Category Archives: Middle East

Germany’s Merkel is Paying Turkey to Keep Refugees

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Merkel forges new alliance on refugees

German chancellor upstages EU-Turkey summit with talks on resettling asylum-seekers.

Politico: EU leaders agreed Sunday to give significant political and financial incentives to Turkey in exchange for its cooperation in stemming the flow of refugees from the Middle East to Europe.

The deal includes an initial payment of €3 billion from the EU to improve conditions for Syrian refugees currently in Turkey, an agreement to loosen visa restrictions on Turks traveling in Europe, and a promise from Brussels to “speed up the tempo” of negotiations on Ankara’s bid to join the EU, as European Council President Donald Tusk put it.

“We do not expect anyone to guard our borders for us,” Tusk said after the meeting between all 28 EU leaders and Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu. “That can and should only be done by Europeans. But we expect a major step towards changing the rules of the game when it comes to stemming the migration flow that is coming to the EU via Turkey.”

But there were divisions among some countries about how far to go in securing Turkish support in dealing with the refugee crisis, including the reopening of accession talks, as well as on how quickly asylum-seekers could be resettled from Turkey to the EU.

And the deal was partly upstaged by an effort from German Chancellor Angela Merkel — holding her own mini-summit earlier Sunday afternoon — to convince several countries to speed up implementation of a resettlement scheme for refugees from Turkey to the EU.

Merkel held talks with a breakaway group of leaders in an attempt to sideline those countries reluctant to take in asylum-seekers. She was joined by the leaders of Sweden, Finland, Austria, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium and Greece at the talks, held two hours before their EU counterparts arrived for the full summit.

“The aim was to bring the implementation of the EU-Turkey action plan forward,” Merkel told reporters Sunday night. “We will start with this implementation within the next days, in cooperation with the Commission. We have no time to lose.”

No figures were discussed during the meeting, Merkel said, calling it a “question to decide in the future.”

Some of the countries involved in the group were reluctant to take part in new refugee resettlement programs because they are politically unpopular, a diplomat said.

Earlier on Sunday the German newspaper FAZ reported that Merkel hoped to convince the countries to agree to the resettlement of 400,000 refugees from Turkey to Europe, a figure that none of the participants would confirm upon arrival in Brussels.

The “coalition of the willing,” as it was branded by some diplomats, has asked the European Commission to put forward a proposal before the next scheduled summit of EU leaders in mid-December for a voluntary resettlement scheme, an EU official said, adding that also other countries could take part in it.

The EU-Turkey action plan, which was presented by the European Commission in October, offers Turkey €3 billion to improve the situation of refugees.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, who was at the pre-summit talks, said he was “very much in favor” of the resettlement of Syrian refugees from Turkey to EU countries willing to accept them.

“Turkey hosts 2.5 million refugees today,” he said. “We must come to a system under which Turkey provides a maximum of border securing,” while Europe provides money and relieves part of the strain by taking some refugees. The aim would be to create “legal migration,” Juncker said.

Juncker was at pains to point out that the “group of the willing” was not evidence of a two-speed Europe.

Germany is frustrated by the lack of support for a new resettlement scheme for Syrian refugees from Turkey. At a meeting of EU ambassadors Friday, Berlin wanted a stronger commitment to resettlements in the final conclusions, the document that wraps up the decision of the summit, but its line was rejected, a diplomat said.

The final summit agreement offers to re-energize Turkey’s accession process, but makes no specific reference to any new areas of negotiation — known as chapters —being opened in Turkey’s EU accession bid, apart from one on further economic integration.

An earlier proposal to open several new areas of the accession talks, including on energy, judiciary and fundamental rights, and foreign, security and defense policy, had been taken out of the final conclusions because of objections from Cyprus, a diplomat said. The eastern Mediterranean island has blocked Turkey’s accession talks for years, citing the presence of Turkish troops in the north of the island.

During the summit Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi and other leaders expressed concern over human rights issues, including the jailing of two prominent journalists in Turkey, said one EU official with knowledge of the talks.

The journalists, Cumhuriyet newspaper’s editor-in-chief Can Dundar, and the paper’s Ankara representative Erdem Gul, were charged with spying after reporting on alleged arms smuggling by Turkish security forces into Syria.

The final summit conclusions also state that €3 billion in aid that the EU will give Turkey is an “initial” payment, meaning that further financial support is likely.

European Council President Donald Tusk, a former prime minister of Poland, one of the countries most reluctant to take in refugees, warned EU states not to “be naive.”

“Let me stress that we are not re-writing the EU enlargement policy,” Tusk said. “The negotiating framework and the relevant conclusions continue to apply, including its merit-based nature and the respect for European values, also on human rights.”

*** Meanwhile, as the Iraqis do some meager fighting against Islamic State, other mass graves have been located.

AssociatedPress: Iraqis find 3 more mass graves in formerly IS-held Sinjar 

IRBIL, Iraq (AP) — Kurdish officials said Sunday three more mass graves have been found in the northern town of Sinjar, where Kurdish forces backed by heavy U.S.-led airstrikes drove out Islamic State militants earlier this month.

The discovery brings the total number of burial sites in the area to five and the total number of bodies uncovered to between 200 and 300, according to local officials.

While experts say proper excavation and identification of the bodies could take months, Sinjar residents are expressing frustration with the process so far, complaining that their requests from the Kurdish Regional Government for expert help have gone unanswered.

Residents are seeking a faster identification process and assistance in rebuilding the town, much of which is uninhabitable after more than a year of clashes and airstrikes.

The graves found over the weekend are believed to contain 80 to 100 bodies, Qasim Simo, the head of security in Sinjar, said on Sunday. Two were uncovered to the east of the town and one was found within the western edges of Sinjar town itself.

Experts caution however, that properly counting and identifying the dead is a process that could take months and requires a controlled environment.

Local media reports showed some of the burial sites being excavated with heavy construction equipment. At others, Kurdish Peshmerga fighters were seen moving what appeared to be human remains into plastic garbage bags.

“The important thing is that the site is secure,” said Kevin Sullivan of the International Commission on Missing Persons, an organization that specializes in war crimes documentation, including the excavation of mass grave sites.

“The site needs to be controlled, for example, by police or under authority of a prosecutor and the bodies need to be exhumed in a systematic way with any identifying artifacts,” as wallets and scraps of clothing, he said. Careful record taking is key to being able to initiate war crimes proceedings in the future, he added.

The proximity of many of the sites in Sinjar to active front lines makes circumstances particularly difficult, Sullivan said.

The first suspected mass graves were uncovered over two weeks ago within days of IS forces being pushed out of Sinjar. One, near the town’s center was estimated to contain 78 elderly women’s bodies, and another, about 15 kilometers (10 miles) outside of Sinjar, contained between 50 and 60 bodies of men, women and children, according to Qasim Samir, the Sinjar director of intelligence.

The Islamic State group captured Sinjar during its rampage across northern Iraq in the summer of 2014 and killed and captured thousands of members of the Yazidi religious minority, including women forced into sexual slavery. The group’s rapid expansion in Iraq’s north, which included a push toward the city of Erbil, spurred the U.S.-led coalition to launch a campaign of airstrikes against IS in Iraq and later Syria.

On Sunday the Pentagon said coalition aircraft carried out 19 airstrikes in Iraq, three of which struck targets near Sinjar and neighboring towns in Iraq’s northwest.

NYT’s: Obama’s Hypocrisy on Syria

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Imagine, the New York Times printed this…..so could it be that some even in the liberal realm of media believe that Barack Obama has failed in his policy or lack thereof with regard to Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey and beyond? Seems someone at the NYT’s allowed some op-ed space to a Republican.

President Obama’s Hypocrisy on Syria

by Peter Wehner, New York Times:

IN 2008, Barack Obama won the presidency promising that he would heal our political divisions. Instead, Mr. Obama has been as polarizing as any president in the history of modern polling. The debate over the Syrian refugee crisis illustrates why.

The civil war in Syria has created one of the worst refugee crises since World War II, and the president has instructed his administration to admit at least 10,000 refugees in fiscal year 2016. Republicans in Congress, in the aftermath of the massacre in Paris on Nov. 13, called for a pause in this process, in part because of their fear that terrorists might pose as refugees. The president, rather than trying to persuade his critics, mocked them.
“Apparently they’re scared of widows and orphans coming in to the United States of America as part of our tradition of compassion,” Mr. Obama said. “That doesn’t sound very tough to me.” According to the president, the most potent recruitment tool for the Islamic State isn’t jihadist social media or battlefield victories but Republican rhetoric. “They’ve been playing on fear in order to try to score political points or to advance their campaigns,” he said.

The president flippantly dismissed worries about the vetting process despite the fact that, as James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said in September, the possibility that the Islamic State might infiltrate operatives among Syrian refugees is “a huge concern of ours.”

Administration officials also acknowledge that there are limitations on determining the history of Syrian refugees since we’re in no position to collect vital information from Syria. Even if the president believes the case for accepting refugees overrides those concerns (as I basically do), he should acknowledge their legitimacy.

What made Mr. Obama’s assault on Republicans particularly outrageous is his hypocrisy, by which I mean the president’s failure to act in any meaningful way to avert the humanitarian disaster now engulfing Syria. It’s not as if options weren’t available to him.

In 2012 Mr. Obama rebuffed plans to arm Syrian rebels despite the fact that his former secretaries of defense and state, his C.I.A. director and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff supported them. He repeatedly insisted he would not put American soldiers in Syria or pursue a prolonged air campaign. He refused to declare safe havens or no-fly zones. And it was also in 2012 that Mr. Obama warned the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, that using chemical weapons would cross a “red line.” Yet when Mr. Assad did just that, Mr. Obama did nothing.

The president, perhaps fearful of offending the pro-Assad Iranian government with which he was trying to negotiate a nuclear arms deal, chose to sit by while a humanitarian catastrophe unfolded. As Walter Russell Mead wrote in The American Interest, “This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn.” Some of us find it a bit nervy for the president to lecture the opposition party for heartlessness because cleaning up after his failure raises security concerns.
A reasonable approach would take account of both the humanitarian crisis in Syria and the concerns of critics of the president’s proposal. Doing so might result in a pause in the process to reassess our security procedures, make improvements where necessary and then proceed. Under the leadership of the new speaker, Paul Ryan, the House has passed just such a proposal with a broad bipartisan majority — 47 Democrats sided with Republicans — but Mr. Obama has promised to veto it if it passes the Senate. In his Manichaean conception of politics, such balance has no place, it seems.

What we have seen and heard from Mr. Obama during the Syrian crisis — self-righteousness without self-reflection, taunting, exasperation that others don’t see the world just as he does, the inability to work constructively with his opponents — have been hallmarks of his presidency. The man who promised to strengthen our political culture has further disabled it.

The president doesn’t bear full responsibility for the fractured state of our politics. The causes are complicated. They predate the Obama presidency, and Republicans have certainly played a role. (For some on the right, compromise is in principle capitulation.)

Yet it was Barack Obama who in 2008 wanted us to “rediscover our bonds to each other” and put an end to the “constant petty bickering that’s come to characterize our politics.” He utterly failed in that and has to own his part in it. According to a new Pew Research Center study, 79 percent of Americans view the country as more politically divided than in the past.

Today our political discourse barely allows us to think clearly about, let alone rise to meet, the enormous challenges we face at home and abroad. Trust in government has reached one of its lowest levels in the past half-century. Americans are deeply cynical about the entire political enterprise; they are losing faith in the normal democratic process.

This creates the conditions for the rise of demagogues, of people who excel at inflaming tensions. Enter Donald J. Trump, who delights in tearing down the last remaining guardrails in our political culture.

Mr. Obama is hardly responsible for Mr. Trump, and it’s up to my fellow Republican primary voters to repudiate his malignant candidacy. Not doing so would be a moral indictment of our party. But in amplifying some of the worst tendencies in our politics, Mr. Obama helped make the rise of Mr. Trump possible.

Will Christians Take on the Radical Mosques?

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The challenge for the United States is to understand what is factually happening in Europe and then look inward. It is time to reckon with the truth and the genesis of militant Islam festering in America. With more than 900 active Islamic State cases being investigated by the FBI in America, there is no denial about where it manifests, mosques and social media. Check your state here.

Has the time arrived for all religious sects outside of Islam to compete for the hearts and minds and if so, who is going to take heed? Europe has an issue that is out of control and there is but one group that is taking a forward leaning posture.

Mysterious ‘Christian State’ Group Threatens Muslims in Letter To Brussels Mosque

Newsweek: A mosque in Brussels received a letter from a previously-unknown group calling itself the “Christian State” this week threatening to kill Muslims and attack their businesses in the country, according to French and Belgian media reports.

The letter arrived on Monday to a mosque in the Molenbeek district of the city, the area linked to a number of radical Islamists suspected of involvement in the deadly Paris attacks of November 13.

According to French daily Le Parisien, the anonymous letter said that “no mosque and none of your businesses will be safe” and threatened that “brothers [Muslims] will be slaughtered like pigs and crucified as our Lord converts their souls.”

It also warned that the group “ will avenge our brothers who fell in the various [Paris] attacks.”

Belgium Europe France The alleged letter sent by the “Christian State” to the Brussels mosque. Twitter / @MarwaanTunsi

The Attadamoun Mosque in Molenbeek, which received the letter, is in the hometown of the three Abdeslam brothers linked to the attacks that left 130 people dead.

Salah Abdeslam, 26, remains at large; Brahim, 31, killed himself when he detonated a suicide vest at a Paris restaurant and Belgian police released Mohamed after he was detained over a possible connection to his brothers’ actions.

The “Christian State” group named on the letter is not known and it remains unclear who and how many people are either in the group or were responsible for the letter. Other Belgian media reports indicated that two other Brussels mosques had also received a version of the document.

Jamal Habbachich, the president of Molenbeek’s mosque association, which includes 16 of 22 mosques in Brussels, said he found the letter in a postbox at the mosque and subsequently filed a complaint with Belgian authorities over the death threat. He added that he would request police patrols at all of the city’s mosques, especially for Friday prayers.

“In the current climate, with fear in everyone’s minds, it is disturbing,” he told Le Parisien when asked about the letter. A video posted by Le Parisien shows Habbachich printing off a copy of the letter, marked by the initials E.C., or “Etat Chrétien” [Christian State].

He told Belgium’s RTBF broadcaster: “There are two situations when you receive this kind of letter. It is a document written by someone unbalanced, or it is a very serious threat. What also concerns me is the name of the author of the letter, which uses similar terminology to that of the Islamic State.”

Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel last week said that the government may close “certain radical mosques” in the Molenbeek district over fears that it was the location where the Paris attacks were launched.

On Thursday, Brussels’ Grand Mosque, which Saudi Arabia gifted to Belgium, was evacuated after packets of white powder caused a security alert. Authorities later revealed that the powder was flour.

A four-day lockdown of the European capital came to an end on Wednesday as Belgian authorities lowered the maximum security threat level to “serious” due to fears of a Paris-like attack. Police remained on the streets and metro stations and schools continued to reopen, Michel said on Thursday. France held a national day of mourning for the victims of the coordinated shooting and suicide bomb attacks on Friday.

WH Pro-Action on Refugees, Meet Reema

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The White House is in full marketing and propaganda mode when it comes to forcing states to accept refugees. There are even some threats as well as videos the White House has launched.

Obama warns states they can’t refuse Syrian refugees

TheHill: The Obama administration is warning states that they cannot refuse to accept refugees fleeing war-torn Syria, saying that noncompliant states may be subject to penalties.

The federal Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) said in a letter to state agencies on Wednesday that they cannot withhold services to refugees based on their country of origin or religion.

“Accordingly, states may not categorically deny ORR-funded benefits and services to Syrian refugees,” the letter said. “Any state with such a policy would not be in compliance with the State Plan requirements, applicable statutes, and their own assurances, and could be subject to enforcement action, including suspension and termination.”

The letter cited the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which bars discrimination on the basis of race or country or origin.

“Thus, it is not permissible to deny federally funded benefits such as Medicaid or TANF to refugees who otherwise meet the eligibility requirements.”

The House overwhelmingly passed a measure earlier this month to make it more difficult for Syrian refugees to enter the country, following the Nov. 13 terrorist attack in Paris in which at least one assailant is suspected of entering the country posed as a migrant.

The ORR letter said refugees are subject to a rigorous screening process before they enter the country.

“It is the most robust screening process for any category of individuals seeking admissions into the United States, and it is only after admission that ORR and our partners in resettlement begin our work,” the letter said.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.) slammed the Obama administration as “hypocritical” over the letter.

“While the United States has the most generous refugee system in the world, the American people are rightly concerned about admitting Syrian refugees and the impact it would have on the safety of their families and neighbors,” Goodlatte said in a statement.

“It’s hypocritical for Obama Administration officials to threaten enforcement action against these states when they refuse to enforce the vast majority of our immigration laws, such as cracking down on sanctuary cities that openly defy federal law and endanger the American people,” he continued.

Obama has vowed to allow 10,000 Syrian refugees into the U.S. over the next fiscal year.

 

Read ORR letter

 

WH and State Dept. Admitted the Ploy of Iran Deal

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Deal or no deal? No deal, no signatures, no vote, no sanctions, no burdens on Iran.

TheTower: Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s deputy foreign minister, warned that if the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) doesn’t close its file of past Iranian nuclear violations, the Islamic Republic will stop complying with the terms of the nuclear agreement it reached with the P5+1 powers, Iran’s semi-official PressTV news service reported on Thursday.

Seyyed Abbas Araqchi said on Wednesday that the IAEA’s Director General Yukiya Amano has decided to release a report on the Iranian nuclear program on December 1, and the Agency’s Board of Governors will review the report and make a final decision in a meeting on December 15.

Araqchi said the report by Amano should result in the closure of the PMD issue.

“In case Yukiya Amano or the Board of Governors presents their report in such a way that it does not meet the stipulated commitments, the Islamic Republic of Iran will also stop [the implementation of] the JCPOA,” he said, in reference to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1.

The IAEA has been tasked with the monitoring and verification of technical issues under the JCPOA. Full article here.

***
NationalReview: President Obama didn’t require Iranian leaders to sign the nuclear deal that his team negotiated with the regime, and the deal is not “legally binding,” his administration acknowledged in a letter to Representative Mike Pompeo (R., Kan.) obtained by National Review. “The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) is not a treaty or an executive agreement, and is not a signed document,” wrote Julia Frifield, the State Department assistant secretary for legislative affairs, in the November 19 letter.
Frifield wrote the letter in response to a letter Pompeo sent Secretary of State John Kerry, in which he observed that the deal the president had submitted to Congress was unsigned and wondered if the administration had given lawmakers the final agreement. Frifield’s response emphasizes that Congress did receive the final version of the deal. But by characterizing the JCPOA as a set of “political commitments” rather than a more formal agreement, it is sure to heighten congressional concerns that Iran might violate the deal’s terms. “The success of the JCPOA will depend not on whether it is legally binding or signed, but rather on the extensive verification measures we have put in place, as well as Iran’s understanding that we have the capacity to re-impose — and ramp up — our sanctions if Iran does not meet its commitments,” Frifield wrote to Pompeo.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani discouraged his nation’s parliament from voting on the nuclear deal in order to avoid placing legal burdens on the regime. “If the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action is sent to [and passed by] parliament, it will create an obligation for the government. It will mean the president, who has not signed it so far, will have to sign it,” Rouhani said in August. “Why should we place an unnecessary legal restriction on the Iranian people?” Pompeo cited that comment in his letter to Kerry, but Frifield did not explicitly address it in her reply. “This is not a mere formality,” Pompeo wrote in his September 19 letter. “Those signatures represent the commitment of the signatory and the country on whose behalf he or she is signing. A signature also serves to make clear precisely who the parties to the agreement are and the authority under which that nation entered into the agreement. In short, just as with any legal instrument, signing matters.” The full State Department letter is below:

Letter from State Department Regarding JCPOA