyed the electrical transformers, Omran said, bathing the ancient city in darkness. Batteries are being used to power computers, but Internet access is spotty. Another source of concern is regime propaganda after the withdrawal: State television has made false claims that Damascus evacuated all of Palmyra’s civilians before its men withdrew. “We’re worried that this was to lay the groundwork for an imminent bombing raid that will make no distinction between Daesh and us,” Omran said, using the derogatory Arabic word for ISIS.

Word on the street is that ISIS has already begun its barbarous counterintelligence work, claiming to have compiled a list of regime agents and sympathizers—a number that, in its view, includes opposition activists opposed to both Assad and ISIS. “The search is on for them,” Omran said.

How were the city’s some 50,000 residents coping, less than 24 hours into ISIS rule? “There’s almost no movement inside the city itself,” he said. “ISIS didn’t introduce a curfew yet, but there’s no one on the street, so you’d think there was one.”

And the mood? “Some people have resigned to their fate,” Omran said. “Most of the key services have been shut down. The bakery has run out of flour. The regime shut the lights. People are fearful. They’re not sure what tomorrow holds.”

The Buzzwords are Refugee and Asylum

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UN pushes for migrants to be called refugees

In part: SAN JOSE, Costa Rica (AP) — United Nations officials are pushing for many of the Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. to be treated as refugees displaced by armed conflict, a designation meant to increase pressure on the United States and Mexico to accept tens of thousands of people currently ineligible for asylum.

Officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees say they hope to see movement toward a regional agreement on that status Thursday when migration and interior department representatives from the U.S., Mexico, and Central America meet in Nicaragua. The group will discuss updating a 30-year-old declaration regarding the obligations that nations have to aid refugees.

Sure there are thousands and in some cases millions that have fled their home country over brutal regimes, civil wars, disease, lack of economic opportunity and to perhaps incite attacks and terrorism in other countries.

U.N. Calls on Western Nations to Shelter Syrian Refugees

With Syria’s neighbors increasingly shutting their borders to refugees and thousands trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in search of safety, the war in Syria is creating the worst global refugee crisis in decades, putting new pressure on the United States and other Western countries to open their doors — and in turn, prompting domestic political backlash.

Not since the wave of people who fled Southeast Asia after the war in Vietnam have the world’s industrialized countries been under such intense pressure to share the burden of taking in refugees, experts say. Nor has the task of offering sanctuary been so politically fraught.

The United States is scheduled to take in its largest group of Syrian refugees to date — up to 2,000 by the fall of this year, compared with a total of about 700 since the civil war in Syria began four years ago, according to the State Department.

Here is a disturbing fact, the work that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees division does for refugees and asylees does NOT collaborate with U.S. agencies as they claim, unless it is on an exceptional basis. They maintain a database of applications and fingerprints that is not integrated or actually shared for background checks.

UNHCR seeks to contribute to informed decision-making and public debate by providing accurate, relevant and up-to-date statistics. As such, the Statistical Online Population Database provides data and trends on the “Population of concern to UNHCR”: refugees, asylum-seekers, returned refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) protected/assisted by UNHCR, returned IDPs, stateless persons, and others of concern to UNHCR, in more than 180 countries.

In a single electronic platform, UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database is bringing together for analysis and comparison standardized data on UNHCR’s population of concern at country, regional, and global levels.

The database is work-in-progress and will be updated on an ongoing basis. Currently, data up to 31 December 2012 can be downloaded from the Statistical Online Population Database. Some of the statistics contained in the Statistical Online Population Database, in particular the ones for 2012 should be considered provisional and subject to change. Some data in the database may differ from statistics published previously due to retroactive changes or the inclusion of previously unavailable data.

 

‘All data refer to the number of individuals with the exception of asylum-seekers in the United States of America, where figures are available only for the number of cases (which may include several individuals) submitted to the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS). However, applications submitted to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) of the United States department of Justice are recorded as individuals.’

‘A combination of armed conflict, deterioration of security or humanitarian situation and human rights concerns in a number of countries – notably the Syrian Arab Republic – have been among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among the main reasons for the sharp increase in the number of asylum-seekers registered among industrialized countries during 2014.’  Full document here. (It is a must read).

Sample application for asylum:

Note the cost of security weakness and lack of full collaboration:

Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. There were significant security weaknesses in the Saudi government’s issuance of Saudi passports in the period when the visas to the hijackers were issued. Two of the Saudi 9/11 hijackers may have obtained their passports legitimately or illegitimately with the help of a family member who worked in the passport office.

 

 

 

Financial Structure of ISIS and a Phone App

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Follow the money, we know where it comes from and where it goes. Islamic State uses the same mafia model, theft, extortion, payment for protection, winning the hearts and minds and then a phone app. Personally I had a gut feeling that there was a Russian component and well, there is…

This also creates a couple of extra issues. Will anyone challenge Russia to stop the app technology and is the West willing to compete with ISIS financially, meaning more than $2 million per day?

ISIS Finances Are Strong

By SARAH ALMUKHTAR

The Islamic State has revenue and assets that are more than enough to cover its current expenses despite expectations that airstrikes and falling oil prices would hurt the group’s finances, according to analysts at RAND Corporation, a nonprofit that researches public policy.

ISIS Relies on Extortion and Taxation

The Islamic State takes in more than $1 million per day in extortion and taxation. Salaries of Iraqi government employees are taxed up to 50 percent, adding up to at least $300 million last year; companies may have their contracts and revenue taxed up to 20 percent. As other revenue streams have stalled, like banks and oil, the Islamic State has adjusted these rates to make taxation a larger portion of its income.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major revenue sources in 2014

$600 mil.

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$500 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$100 mil.

Oil

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major revenue sources in 2014

$600 mil.

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$500 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$100 mil.

Oil

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

ISIS’ estimated assets as of

the fall of Mosul in June 2014

$875 mil.

ISIS’ estimated major

revenue sources in 2014

Extortion and taxation in Iraq

$600 mil.

Stolen from state-owned banks in Iraq

$500 mil.

Oil

$100 mil.

Kidnapping ransoms

$20 mil.

Oil Is Not the Main Source of Cash

The Islamic State’s oil infrastructure, especially refineries, has been targeted by the United States-led airstrikes. Oil revenue has fallen to about $2 million per week, but the group is not dependent on oil income. Much of the production is used for its own fuel. Past oil sales show that the Islamic State was already selling oil at deep discounts that fluctuated between local markets — for instance, selling oil for less in Kirkuk than in Mosul.

Smoke is seen rising from the Baiji oil refinery on April 18, 2015, during ongoing clashes for control.

A U.S. airstrike on the Islamic State-controlled Mayadin modular oil refinery in Syria on Sept. 24, 2014.
The New York Times|Sources: NASA/USGS Landsat, U.S. Central Command

ISIS Invests in People, Not Infrastructure

The largest expenditure is salaries, which is estimated to be between $3 million and $10 million every month. The Islamic State also invests in police-state institutions, such as committees, media, courts, and market regulation, but provides relatively few services. The group avoids investment in infrastructure because it can be an easy target for attacks, and the territory it holds can change quickly.

Islamic State fighters stand guard at a checkpoint in in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Reuters

ISIS Keeps Its Costs Low

The group minimizes costs by looting military equipment, appropriating land and infrastructure, and paying relatively low salaries. The group also limits its vulnerability by shifting operations, transitioning between expanding its territory and fueling terrorist activity. The Islamic State’s loss of ground in Tikrit last month, for example, has not stopped it from launching attacks in other parts of Iraq and Syria and taking the Iraqi city of Ramadi this weekend.

Islamic State fighters march in the Syrian city of Raqqa in an image posted on a militant website on Jan. 14, 2014. Uncredited/Militant Website, via Associated Press

Now for that phone app…

IS Militants Use Popular Russian Web Payment System To Raise Cash

A  group of Islamic State (IS) militants from Russia’s North Caucasus region are using the popular Russian QIWI wallet electronic payment system to raise money online.

The group’s use of the QIWI wallet sheds light on how individual factions within IS carry out their own fundraising and outreach, and shows that this particular group has managed to raise cash openly using mainstream resources in Russia even though Moscow has banned IS and donating money to it illegal.

The militants involved in the fundraising are doing so through an unofficial Russian-language IS media activist group, ShamToday, which mostly comprises people from the North Caucasus who are with IS in Syria and Iraq.

ShamToday is closely associated with the Chechen-led IS fighting faction Katibat al-Aqsa, a group known to have been close to IS’s military commander in Syria, Umar al-Shishani.

A key ShamToday figure, a Chechen militant named Ilyas Deniev, was killed last month in clashes in Baiji in Iraq.

Another figure associated with the group is a prominent social media activist who goes by the name Murad Atajev. It is thought that Atajev, who maintains accounts on Facebook and VKontakte, operates out of Turkey.

ShamToday first emerged in 2013 on Russia’s VKontakte social-networking website, where the group initially had its own dedicated page. Since VKontakte banned its page several months ago as part of a crackdown on pro-IS propaganda, ShamToday has shifted to using a number of different VKontakte accounts and specific hashtags to spread its propaganda, a method used by other IS groups on various social-media platforms.

Unlike other IS media groups, ShamToday has not been involved in producing video propaganda.

Instead, its main activities are recruitment and outreach to IS sympathizers in the Russian Federation, mostly by spreading news about IS’s activities in Syria and Iraq, sharing Russian audio recordings of lectures given by IS preachers and ideologues, and organizing online pro-IS seminars via its dedicated channel on Zello, a social-media app that is widely used by IS to broadcast sermons.

ShamToday’s Zello sermons frequently involve IS’s most prominent North Caucasus ideologues, including a Chechen named Musa Abu Yusuf Shishani, who has previously called on Chechens in Europe to carry out attacks against civilians, and Abu Jihad, an ethnic Karachai who is a close confidant of Umar al-Shishani.

Raising Funds For The ‘Caliphate’

A recent advertisement published by ShamToday includes a request for donations via the QIWI wallet system.

The request for donations does not say what the money will be used for but uses an interesting call to action to persuade supporters in Russia and Central Asia to donate: the Koran’s Surat al-Tawbah, which instructs Muslims to “fight against the disbelievers collectively as they fight against you collectively.”

The donation request also includes an advertisement for two of ShamToday’s Zello channels, including one named Novosti Khalifata (“Caliphate News”) which the group uses to spread information about IS’s advances in Syria and Iraq to a Russian-speaking audience.

Other Russian-speaking militants associated with IS are also using QIWI accounts to fundraise. A post on the “Official Page KHILAFA” account on VKontakte, which posts news about IS in Syria and Iraq, also includes a QIWI account number and requests for donations.

Why Use QIWI?

Ironically, the ShamToday militants prefer to use QIWI for the same reason as millions of security-conscious Russians: the service allows people to transfer money electronically without having to transmit sensitive bank account information, and without having to have a bank account in the first place.

IS sympathizers who want to donate to ShamToday can do so at a dedicated QIWI kiosk (Russia had over 169,000 of these in 2013) or via their smartphone, by transferring money from their own QIWI account to the ShamToday account number, provided by the group on its donation request.

Besides Russia, QIWI is also available to consumers in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan. QIWI users in these countries even make transfers abroad, including to Turkey, where the ShamToday account is most likely based.

The account number provided by ShamToday is a Russian mobile-phone number, which is most likely an untraceable anonymous SIM card and not a working number belonging to a member of ShamToday. Attempts to reach the phone number produced an automated message that said the phone was switched off or outside its provider’s coverage area.

Combating Terror Financing

The use of electronic payment systems like QIWI by banned groups is not new.

Russian lawmakers have taken steps to try to quash the use of electronic payment systems like QIWI for terrorist financing.

In January 2014, a group of lawmakers from Russia’s United Russia party (including Shamsail Saraliev, the former External Affairs Minister for the Chechen Republic) and the far-right Liberal Democratic Party of Russia put forward amendments to existing electronic payment legislation, as part of a counterterrorism package.

The proposed amendments initially called for banning all anonymous transfers over 5,000 rubles, a move that caused QIWI stock to plummet 19 percent on January 15, 2014.

However, when the final version of the amended law passed on May 5, 2014, anonymous payments under 15,000 rubles were retained, although the legislation did ban anonymous payments of any size if they were between individuals rather than companies or other organizations.

The open use of QIWI by ShamToday suggests that this legislation has not deterred some extremist groups from using the electronic payment system to raise funds in Russia.

In a response to an inquiry by RFE/RL about the use of its services by ShamToday, QIWI said that it “condemns and does not support terrorist, extremist and other illegal activities” and that it was operating in “strict compliance with applicable legislation including legislation to combat money laundering of criminal funds and terror financing.”

“The company is taking all necessary and applicable legal measures to protect its services from penetration by criminal proceeds and also to minimize the risk of the company being involved in the laundering of proceeds from criminal activities and terrorist financing,” QIWI said in an e-mail.

ISIS Strategy, No Counterpunch, No Win

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Even from a liberal Democrat:

A senior congressional Democrat said Tuesday that he’s concerned the Obama administration’s strategy for defeating ISIS is heading in the wrong direction. To the extent that the administration has been measuring success against the Islamist group by ticking off the number of airstrikes against ISIS positions in Iraq and Syria, as a White House spokesman did Monday, “alarm bells should be going off,” Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) told reporters during a question and answer session in Washington. Schiff, the most senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, called ISIS’s capture of Ramadi, Iraq, “a very serious and significant setback” in U.S.-led efforts to defeat the extremist group.

Another battle and another chaotic retreat by Iraqi government forces, who abandoned their positions in Ramadi, the provincial capital of Anbar province, despite U.S. air support and a last-minute appeal by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who called on his soldiers to “hold their positions.”
Only hours before the fall, the Baghdad government sent in reinforcements to try to contain what was a counterpunch mounted by the militants of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, formerly known as ISIS, to their defeat in Tikrit just weeks ago. Tikrit, in neighboring Salahaddin province, was the first substantial city lost by ISIS and it was hailed by U.S., and Iraqi leaders, as the start in earnest of the rollback of the militants.
U.S. officials are couching the loss of Ramadi as a setback rather than a blow, arguing they had always expected ups and downs and reversals mixed in with steady progress in the fight against the Islamic extremists and their Sunni allies in Iraq. Only on Friday, Brig. Gen. Thomas Weidley, chief of staff of the Combined Joint Task Force-Operation Inherent Resolve, was describing to reporters how ISIS is “on the defensive throughout Iraq and Syria,” although he cautioned the terror army will still have “episodic successes” but they won’t “materialize into long-term gains.”

Then when the White House sends over to Congress an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and Congress cannot provide approval it speaks to a wide known fact that there is no strategy with defeating global enemies most of which is ISIS. John Boehner, Speaker of the House has called for a strategy and a new AUMF request.

Boehner Demands an Obama Do-Over on AUMF

John A. Boehner said Tuesday that President Obama should withdraw his current war request from Congress and “start over,” coming up with an entirely new strategy to fight the Islamic State after this weekend’s setback in Iraq.

“We don’t have a strategy,” Mr. Boehner said in calling for the do-over.

The Ohio Republican had spent much of last year demanding Mr. Obama send up a request for Congress to authorize the use of military force, known in Capitol-speak as an AUMF. But when Mr. Obama finally did send one up, it left Congress paralyzed, and no major legislative action has occurred in the three months since.

Facing stiff criticism from those who say Congress is shirking its duties, Mr. Boehner said it was Mr. Obama who was failing by sending up a bad request.

He said Mr. Obama asked for less power to fight the Islamic State than he currently has under the 2001 legislation that authorized war against al Qaeda and the Taliban — the powers the president has already been relying on to fight the Islamic State for a year.

“The president’s request for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force calls for less authority than he has today,” Mr. Boehner said.

The demand comes just days after Iraqi troops retreated and Islamic State fighters took control of Ramadi, a city 70 miles from Baghdad. But it also comes after a U.S. special forces raid in Syria on Friday killed about a dozen Islamic State terrorists.

The contrast left some military analysts insisting it was evidence that U.S. troops will be needed to win the fight against the Islamic State.