Category Archives: Iran Israel

Palestinian Authority Paying Terrorists

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CRS March Report in part: Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed more than $5 billion in bilateral economic and non-lethal security assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid. Successive Administrations have requested aid for the Palestinians in apparent support of at least three major U.S. policy priorities of interest to Congress:

* Promoting the prevention or mitigation of terrorism against Israel from Hamas and other militant organizations.

* Fostering stability, prosperity, and self-governance in the West Bank that may incline Palestinians toward peaceful coexistence with Israel and a “two-state solution.”

* Meeting humanitarian needs.

 

Report: Palestinian Authority Paying Terrorists with Foreign Aid, Despite Promise to Stop

TheTower: The Palestinian Authority has continued to award lifetime payments to convicted terrorists, despite a promise to end the practice, an investigative report published Sunday by The Mail on Sunday (MoS) revealed. The report was part of a broader investigation into what the paper described as the “wasteful” use of British taxpayer money.

According to MoS, the British government gives £72 million (over $102 million) to the Palestinians annually, with more than one-third of that sum directly going to the PA. While the PA said it that would no longer use aid money to pay terrorists or their families, recipients of the funds and official PA statements confirm that the practice continues.

Ahmad Musa, who admitted to shooting two Israelis dead, told MoS that he receives a monthly stipend of  £605 (over $850). Musa was jailed for life for his crimes, but was freed after five years in an Israeli effort to restart peace talks with the PA.

Amjad and Hakim Awad, two cousins who in 2011 massacred five members of the Fogel family– parents Ehud and Ruth Fogel, 11 year-old Yoav, four year-old Elad, and three month-old Hadas– in their West Bank home, have been also been paid. Amjad alone may have received more than £16,000 (nearly $23,000), according to estimates. (In 2012, PA television praised the cousins as “heroes.”)

Another terrorist on the payroll is veteran Hamas bomb-maker Abdallah Barghouti. Barghouti is serving 67 life sentences in an Israeli jail over his role in numerous bombings, including at the Hebrew University cafeteria in 2002, the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001, and a Rishon Lezion nightclub bombing in 2002, which killed 66 people. He is believed to have received £106,000 (over $150,000) for his efforts.

“[The] cash-strapped PA relies on foreign aid for nearly half its budget,” MoS reported. “Yet it gives £79 million a year to prisoners locked up in Israeli jails, former prisoners and their families.” When the paper asked the UK’s Department For International Development about the payments, the DFID defended them as “social welfare” for the families of prisoners, but denied that any British aid was involved. (In a similar vein, when asked about the PA’s payments to terrorists and their families, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Anne Patterson told a congressional hearing in 2014, “they have to provide for the families.”)

More reading here.

The DFID claimed that the PA stopped paying the stipends in 2014, and that the money is now provided by the Palestinian Liberation Organization. However, according to MoS, this assurance conflicts with the accounts given by former Palestinian prisoners and their families, as well as official PA statements. The paper added that Britain gave funds to the PLO until last year.

MoS also noted that in 2015, a year after the PA officially transferred authority over Palestinian prisoners to the PLO, it transferred an extra 444 million shekels (over $116 million) to the PLO. This was nearly the same amount that the PA allocated in the previous years to its now-defunct Ministry of Prisoners’ Affairs.

 Palestinian Authority Embassy Brazil

 Palestinian Authority Embassy Bulgaria

According to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), which has been documenting the ways that the PA incentives terror since 2011, the transfer to the PLO was meant to evade pressure from Western governments that demanded an end to terrorist salaries.

However, the PLO Commission was new only in name. The PLO body would have the ‎same responsibilities and pay the exact same amounts of salaries to prisoners; the ‎former PA Minister of Prisoners’ Affairs, Issa Karake, became the Director of the new ‎PLO Commission and PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas retained overall supervision of ‎the PLO Commission.

In addition to highlighting the use of British foreign aid to reward Palestinian terrorists, MoS also investigated the £9 million state-of-the-art palace being built for PA President Mahmoud Abbas.

“This is like a five-star hotel,” a security guard at the complex told MoS.“It has two helipads, two swimming pools, a Jacuzzi, restaurant… all the latest technology.”

The palace, which is weeks away from completion, was designed for “a president whose domain is so dependent on aid that last year his Palestinian Authority had to pass an emergency budget when some was held up by Israel,” according to MoS.

In addition to using foreign aid to reward terrorists, and building a luxury home for Abbas, British foreign aid is also being used to pay the salaries of PA employees living in the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip for “[sitting] at home.” These government employees lost their jobs when Hamas took over the Gaza in 2007, yet are still receiving salaries due to foreign aid.

“Getting paid from Britain while living here means you can have a good life,” one ex-teacher told MoS.

Israel Radio obtained documents last October showing that the PA is continuing to pay salaries to convicted terrorists, many of whom were responsible for the most lethal terrorist attacks of the second intifada. The Jerusalem Post reported that the amount of money awarded to the terrorists correlates to the amount of time they’re serving in prison, meaning that “the more gruesome the terrorism, the more money will be paid.”

While knowledge of these payments is “nothing new,” it clearly shows that the PA provides economic incentives for carrying out terrorist acts. More than that, one source said, the fact that these funds are allocated for that purpose helps bolster the image of terrorists – or as the Palestinians often call them, “martyrs” – into heroes.

“It is a problem for the PA. On one hand they claim they want peace and discourage violence, and on the other hand they put terrorists on pedestals, idolize them as heroes, and provide meaningful financial incentives for others to follow their path,” the source said.

Stalking Iran and bin Ladin with a Drone

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We don’t have an intelligence problem, we don’t have a signit problem, not even a humint problem, we have a lack of will which translates to a lack of strategy and a mission objective. We did get Usama bin Ladin but what was the real gain?

At least for we weary Americans, we can take some confidence that we do have technology.

The Drone that Stalked Bin Laden

AirandSpace: In 2009, after two weeks of being embedded as an independent journalist with a small team of U.S. Marines in Afghanistan, I ended up at Combat Outpost Monti, a 14-acre camp of tents, plywood huts, a few concrete bunkers and makeshift guard towers, and a helicopter landing area, all ringed by collapsible barriers. At the outpost, one of hundreds built in Afghanistan during the 13 years of NATO combat operations, the Marines were training and fighting alongside Afghan National Army soldiers. COP Monti was less than 10 miles from the Pakistan border, near the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

RQ-170

My time with the team was just about up when they were ordered to move up the Kunar River valley on a large combat operation. I stayed behind with the Afghan soldiers and, before I managed to find a ride out, weathered a mortar and rocket attack from combatants who had undoubtedly planned the attack and stockpiled the weapons for it at a site across the border, in Pakistan. Even if the Marines had still been there, they could not have pursued the attackers. Al-Qaeda, Taliban, and other belligerents have hidden from the U.S. military in Pakistan’s tribal areas, with varying success, since Americans entered Afghanistan in 2001.

“Everybody knows that the Taliban and other groups train, raise money, plan operations, and even recruit in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” says a retired U.S. infantry officer who served two tours in Afghanistan as well as a rotation in Iraq. (All of the sources quoted in this article spoke to me on the condition that I would not name them because they do not have permission to speak on the record.) “The insurgent leadership move men and materials into Afghanistan and attack American and coalition forces and assets.” Then, he says, they scurry back to Pakistan, where U.S. forces can’t follow.

At least, not on the ground.

Since 2004, the United States has followed insurgents into Pakistan, and has spied on and sometimes killed them there. The CIA flies Predator and Reaper unpiloted aerial vehicles over the tribal districts, often with the approval of Pakistani leaders, who have enemies of their own among the militants inhabiting the country’s northwest. Some missions though are conducted without approval from Pakistan’s authorities. For those missions, the CIA needed a different aircraft.

In late 2007, reporters and observers at Afghanistan’s Kandahar Airfield discovered that a new spy had joined the team. Grainy photographs emerged of what appeared to be an unmanned flying wing. Aviation reporter Bill Sweetman (who writes a column for this magazine) nicknamed the aircraft “the Beast of Kandahar,” and the name has stuck, though the airplane doesn’t have the ferocity or power of a beast. It is an unarmed, stealthy observer designed to glide silently over its targets and transmit photos, video, and other intelligence to a worldwide network of users. The Air Force acknowledged it in 2009 and revealed its official name: the Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel.

The RQ-170 is operated by the U.S. Air Force 432nd Wing, which also operates Predators and Reapers. The 432nd, stationed at Creech Air Force Base, northwest of Las Vegas, declined to speak about the Sentinel, and a spokesperson for Lockheed Martin would state only that it is a “low-observable Unmanned Aerial System” and that its “primary mission is Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance.”

Trying to put together a picture of how the RQ-170 might have been used in the mysterious Afghanistan-Pakistan border region, I spoke to a U.S. military pilot who had flown in the 2003 Iraq war and who had later served in a senior position in an unmanned aerial vehicle unit. “At the start of [Operation Iraqi Freedom], one of our missions was to fly right up against the Iranian border, with our targeting pods slewed to the side to scan for border activity,” the pilot said. “We were right on the border, but we couldn’t cross it. Their radar had us. We were doing ISR work, trying to figure out just what, if any, activity was taking place on and as far inside their border as possible.” One type of activity the U.S. military was trying to follow and disrupt was the Iranian manufacture of devices called EFPs—explosively formed penetrators—and their distribution to enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Historically, insurgencies have required bases of support outside the contested country. “When discussing the RQ-170,” the pilot continued, “you have to understand that both Pakistan and Iran are outside of the ISR grasp of a targeting pod on an aircraft flying on the border, or of satellites. Sheer distance degrades certain aspects of a satellite’s ability to observe.”

The United States needed an intelligence-gathering platform that could avoid detection by Iranian and Pakistani radars. A retired military aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during Sentinel operations pointed out that the UAV’s size and shape give it a low radar cross-section—the measure of the amount of energy a target reflects toward the radar that illuminated it. “It’s a large airfoil, roughly 65 to 70 feet in length,” he said. “Being a main wing only, with no fuselage and tail surfaces, drastically reduces both its radar signature and aerodynamic drag.” The Sentinel has the stealthy form of the 172-foot-span B-2 bomber, but is less than half its size.

Because the Sentinel is manufactured by the company that brought us the F-22 stealth fighter and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (and, before that, the F-117, SR-71, and U-2), we can assume that its skin uses radar-absorbent materials to further diminish radar return. Although its shape and materials keep it invisible to some radars, the aviator explained, others would be able to detect the aircraft but might not be able to track or target it.

At medium altitudes, the Sentinel’s light gray color enables it to blend in with the sky. It must also be quiet enough that it won’t be heard on the ground. An aviator who held a senior position at Kandahar Airfield during the Sentinel’s operation said its sound during takeoff wasn’t loud but distinctive—different from the propeller-driven UAVs and military jets that operated from the airfield.

Kandahar Airfield

An early image of the drone, at Kandahar Airfield before 2010. (Anonymous)

Engine noise or heat can never be eliminated but can be reduced. “[A stealth UAV] would use a high-efficiency turbofan engine, and its exhaust would be spread out as much as possible, masking both heat and noise,” the aviator said. A nozzle that spreads the exhaust eliminates concentrations of heat and helps mix hot exhaust with cooler ambient air.

An earlier, short-lived Lockheed Martin stealth UAV, the RQ-3 DarkStar, used a Williams-Rolls-Royce FJ44-1A turbofan, an engine favored for 1990s-era business jets, whose manufacturers claimed noise reductions. But those reductions were due partly to a change in the jets’ takeoff and landing profiles. Flight profile, according to an expert in unmanned aerial systems, is key to maintaining low observability. He explained that to fly low over a location of interest, an aircraft would most likely be put into a shallow descent, with its engine throttled back, so that it would essentially glide over the target. After one pass, “it will turn and gently increase power, but in a geometry such that nobody at or near the target could hear.” Once back at a higher altitude, the Sentinel would, if necessary, set up for another pass. This description suggests that maintaining continuous observation of a location would require two, possibly three, Sentinels flying overlapping patterns, not a sole craft orbiting.

**********

In December 2011, one or several of the Sentinel’s stealthy protections could have failed: An RQ-170 was taken prisoner in Iran. It had been on a reconnaissance mission and landed within the country, mainly intact, a few hundred miles from its home runway at Kandahar Airfield. The Iranians seized it, put it on display, and broadcast claims that they had spoofed its guidance system. Another possibility is that the UAV lost power or that its guidance system simply malfunctioned, an explanation that several Pentagon officials offered the press in the days after the incident.

“These systems have trip wires,” an aviator explained. “They’re meant to automatically return home, or at least to friendly airspace. But you have to consider: Was there a possibility of an oversight that the Iranians figured out they could exploit?” The guidance system, he noted, likely uses a combination of GPS and inertial navigation. With inertial navigation, highly sensitive accelerometers and gyros determine a craft’s route in three axes. Inertial systems cannot be fooled, though they can drift. GPS signals and guidance systems can be jammed or fooled; receivers can be sent signals making the onboard navigation system believe that the aircraft’s home airport is hundreds of miles from where the airport really is.

In 2008, at a Marine Aviation Weapons and Tactics training exercise outside Yuma, Arizona, a GPS guidance unit was accidentally spoofed, with a near-disastrous result. The unit was attached to a Containerized Delivery System, a pallet with stuff to resupply ground troops—food, ammunition, water—that had been released from a C-130 transport, and was tracking a GPS signal so it would arrive at a certain point on the ground. In the exercise with the C-130 were a number of airplanes and helicopters, many of them using electronic jamming equipment or testing electronic warfare systems. In the signal-rich environment, the CDS, instead of landing at its programmed landing point, was heading straight for the Chevy Suburban that was waiting to return the pallet to base. Seeing the CDS headed for him, the Suburban driver stepped on it, but he wasn’t fast enough; the cargo crashed into the back of the van. The driver was uninjured.

Reporters have surmised that the Sentinel was in Iran to gather information about Iranian progress in developing nuclear weapons. Satellites can detect nuclear detonations, but to passively sniff for isotopic and other signs of uranium enrichment, analysts would need a platform much closer to the ground. Although reporters have also speculated that the Sentinel, to keep from being heard, flies upwards of 50,000 feet, it probably flies much lower—to be closer to its targets of observation. “Most aircraft are inaudible above 8,000 feet,” says a Department of Defense UAV expert. He explains that if a sensor is operated at a high altitude, it needs to be much larger and heavier to obtain the same degree of accuracy as smaller, lighter ones operating at low altitudes.

He also used intelligence from the MC-12 Liberty, another King Air, this one stuffed with a more exotic sensor suite than the Predator or Guardrail has, including a “complete collection, processing, analysis and dissemination system,” according to its U.S. Air Force fact sheet. The Liberty is brought to bear when commanders want to know what’s going on inside a building, whether people are “manufacturing explosives, packaging opium, or something else,” the officer said. The MC-12 “can sniff things out based on their chemical or metallurgical signatures. They’re incredibly accurate.”

But they aren’t stealthy and can fly only in airspace where the enemy has no radar. So is the purpose of the RQ-170 to carry any combination of the instruments deployed on the Predator, Guardrail, and Liberty into places where those three aircraft can’t go? A former unmanned aircraft systems commander answered: “Yes, definitely.”

The expert pointed out the two bumps on the top of the craft: “Not one antenna but two, so it can be serving multiple, distinct tasks, simultaneously, for users all over the world.”

**********

When I left Combat Outpost Monti—on a blue and white Bell B412 helicopter flown not by the U.S. military but by a Canadian contracting company working for the military (with the call sign “Molson Air,” for the Canadian beer)—we flew for roughly 15 minutes, then landed in a field next to a compound outside a small village. I checked my GPS; we were idling about a half-mile from Pakistan. Two U.S. military personnel, wearing camouflage and helmets unfamiliar to me, climbed aboard the helicopter. We then continued the journey to Asadabad.

A model of the RQ-170, which Iran claimed to have reverse-engineered, on display in Tehran (The Office of the Supreme Leader, Iran)

After returning home, I got an inkling of what those guys in unfamiliar camouflage might have been doing there near the Pakistan border and how they may have used the RQ-170. I learned about counter-terrorism units in a program called Omega, which combined special forces with CIA teams for missions into Pakistan to conduct raids on Taliban and other insurgent and terrorist targets. Putting this information together with what my sources had described, I had little doubt that intelligence about those targets was gathered in part by Sentinels.

The joint CIA–special operations forces mission that would best show off the RQ-170’s surveillance capabilities was conducted years later, in support of the SEAL team who, on the night of May 1, 2011, flew into Pakistan on two modified Black Hawk helicopters, entered a compound in Abbottabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. U.S. government officials told Washington Post reporter Greg Miller that stealth drones had flown dozens of missions to monitor the Abbottabad compound.

My own experience in Afghanistan suggests other missions the RQ-170 might have flown. I often heard intelligence officers or patrol commanders request “a pattern of movement” or a “pattern of life” for targets and enemy forces. To provide that information, analysts would draw data from a number of types of surveillance and reconnaissance aircraft. Learning about the capabilities of these aircraft helped me understand the kind of surveillance the Sentinel might perform.

One of the most important reconnaissance aircraft collecting data for the coalitions in Iraq and Afghanistan is also one of the least known: the Northrop Grumman RC-12 Guardrail. “The Guardrail is probably the most boring-looking airplane in the Department of Defense, but in my opinion, it brings some of the most important capabilities to ground forces,” said the retired infantry officer. The RC-12 is a Hawker Beechcraft Super King Air sprouting antennas to collect signals intelligence. “Looks like a flying porcupine, with all the antennas dangling off it,” the officer said. He regularly requested the Guardrail’s listening capabilities to identify, locate, and track insurgents and to help develop ground operations. The Guardrail does not process the data it collects; instead, it transmits it via a secure satellite link to locations in the United States or, according to a U.S. Army fact sheet, in Germany or Korea, where the data is processed and the results beamed back to the aircraft, which transmits it to the commanders who requested it. It happens fast. Within a second, the system can identify an individual’s or a group’s precise location. It takes a little longer to record and analyze their transmissions.

“I’ve tasked all sorts of assets, manned and unmanned, to look at ground targets and areas of interest,” said the infantry officer. For imagery intelligence, he said, “we used Predator a lot.”

“The beauty of how intelligence gets disseminated with the systems we have in place is that you just request an intelligence product, and you get it based on classification level and need-to-know,” says the aviator who served in a senior position at Kandahar Airfield. “You don’t ask for a platform, just a product. Much of the time intelligence users won’t know they are seeing something that was sourced from a Sentinel.”

The Sentinel is one platform in a complex intelligence system that collects information from every U.S. military command around the world. Analysts at various centers process 20 terabytes of data, of all intelligence types, every day. “Once each type is processed into a product, then it gets fused together with other intelligence products to give a multidimensional picture,” the aviator says.

“Think of a compound, say in Abbottabad, Pakistan, one with some walls that imagery shows to be 16 feet high. Combine that knowledge with signals collections of those in and around the structure, learn the pattern of life, maybe pick up a tall guy walking around, and maybe do some sniffing for weapons in the compound, soak up computer noise that can be analyzed, and then put that together with some human intelligence gathered on the ground about who that tall guy is.” He laughs. “There you go.”

 

Operation Hemorrhage

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It has been said often, either fight the enemy in a true war theater on the battlefield with real war tactics or fight them at home. Brussels and Paris and in the United States in Boston and San Bernardino to mention a few, the hybrid war gets real expensive. These costs are rarely measured or questioned. We are also not measuring the cost of freedoms are giving up. Add in the cost of the cyber war…..well….going back much earlier than 9-11-01 the costs cannot be calculated.

Operation Hemorrhage: The Terror Plans to Wreck the West’s Economy

The Western economy is a key underlying target in attacks like the one that the Islamic State perpetrated in Brussels.

DailyBeast: Every European who flies frequently knows the airport in Zaventem, has spent time in the ticketing area that was strewn with blood, limbs, broken glass, battered luggage and other wreckage.

It was another attack on aviation that pulled the United States into the conflict sometimes known as the “global war on terror” in the first place. Since then, airports and airplanes have remained a constant target for Islamic militants, with travelers being encumbered by new batches of security measures after each new attack or attempt.

After the ex-con Richard Reid managed to sneak a bomb aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, but failed to detonate the explosives, American passengers were forced to start removing their shoes on their way through security. After British authorities foiled a 2006 plot in which terrorists planned to bring liquid explosives hidden in sport drink bottles aboard multiple transatlantic flights, authorities strictly limited the quantity of liquids passengers were allowed to carry. When Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab snuck explosives hidden in his underwear onto a flight on Christmas Day 2009, he ushered in full-body scans and intrusive pat-downs.

Those are the misses. There have been hits, too. In August 2004, two female Chechen suicide bombers, so-called “black widows,” destroyed two domestic Russian flights. In January 2011, a suicide bomber struck Moscow’s Domodedovo airport in an attack that looked almost identical to the one that rocked the airport in Brussels: the bomber struck just outside the security cordon, where the airport is transformed from a “soft” target to a “hard” one. Just months ago, the self-proclaimed Islamic State (ISIS)—the perpetrator of the Brussels attacks—destroyed a Russian passenger jet flying out of Egypt’s Sinai, killing 224 people.

The targeting of airports and airplanes has been so frequent that in lighter times—back when the terrorists seemed so much worse at what they do—some pundits openly mocked their continuing return to airplanes and airports. In one representative discussion from early 2010, a well-known commentator described jihadists as having a “sort of schoolboy fixation” with aviation.

But the reason for this targeting, of course, is neither mysterious nor quixotic, and it’s one the jihadists have explained for themselves. Following the November Paris attacks, ISIS released an infographic boasting that its slaughter on the streets of Paris would force Belgium “to strengthen its security measures … which will cost them tens of millions of dollars.” Moreover, the group claimed, “the intensified security measures and the general state of unease will cost Europe in general and France in specific tends of billions of dollars due to the resulting decrease in tourism, delayed flights, and restrictions on freedom of movement and travel between European countries.”

And that was before the group successfully attacked the Brussels airport, despite those costly new security measures.

Even before 9/11, jihadists saw bleeding the American economy as the surest path to defeating their “far enemy.” When Osama bin Laden declared war against the “Jews and crusaders” in 1996, he emphasized that jihadist strikes should be coupled with an economic boycott by Saudi women. Otherwise, the Muslims would be sending their enemy money, “which is the foundation of wars and armies.”

Indeed, when bin Laden first had the opportunity to publicly explain what the 9/11 attacks had accomplished, in an October 2001 interview with Al Jazeera journalist Taysir Allouni, he emphasized the costs that the attacks imposed on the United States. “According to their own admissions, the share of the losses on the Wall Street market reached 16 percent,” he said. “The gross amount that is traded in that market reaches $4 trillion. So if we multiply 16 percent with $4 trillion to find out the loss that affected the stocks, it reaches $640 billion of losses.” He told Allouni that the economic effect was even greater due to building and construction losses and missed work, so that the damage inflicted was “no less than $1 trillion by the lowest estimate.”

In his October 2004 address to the American people, dramatically delivered just before that year’s elections, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost Al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of Al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

Al Qaeda fit the wars the United States had become embroiled in after 9/11 into its economic schema. In that same video, bin Laden explained how his movement sought to suck the United States and its allies into draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahedin “bled Russia for ten years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

Just prior to 2011, there was a brief period when jihadism appeared to be in decline. Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that later became ISIS, had all but met with defeat at the hands of the United States and local Sunni uprisings. Successful attacks were few and far between.

People gather at a memorial for victims of attacks in Brussels on Wednesday, March 23, 2016. Belgian authorities were searching Wednesday for a top suspect in the country's deadliest attacks in decades, as the European Union's capital awoke under guard and with limited public transport after scores were killed and injured in bombings on the Brussels airport and a subway station. (AP Photo/Valentin Bianchi)

Valentin Bianchi/AP

Representative of those dark times for jihadists, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula released a special issue of its online magazine Inspire celebrating a terrorist attack that claimed no victims. In October 2010, jihadists were able to sneak bombs hidden in printer cartridges onto two cargo planes. Due to strong intelligence efforts, authorities disabled both bombs before they were set to explode, but the group drew satisfaction from merely getting them aboard the planes.

“Two Nokia phones, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the lead article in that special issue of Inspire boasted. “On the other hand this supposedly ‘foiled plot’, as some of our enemies would like to call [it], will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures.” The magazine warned that future attacks will be “smaller, but more frequent”—an approach that “some may refer to as the strategy of a thousand cuts.”

The radical cleric Anwar Al Awlaki, writing in Inspire, explained the dilemma that he saw gripping Al Qaeda’s foes. “You either spend billions of dollars to inspect each and every package in the world,” he wrote, “or you do nothing and we keep trying again.”

Even in those days when the terrorist threat loomed so much smaller, the point was not a bad one. Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists aim to wear down Western economies.

Unfortunately, Al Qaeda’s envisioned world of smaller but more frequent attacks proved unnecessary for the jihadists. Less than two months after the special issue of Inspire appeared that celebrated an at best half-successful attack, the revolutionary events that we then knew as the “Arab Spring” sent shockwaves through the Middle East and North Africa.

This instability would help jihadism reach the current heights to which it has ascended, where the attacks are not only more frequent but larger. Unfortunately, the United States—blinded at the time by the misguided belief that revolutions in the Arab world would devastate the jihadist movement—pursued policies that hastened the region’s instability. The damages wrought by these policies are still not fully appreciated.

The silver lining to the jihadist economic strategy is that they, too, are economically vulnerable. The damage inflicted on ISIS’s “state” by coalition bombings and other pressures forced the group to slice its fighters’ salaries at the beginning of this year. But as Al Qaeda watches its flashier jihadist rival carry out gruesome attacks on Western targets and get bombarded in return, it discerns further proof of the wisdom of its strategy of attrition.

As it watches these two sets of foes exhaust each other, Al Qaeda believes that its comparative patience will pay off. It believes that its own time will come.

 

Testimony: Hezbollah Threat Against U.S. National Security

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TITLE I–PREVENTION OF ACCESS BY HIZBALLAH TO INTERNATIONAL FINANCIAL AND OTHER INSTITUTIONS

(Sec. 101) The President shall report to Congress on: (1) satellite, broadcast, Internet, or other providers that have knowingly entered into a contractual relationship with al-Manar TV and its affiliates; and (2) the identity of those providers that have or have not been sanctioned pursuant to Executive Order 13224 (relating to blocking property and prohibiting transactions with persons who commit or support terrorism).

Middle East and North Africa Subcommittee.

Badran: The Syrian uprising constitutes one of the greatest challenges that Iran and Hezbollah have faced in decades. The collapse of the Assad regime would have, in the words of then-Commander of U.S. Central Command General James Mattis, dealt Iran “the biggest strategic setback in 25 years.” It would have cut Iran’s only land bridge to Lebanon, and deprived Hezbollah of its strategic depth.

Unfortunately, the situation in Syria has resulted in the opposite effect. While many, perhaps most, observers have tended to view Syria as a bloody quagmire that will erode Iranian ambitions, Tehran has deftly exploited the conflict, turning the strategic challenge it faces into an opportunity to expand its influence throughout the region.

In doing so, Iran has followed a well-developed template. It is building up Shiite militias, which it recruits from around the Greater Middle East, on the model of Hezbollah. This means it places the militias under the operational command of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), and demands from them full allegiance to the Iranian regional project. The template goes back to the earliest days of the Islamic Revolution, but in recent years Iran has expanded its use to an extent never-before seen, with the biggest growth being in Iraq. Hezbollah, however, is the crown jewel of this region-wide network, with nodes in Syria, the Arab Gulf states, and, of course, Yemen.

This is arguably the most significant and most under-appreciated development in the region over the past five years. Iran’s expansionist drive, through its legion of Shiite militias based on the model of Hezbollah and often trained by the group, has not been opposed by the U.S. If anything, Washington has effectively acquiesced to it, viewing it as a means to affect a new regional “equilibrium.”

This has forced traditional U.S. regional allies – from Israel to Saudi Arabia – to look for measures to try and stop this emerging shift in the regional balance of power, which directly impacts their national security interests.

Although the effects are region-wide, this Iranian strategy has played out most consequentially in Syria. Five years into the uprising against the Assad regime, Iran and Hezbollah have secured their core interests in Syria. Hezbollah has taken significant losses at the tactical level but those have been offset by significant gains: Hezbollah is now better equipped and more operationally experienced than ever before.

The first-order priority for Hezbollah and Iran was to secure Assad’s rule in Damascus and Western Syria. Maintaining control over key real estate in order to ensure territorial contiguity with Lebanon was essential. In fact, the Iran-Assad-Hezbollah axis showed a willingness to forgo ancillary territory relatively early in the conflict in order to secure the corridor between what might be called Assadistan and Hezbollahstan. Specifically, Hezbollah and Iran were determined to hold the areas adjacent to Lebanon’s eastern border and secure the routes to Damascus. This is essential for safeguarding arms transfers from Iran to Lebanon, as well as for protecting weapons storage depots on Syrian soil. Hezbollah is now reportedly also working to ethnically cleanse these areas.

The campaign to create the security corridor has ensured that Hezbollah’s supply lines have remained open and uninterrupted. In fact, shipments into Lebanon from Syria may have even accelerated, and they may have included the transfer of certain strategic weapons systems that were kept on Syrian soil, as evident from the list of reported Israeli airstrikes over the last three years.

As part of its effort to secure the border, Hezbollah deepened its partnership with the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), whose cooperation has been vital – and not only on the Syrian front. As Hezbollah began to face backlash in the form of car bombs in Beirut over its involvement in Syria in 2013, it looked to the LAF for support in protecting its domestic flank.

The partnership between the LAF and Hezbollah has grown to such an extent that it is now meaningful to speak of the LAF as an auxiliary force in Hezbollah’s war effort. Indeed, in explaining the recent decision by Saudi Arabia to pull its $3 billion grant to the LAF, Saudi columnist Abdul Rahman al-Rashed wrote, “Hezbollah has started to use the army as its auxiliary in the war against the Syrians, which protects its lines and borders.”

In certain instances, LAF troops and Hezbollah forces have deployed troops jointly, such as during street battles with the followers of a minor Sunni cleric in Sidon in 2013. The LAF routinely raids Syrian refugee camps and Sunni cities in Lebanon, rounding up Sunni men and often detaining them without charges. In a number of cases, it has arrested defected Syrian officers in the Free Syrian Army, either handing them back to the Assad regime, or, in some cases, delivering them to Hezbollah, which then uses them in prisoner swaps with the Syrian rebels.

The LAF-Hezbollah synergy is broadly recognized in the region, with strategic implications that have been only dimly perceived in the United States. The Saudis, as I noted above, have reacted by withdrawing their aid to the LAF – and they are by no means alone. The Israelis have no choice to but expect that if war should break out between them and Hezbollah, the LAF will come to the direct aid of the latter. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have therefore warned that in the next war, they will certainly target the LAF. In contrast to the policies of Israel and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is not making its aid to the LAF contingent on it severing its operational ties with Hezbollah – a policy which many in the Middle East see as facilitating the partnership between the two.

Hezbollah’s influence in Lebanon is by no means limited to its partnership with the LAF. Hezbollah exploits the weak and dysfunctional Lebanese state in order to advance its interests. It exerts direct influence over, for example, the Lebanese customs authority and the financial auditor’s office in order to protect its criminal enterprises, and uses Lebanese territory for the training of Shiite militias in the Iranian network. As Lebanon’s Interior Minister observed earlier this month, Lebanon is now the IRGC’s “external operations room for training and sending fighters all over the world.” Through Hezbollah, Iran has made the Lebanese state complicit in its activities.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly last October, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that despite Israel’s interdiction efforts, and in violation of UNSCR 1701, Iran had managed to bring advanced weapons systems into Lebanon, specifically the Russian-made Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles, SA-22 (Pantsyr-S1) air defense system, and precision-guided surface-to-surface missiles – which presumably includes the upgraded Iranian Fateh-110 missiles with integrated GPS navigation.

The Yakhont and the precision-guided missiles pose serious threats to Israel because they are capable of hitting strategic installations and targets deep inside the country as well as offshore. These advanced systems are, of course, in addition to the estimated 100,000 rockets and missiles that Hezbollah has already stored in Lebanon – mainly in civilian areas. When one considers that Hezbollah has the capability to rain down 1,500 rockets a day on Israel, it becomes clear that civilian casualties in the next war will be much higher on both sides than in any of the previous wars.

IDF officers believe that Hezbollah has amassed valuable tactical experience in Syria. The military capabilities of the Syrian opposition do not compare to those of the IDF; nevertheless, Hezbollah’s units are mastering the use of diverse weapons systems, in both urban and rural settings. Over the past year, this experience has included working together with the Russian military, which has introduced new weapons systems and combined arms operations to the Syrian theater. In fact, Hezbollah, Iranian, and Russian officers have worked together on planning operations, and a joint operations room was reportedly also established in Iraq last year.

Iran and Hezbollah clearly intend to leverage their success in Syria to change the balance of power with Israel. Specifically, they have set their sights on expanding into the Golan Heights, and on linking it to the south Lebanon front. They signaled the importance they attached to this effort by sending a group of high-ranking Iranian and Hezbollah officers on a mission to Quneitra in January 2015. The Israelis destroyed that particular group, but we can be certain that they will resume their push there at a later date.

Iran and Hezbollah have invested in local Syrian communities to create a Syrian franchise of Hezbollah. Besides developing Alawite militias, they have also invested in Syria’s Shiite and Druze communities. The Druze, by virtue of their concentration in southern Syria, are particularly attractive as potential partners. Hezbollah has cultivated recruits from the Druze of Quneitra and has used them in a number of attacks in the Golan over the past couple of years. In addition to recruitment to Syrian Hezbollah or other Shiite militias in Quneitra, there have also been some efforts with the Druze of Suwayda province near the Jordanian border.

As a result, the IDF is preparing for offensive incursions by Hezbollah into northern Israel in the next conflict. For Israel, Hezbollah’s use of Lebanon as an Iranian forward missile base, its expansion into Syria with an aim to link the Golan to Lebanon, and the prospect of this reality soon getting an Iranian nuclear umbrella, creates an unacceptable situation which, under the right circumstances, could easily trigger a major conflict.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Israeli officials have been loudly voicing the position that any settlement in Syria cannot leave Iran and Hezbollah in a position of dominance, and certainly not anywhere near the Golan. Unfortunately, this position is directly at odds with current U.S. policy. President Obama has stated that any solution in Syria must respect and protect so-called Iranian “equities” in Syria. When one actually spells out what these “equities” are – namely preserving the Syrian bridge to Hezbollah in Lebanon – it becomes clear that U.S. policy in Syria inadvertently complicates Israel’s security challenge.

It also complicates the challenges of other critical U.S. allies, such as Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Indeed, Hezbollah’s expansion has also spurred a Saudi-led campaign targeting the group, culminating in its designation as a terrorist organization by the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League. The Saudis have also announced measures to freeze the accounts of any citizen or expatriate suspected of belonging to or supporting Hezbollah. Supporters would be prosecuted, jailed, and deported. Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates have followed suit, deporting a number of Lebanese expatriates with connections to Hezbollah.

There is talk – or perhaps a threat – that the Saudis might go after not just Shiite supporters, but also Christian businessmen who support the group or are part of its financial schemes, and who are seen as weak links because of their financial interests in the Gulf. The potential impact of Saudi measures against Hezbollah could be significant if followed through. However, as noted earlier regarding Hezbollah’s relationship with the LAF, the Saudis have come to recognize that the Lebanese state itself is in Hezbollah’s grip.

This is a bleak picture, but there are steps that Congress can take to help steer U.S. policy in the right direction.

First, Congress should push the administration on the implementation of H.R. 2297, targeting Hezbollah’s criminal and financial activities. It’s important not to be dissuaded by the argument that pushing too hard would break Lebanon’s economy. It is critical to realize that Hezbollah’s position in the Lebanese state and economy increasingly resembles that of the IRGC in the Iranian state. Moreover, it would be worthwhile to use the Arab League and Gulf Cooperation Council designation of Hezbollah to encourage the European Union to follow their lead in designating all of Hezbollah as a terrorist organization.

Second, security assistance to the LAF should be, at a minimum, reviewed. Although the Obama administration is said to be unhappy with the Saudi decision to suspend its aid to the LAF, it is a sound decision and should push the U.S. to reconsider its own policies. The United States cannot, under the pretext of combating Sunni jihadism, align with Iranian assets and Iranian-dominated “state institutions.” Using this pretext, the U.S. has looked the other way from, if not condoned, the partnership between the LAF and Hezbollah. The result has been that U.S. military support and intelligence sharing has helped Hezbollah, if only indirectly.

Finally and more broadly, the United States must conduct comprehensive realignment in the Middle East away from Iran and back towards its traditional allies. The place to begin that realignment is Syria. Instead of pushing for an endgame in Syria which preserves so-called Iranian “equities,” or which creates cantons that function as Iranian protectorates, the United States should be working with its allies to impose severe costs on Hezbollah for its Syrian adventure.

Obviously, the White House holds the keys to such a realignment, but Congress can certainly help. It can, for example, hold the administration to its promise to “push back” against Iranian regional expansionism. Our Israeli, Jordanian, and Saudi allies have voiced their deep concerns about how a Syrian endgame that leaves Iran entrenched in Syria threatens their security. The U.S. response should not be to tell them to “share the region” with Iran. Rather, it should be to help them roll back the threat posed by Iran and Hezbollah. Full testimony here.

Declaring Genocide: Does it Mean Anything?

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John Kerry and Barack Obama finally declared ‘genocide’ with regard to Islamic State but why stop with ISIS? What about Bashir al Assad but mostly what about Mahmoud Abbas? For the Obama White House, Iran certainly does not matter either.

Obama did finally declare genocide after the lawyers reviewed and advised him. But does it matter?

The Genocide Convention says it does matter.

 

In 2009, Barack Obama in Oslo accepting the Nobel Peace Prize award.

THE PRESIDENT:  Your Majesties, Your Royal Highnesses, distinguished members of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, citizens of America, and citizens of the world:

I receive this honor with deep gratitude and great humility.  It is an award that speaks to our highest aspirations — that for all the cruelty and hardship of our world, we are not mere prisoners of fate.  Our actions matter, and can bend history in the direction of justice.

And yet I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the considerable controversy that your generous decision has generated.  (Laughter.)  In part, this is because I am at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.  Compared to some of the giants of history who’ve received this prize — Schweitzer and King; Marshall and Mandela — my accomplishments are slight.  And then there are the men and women around the world who have been jailed and beaten in the pursuit of justice; those who toil in humanitarian organizations to relieve suffering; the unrecognized millions whose quiet acts of courage and compassion inspire even the most hardened cynics.  I cannot argue with those who find these men and women — some known, some obscure to all but those they help — to be far more deserving of this honor than I.

But perhaps the most profound issue surrounding my receipt of this prize is the fact that I am the Commander-in-Chief of the military of a nation in the midst of two wars.  One of these wars is winding down.  The other is a conflict that America did not seek; one in which we are joined by 42 other countries — including Norway — in an effort to defend ourselves and all nations from further attacks.

Still, we are at war, and I’m responsible for the deployment of thousands of young Americans to battle in a distant land.  Some will kill, and some will be killed.  And so I come here with an acute sense of the costs of armed conflict — filled with difficult questions about the relationship between war and peace, and our effort to replace one with the other. Full speech here.

What is worse a war, nuclear weapon or genocide? Dead is dead.

May: In the Yemeni port city of Aden earlier this month, Islamists attacked a Catholic home for the indigent elderly. The militants, believed to be soldiers of the Islamic State, shot the security guard, then entered the facility where they gunned down the old people and their care-givers, including four nuns. At least 16 people were murdered. Such atrocities are no longer seen as major news events. Most diplomats regard them – or dismiss them — as “violent extremism,” a phrase that describes without explaining. On America’s campuses, “activists” are deeply concerned about “trigger warnings” and “microaggressions.” Massacres of Christians in Muslim lands, by contrast, seem to trouble them not at all. More here.

Sure they do get it right on Islamic State, when Germany is forecasted as a future target as a matter of sampling.

GateStoneInstitute:

  • Hans-Georg Maaßen, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV), warned that the Islamic State was deliberately planting jihadists among the refugees flowing into Europe, and reported that the number of Salafists in Germany has now risen to 7,900. This is up from 7,000 in 2014 and 5,500 in 2013.
  • “Salafists want to establish an Islamic state in Germany.” — Hans-Georg Maaßen, director, BfV, German intelligence.
  • More than 800 German residents — 60% of whom are German passport holders — have joined the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Of these, roughly one-third have returned to Germany. — Federal Criminal Police Office.
  • Up to 5,000 European jihadists have returned to the continent after obtaining combat experience on the battlefields of the Middle East. — Rob Wainwright, head of Europol.

Going back to 2013: BBC: UN implicates Bashar al-Assad in Syria war crimes, “The UN’s human rights chief has said an inquiry has produced evidence that war crimes were authorised in Syria at the “highest level”, including by President Bashar al-Assad. It is the first time the UN’s human rights office has so directly implicated Mr Assad. Commissioner Navi Pillay said her office held a list of others implicated by the inquiry. The UN estimates more than 100,000 people have died in the conflict.”