Category Archives: Veterans

International Red Cross is a Political Wing for Foreign Policy

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Red Crescent too….

Hamas Charter: Article Two: The Link between Hamas and the Association of Muslim Brothers
The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the wings of the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The Muslim Brotherhood Movement is a world organization, the largest Islamic Movement in the modern era. It is characterized by a profound understanding, by precise notions and by a complete comprehensiveness of all concepts of Islam in all domains of life: views and beliefs, politics and economics, education and society, jurisprudence and rule, indoctrination and teaching, the arts and publications, the hidden and the evident, and all the other domains of life.

Article Twenty-Eight
 The Zionist invasion is a mischievous one. It does not hesitate to take any road, or to pursue all despicable and repulsive means to fulfill its desires. It relies to a great extent, for its meddling and spying activities, on the clandestine organizations which it has established, such as the Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, Lions, and other spying associations. All those secret organizations, some which are overt, act for the interests of Zionism and under its directions, strive to demolish societies, to destroy values, to wreck answerableness, to totter virtues and to wipe out Islam. It stands behind the diffusion of drugs and toxics of all kinds in order to facilitate its control and expansion. The Arab states surrounding Israel are required to open their borders to the Jihad fighters, the sons of the Arab and Islamic peoples, to enable them to play their role and to join their efforts to those of their brothers among the Muslim Brothers in Palestine. The other Arab and Islamic states are required, at the very least, to facilitate the movement of the Jihad fighters from and to them. We cannot fail to remind every Muslim that when the Jews occupied Holy Jerusalem in 1967 and stood at the doorstep of the Blessed Aqsa Mosque, they shouted with joy: “Muhammad is dead, he left daughters behind.” Israel, by virtue of its being Jewish and of having a Jewish population, defies Islam and the Muslims. “Let the eyes of the cowards not fall asleep.” Read all 36 Hamas Charter Articles here.

Cant make this up! Notice how blame always included Israel.

Red Cross Offers Workshops in International Law to Hamas

NYT: GAZA CITY — A new training regimen for fighters in Hamas’s armed wing employs slide presentations and a whiteboard rather than Kalashnikov rifles and grenades. The young men wear polo shirts instead of fatigues and black masks. They do not chant anti-Israel slogans, but discuss how the Geneva Conventions governing armed conflict dovetail with Islamic principles.

The three-day workshop, conducted last month by the International Committee of the Red Cross, followed numerous human-rights reports accusing both Israel and Hamas, the Islamist group that controls Gaza, of war crimes in their devastating battle last summer, and came as the International Criminal Court prosecutor conducts a preliminary inquiry into that conflict.

It was clear during the opening session that the Red Cross would face a steep climb to convince militant Islamists that international law should govern their resistance against Israel.

“The prophet used to give orders to his army that you don’t kill any child, don’t cut any tree,” one fighter said promisingly, lending Quranic support to the principle of distinguishing between soldiers and civilians. “As long as he is not fighting me, I should not kill him.”

But a colleague soon countered, “The prophet is different than today,” and the conversation quickly shifted from Hamas’s own questionable methods to the enemy.

“They killed us, they killed our babies,” one militant insisted, speaking of the Israeli military. Of the humanitarian principles underpinning both Islam and international law, he added, “Sometimes we need to overlook these things, because the situation is different.”

The Red Cross developed its program in conjunction with Islamic scholars several years ago, but ramped it up after last summer’s deadly battle. So far this year, it has conducted six sessions for a total of 210 fighters from Hamas’s Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades and two other Gaza armed groups. Another workshop is scheduled for this week.

 Skeptics may question the utility of teaching humanitarian law to a guerrilla force that the United States and the European Union classify as a terrorist organization. The Qassam Brigades fired thousands of rockets and mortars toward Israeli cities last summer; its weapons caches have been found in civilian homes and schools across Gaza, and Israel alleges that it uses Palestinian residents as human shields, purposely risking their lives to mobilize international ire against Israel.

But Red Cross leaders say they have seen an increasing commitment from Hamas leaders and linemen alike, if only because they now consider their international image a critical component of their struggle.

Mamadou Sow, who heads Red Cross operations in Gaza, said that in April he presented a critique of Hamas’s conduct during the 2014 hostilities to its top political and military leaders, and that they “welcomed it” and “indicated that they are a learning organization.” He said they also “challenged us to keep in mind the topology of the Gaza Strip,” one of the most densely populated patches on the planet.

“For the first time,” said Jacques de Maio, director of the Red Cross delegation in Israel and the Palestinian territories, “Hamas is actually, in a private, protected space, expressing a readiness to look critically at a number of things that have an impact on their level of respect for international humanitarian law.”

He added, “Whether this will translate into something concrete, time will tell.”

Besides participating in the workshops, Hamas has altered its propaganda in the aftermath of the war. New talking points stress that tunnel attacks last summer targeted military positions, not civilian communities, and argue — dubiously — that rockets fly toward civilian areas because the Gaza groups lack guiding technology.

Still, Hamas leaders routinely praise attacks on Israelis, and there are widespread reports that Qassam is rebuilding tunnels to infiltrate Israeli territory.

Last week, in announcing the arrest of a Qassam fighter in July, Israel’s security service said that he had told interrogators “the organization’s fighters endanger many civilians by storing explosives in their homes, on the instructions of Hamas commanders.”

Mr. de Maio of the Red Cross acknowledged that “a big ethical, fundamental question would be, ‘Are we now shaking hands with the devil?’ ” But he said his group’s work with rogue rulers and rebels around the world had altered their modi operandi. He cited a 2011 episode in Afghanistan in which operatives painted a vehicle like an ambulance. “We engaged with the Taliban and it was a long process,” he said. Eventually commanders issued an order saying it was a mistake that should not be repeated, “and it didn’t happen again.”

The Red Cross and the Qassam Brigades let reporters from The New York Times observe the first day of the workshop in July, on the condition that neither the trainers nor the participants be named, and that no photographs be taken. Role-playing and case studies — one exercise involved an armed group firing on an invading tank from the garden of a civilian home, near a hospital — were also off limits.

Most of the men were in their 20s and wore trim beards. Their leader opened by saying, “All what we’re going to hear we can find in our religion,” urging them “to take it very seriously” and reminding them to silence their cellphones.

The seminar unfolded in a room of Al Salam Restaurant, overlooking the beachfront where four young cousins were killed by Israeli missiles in 2014, a seminal episode that prompted one of the loudest international outcries of the war. Israeli military investigators later classified the attack as a tragic mistake.

During five hours of conversation, the fighters did not reflect on their own questionable activities or debate any situations they faced regarding risk to civilians while operating in Gaza’s urban landscape. Instead, they repeatedly turned the focus to Israel.

“You are dealing with an enemy that there’s not any difference between soldier and civilian,” insisted one fighter in a plaid shirt.

“Israelis violated everything,” another declared. “You say this also to the Jews?”

Yes, the Red Cross officials said, they conduct similar sessions with the Israeli military. This prompted more outrage. “You equalize the victim and the criminal,” one fighter said accusingly. “All of you, until now, you did not denounce the crimes of the Zionists.”

Others challenged Red Cross war efforts — providing water to refugee camps, repairing downed power lines, restoring cellular service, arranging with Israel to evacuate the wounded from bombarded areas.

“What was your role when the massacre in Rafah happened?” one fighter wanted to know, referring to Black Friday, when Qassam fighters took the remains of a slain Israeli soldier after a tunnel battle, prompting an Israeli assault that killed as many as 200 civilians. “We were besieged inside the hospital — why didn’t the I.C.R.C. help us?”

The trainer allowed, “The whole environment was very complicated, we couldn’t deal with everything and every place — you can’t have a war without victims.”

The Qassam coordinator, who gave only his nom de guerre, Abu Mahmoud, refused to let participants be interviewed about their experience or to engage in any substantive discussion of the group’s methods. “We did not commit war crimes as much as the Israelis did,” he said, adding that “civilian casualties happen because we are not an organized army.”

As for the International Criminal Court inquiry into both sides, he said with a shrug: “It will not affect us. We are, eventually, victims and they are occupiers, so there is no comparison.”

A 23-year-old Qassam member who participated in a similar workshop in May 2014, was permitted to speak only with Abu Mahmoud monitoring. He said that he had “signed a paper saying I should not kill civilians” upon joining Qassam four years ago, and that last summer, “the rules and teachings of this training made me fight within limits.”

Pressed for examples, the fighter recalled one instance in which “some of my colleagues wanted to have a military task inside a school, but we prevented this from happening.”

“We explained the consequences of such actions,” he said. “What will happen in the I.C.C. against us, and the international community. We don’t want to have a weakness point, and that the occupation will use it against us.”

Germany’s Long History with Iran, Surfaced with Jimmy Carter

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If you saw the movie Argo, well it appears very little of it was either true or purposely was designed to include Germany’s hidden relationship with Iran. Sheesh…things are for sure coming into play and full understanding given the recent Iran nuclear deal.

Iranian Hostage Crisis: West Germany’s Secret Role in Ending the Drama

By Klaus Wiegrefe

The day after the last day of his presidency, Jimmy Carter flew to Frankfurt to greet 52 American diplomats who had been held as hostages for about a year by radical students in United States Embassy in Tehran. Now they were being attended to in a US Air Force hospital in Wiesbaden, near Frankfurt, and Carter wanted to express his sympathy.

On Jan. 21, 1981, the ex-president had warm, but mysterious, words for his German hosts. At the time, Helmut Schmidt, a member of the center-left Social Democrats, and Hans-Dietrich Genscher, of the liberal FDP, were leading West Germany in the former capital city of Bonn. The Germans, Carter said, “helped us in a way I can never reveal publicly to the world.”

The race to apportion credit began only moments after the words about Germany’s mysterious role had been uttered. Chancellor Schmidt allowed himself to be celebrated by the daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, which wrote that “Bonn appears to have played a decisive role.” Foreign Minister Genscher was lauded by the tabloid Bild, which claimed the “release had been negotiated at night at Genscher’s.” And Middle East negotiator Hans-Jürgen Wischnewski was praised in the daily Die Welt.

The occupation of the US Embassy and the 444-day hostage situation remains one of the most dramatic events of the post-World War II era. It represented the Western world’s first encounter with the radical Shiite movement of Ayatollah Khomeini, which was violating the rules of international law. A mob could be seen burning American flags on the embassy property, and for a time Iran and the US appeared to be on the verge of war. In the end, however, everyone claimed to have helped them to reach a peaceful solution.

The details of the German contribution, however, remained unclear. Now historian Frank Bösch, the director of the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam and SPIEGEL have conducted research in German archives and spoken with period witnesses. This has revealed that the West German government at the time had a “smooth intermediary role,” as Bösch puts it. And one of the key figures, it turns out, is barely known: Gerhard Ritzel, the German ambassador in Tehran.

Witnesses from the time describe the small, portly native of the Odenwald region in central Germany, who died in 2000, as a very sly man. He’s also one whose career is rich in anecdotes. As a young diplomat in the 1950s, he pretended to trip at a reception in Bombay (now Mumbai) so that he could fall on top of a banquet table covered with colored rice kernels in the shape of a swastika. In India, the swastika is a symbol of luck and the thoughtless host had served it up in honor of his German guests. Before a meeting with Soviet diplomats, Ritzel ate sardines and drank his colleagues under the table.

Contact with the Opposition

When Ritzel took his post in Tehran in 1977, the shah, who had a good relationship with Bonn, was still in power. Iran was Germany’s largest source of oil and, in exchange, was pressing Schmidt and Genscher for the planned export of submarines, frigates and nuclear power plants.

At the time, Ritzel was also trying to establish contact with the fundamentalist Iranian opposition. They were adventurous meetings, which he told everyone about afterwards. Before the meetings, a car would pick him up in front of a hotel, and the driver would drop him off somewhere in Tehran with a note pressed into his hand. On it stood: “Wait here, a blue pick-up will come by.” He would then changed cars one more time and ultimately had to cross various courtyards and climb into an upper floor whose wall had been punctured by a mortar. There he met his interlocutors, a group that would soon be taking over power in Iran.

In January 1979, after millions of people demonstrated against him, the shah left Iran. A few weeks later, Khomeini returned from his Parisian exile and announced the beginning of an Islamic Republic.

Ritzel quickly came to terms with the regime change. The West feared that Iran could slip into the Soviet sphere of influence. Khomeini seemed to be the lesser evil — and the new regime didn’t appear to have much of a future. “The ayatollahs can’t govern the country in the long run,” Chancellor Schmidt prophesized in March 1979. He conveyed to Khomeini that Iran would remain an “important external trading partner, regardless of its form of government.”

Ritzel, however, seems to have truly liked Khomeini. The Shiite leader, he later claimed, was a “humanitarian.” He also argued that the West should be “thankful if he is around for many more years.”

Ritzel as Intermediary

The ambassador purposefully established contact with people in the “Imam’s” milieu. He profited from the fact that Khomeini was partly surrounded by men who had lived in the West Germany, including Sadeq Tabatabaei, who had completed his doctorate at the Ruhr University in Bochum. His sister had married one of the ayatollah’s sons.

Tabatabaei became a senior government official in Tehran and Ritzel’s main interlocutor. After the beginning of the hostage-taking on Nov. 4, 1979, he also became the Germany’s main source of hope in the quickly escalating crisis. Khomeini put his support behind the students, describing the United States as “the great Satan,” while President Carter imposed strict sanctions, demanding that his allies do the same and ordering the preparations for a military attack.

Ritzel was one of the few Western diplomats officials in Tehran would still listen to. In order to safeguard German export interests, the government in Bonn wanted a quick end to the crisis. Ritzel obtained permission for a delegation from the International Red Cross to visit the hostages. He had newspapers brought to the imprisoned Americans, including a January 1979 issue of DER SPIEGEL featuring Khomeini on the cover at the top of the stack. When the revolutionary leader wanted to convince the shah to face the “complaints of the Iranian people,” the relevant letter was given to Ritzel. The shah, however, refused to accept it.

The situation in Tehran was confusing for the Americans, because self-described middlemen were constantly popping up. The Americans first approached Ritzel in May 1980. Together with Genscher, he flew to Vienna to meet with then US Secretary of State Edmund Muskie. There, Muskie and Ritzel had a one-on-one conversation, and when Tabatabaei found out about it, the Iranian declared that he could be of service to the German ambassador.

At the request of the Americans, the German Foreign Ministry passed Ritzel’s situation reports on to the US. The Iranians were worried that a retaliatory military attack would take place if the hostages were released. They also wanted back the deposits of $12 million that Carter had had frozen in US banks and access to the shah’s fortune, which they believed to be in the US. On May 27, the US Embassy in Bonn communicated that Ritzel should tell the Iranians that Carter would “seriously consider” a declaration to this effect.

Ritzel’s Savvy Ploy

In order to get the ayatollahs to compromise, the resourceful Ritzel undertook a journey to the spiritual leader of the holy city of Mashhad. He politely asked for the terms “truth,” “justice” and “hospitality” to be interpreted for him from an Islamic perspective.

After three days of religious-spiritual debate, the ayatollah asked the visitor why he had really come to visit. Ritzel’s honest answer: He was looking for arguments for the release of the hostages. “I will think about this,” answered the cleric. Soon after, a messenger arrived at Ritzel’s, with a document from the cleric for Khomeini that indirectly frowned upon the hostage-taking. Years later, Genscher raved about how the diplomat had created a “basis for the trust” on the part of the Iranians in the German government.

On Sept. 9, Tabatabaei offered to meet with a US delegation in West Germany. Under Khomeini’s instruction, he asked that Germany keep the minutes for the meeting, and that Genscher “be involved” in the discussions for as long as possible.

One week later, the secret negotiations between Tabatabaei and Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher began in the guest house of the German Foreign Ministry in Bonn under Genscher’s leadership. Christopher was surprised when he met Tabatabaei: A good-looking man in his mid-thirties wearing flannel pants and a sporty tweed blazer. He hadn’t thought that a representative of the Khomeini regime could look like that.

His demands, however, posed problems for the US emissaries. Ultimately, Washington couldn’t take control over the now-dead shah’s funds. American creditors were also demanding compensation for confiscated Iranian assets.

But Christopher did offer a guarantee that the US would not attack and held out the prospect that approximately $6 billion in gold and other assets would be released. The gold was to be handed over with the help of the Bundesbank, Germany’s central bank. Christopher also agreed to “help overcome banking secrecy” to access the shah’s fortune. Genscher added that this seemed “exceptionally far-reaching and very substantial,” and that his government could not offer anything on that scale. Even years later, Christopher still seemed convinced that without the help of the foreign minister, the discussions would have fallen apart at this point.

Carter noted in his diary that, for the first time, he was certain that he was “in direct contact” with Khomeini.

An agreement seemed to be close. Over the following weeks, Ritzel met with Tabatabaei almost every day. For reasons of secrecy, the latter was now referred to as “the traveler” in German documents.

Sudden Twist

In early October, the Americans deposited drafts for legislative decrees — with which Carter wanted to resolve the disputed points — in the US Embassy in Bonn. Genscher helped where he could. He offered to Tabatabaei that Germany would take on the “role of guarantor when it comes to Americans’ adherence of their obligations.” He agreed to “positively influence public opinion about Iran” and suggested meetings in Berchtesgaden, Germany, or Saudi Arabia.

Then, suddenly, the Iranian side froze up again, for reasons that have been widely speculated. The American election was set to take place on Nov. 4 — did Khomeini want to prevent Carter from getting a boost in the election if the hostage drama came to an end? Or had another group gotten the upper hand in the power struggle in Tehran?

In any case, Tabatabaei delivered alarming news on Nov. 9. He said he was in danger of being arrested and that Ritzel needed to make sure that all documents testifying to Tabatabaei’s role were destroyed.

That fear ended up being exaggerated: Tabatabaei, who died earlier this year, was later named special envoy. But when the Iranians took up negotiations with the United States again in November, they bypassed him and his German connection. Algeria ended up helping release the Iranian billions and on Jan. 20, 1981, the hostages were flown out of the country. US President Carter’s praise for the Germans, however, endured. Without their prior mediation, Historian Bösch says, the agreement wouldn’t have worked out. Even the suggestion to include Algeria came from Bonn. According to the records, it came from Helmut Schmidt.

U.S. Germany to Remove Missile Defense Systems from Turkey

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WTH??? Anyone who believes the reasons for these decisions needs to think again.
I personally will throw in my reason, it is part of the Iran Deal where under the P5+1, John Kerry and Wendy Sherman along with The White House gave up yet another major item….missile defense. Iran and the IRGC must be delighted.
 Germany to Withdraw Patriot Missiles From Turkey in 2016
Berlin:  Germany on Saturday said it would withdraw its two Patriot missile batteries from Turkey early next year, ending its role in a three-year NATO mission to help bolster the country’s air defences against threats from Syria’s civil war.

The German army, known as the Bundeswehr, said on its website that the mandate for the mission would run out on January 31, 2016, and would not be renewed.

Germany will also call back around 250 soldiers who are currently deployed in southeastern Turkey as part of the mission, the statement said.

“Along with our NATO partners, we have protected the Turkish people from missile attacks from Syria,” Defence Minister Ursula von der Leyen was quoted as saying in the statement.

“We are ending this deployment in January 2016,” she said, adding that the main threat in the crisis-wracked region now came from the Islamic State group.

Turkey turned to its NATO allies for help over its troubled frontier after a mortar bomb fired from Syrian territory killed five Turkish civilians in the border town of Akcakale in 2012.

The United States, the Netherlands and Germany each sent Patriot missile batteries in response. Germany’s Patriot missile system is based in the Turkish town of Kahramanmaras, some 100 kilometres (60 miles) from the Syrian border.

Originally used as an anti-aircraft missile, Patriots today are used to defend airspace by detecting and destroying incoming missiles. NATO deployed Patriot missiles in Turkey during the 1991 Gulf war and in 2003 during the Iraqi conflict.

U.S. pulling Patriot missiles from Turkey

FNC: The U.S. military is pulling its Patriot missiles from Turkey this fall, the U.S. Embassy in Ankara announced Sunday.

It is unclear if the decision to pull the missiles is in response to Turkey’s unannounced massive airstrike against a Kurdish separatist group in northern Iraq on July 24. The strike endangered U.S. Special Forces on the ground training Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, angering U.S. military officials.

The U.S. military was taken completely by surprise by the Turkish airstrike, which involved 26 jets, military sources told Fox News.

Patriot missiles have been upgraded in recent years to shoot down ballistic missiles, in addition to boasting an ability to bring down enemy aircraft. The U.S. military has deployed these missiles along Turkey’s border with Syria.

When a Kurdish journalist asked the Army’s outgoing top officer, Gen. Raymond Odierno, about the incident over northern Iraq at his final press conference Wednesday, Odierno replied: “We’ve had conversations about this to make sure it doesn’t happen.”

The Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK, has been listed as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department. It is influenced by Marxist ideology and has been responsible for recent attacks in Turkey, killing Turkish police and military personnel. A separate left-wing radical group was responsible for attacking the U.S. Consulate in Istanbul last week.

State Department and Pentagon officials have said in recent days that Turkey has a right to defend itself against the PKK.

A senior military source told Fox News that Turkey is worried about recent gains by Syrian Kurds, some affiliated with the PKK. But the group is seen as an effective ground force against ISIS, helping pinpoint ISIS targets for U.S. warplanes.

The Turks, however, worry Syrian Kurds will take over most of the 560-mile border it shares with Syria.

Currently, ISIS controls a 68-mile strip along the Turkey-Syria border, but Turkey does not want Kurdish fighters involved in the fight to push out ISIS from this portion of the border because it would enable the Kurds to control a large swath of land stretching from northern Iraq to the Mediterranean. Right now Syrian Kurds occupy both sides of the contested 68-mile border controlled by ISIS.

Of the 30 million Kurds living in the Middle East, 14 million reside in Turkey. They are one of the world’s largest ethnic groups without its own country.

Despite Turkey being listed among the 62-nation anti-ISIS coalition, it has yet to be named as a country striking ISIS in the coalition’s daily airstrike report.

A week ago, after months of negotiations, the U.S. Air Force moved six F-16 fighter jets to Incirlik Air Base in Turkey from their base in Italy and several KC-135 refueling planes. Airstrikes against ISIS in Syria soon followed.

The decision to allow manned U.S. military aircraft inside Turkey came days after an ISIS suicide bomber killed dozens of Turkish citizens.

Part of Turkey’s reluctance to do more against ISIS is because Turkey wants the U.S. military to take on the regime of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. But that is not U.S. policy.

“We are not at war with the Assad regime,” Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis said recently.

The animosity between Turkey and Syria goes back decades. In 1939, Turkey annexed its southern most province, Hatay, from Assad family land. Syria has never recognized the move and the two countries have been at odds ever since.

There was no immediate reply from the Pentagon or State Dept. when contacted by Fox News asking what prompted the decision to pull the U.S. missiles from Turkey.

This is What War Planning and Victory Looked Like

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The nobility of another time where the United States had a strategy and led.

World War II ended 70 years ago — here’s the planned US invasion of Japan that never happened

Business Insider: On August 14, 1945, US President Harry Truman announced the unconditional surrender of Japanese Emperor Hirohito, thereby ending World War II.

vj day kiss

The surrender came after months of bombing raids across the Japanese countryside, two atomic bombs, and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on the island nation.

The iron resolve of the Japanese was a major factor the US anticipated while planning the invasion of mainland Japan. The culture known for literally putting death before dishonor with practices such as hara-kiri would not, by any stretch of the imagination, go softly into surrender.

By the time the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, 500,000 Japanese had already died during bombing raids, not just in Tokyo, but in smaller towns too.

This badly hurt Japanese morale as Yutaka Akabane, a senior-level civil servant, observed: “It was the raids on the medium and smaller cities which had the worst effect and really brought home to the people the experience of bombing and a demoralization of faith in the outcome of the war.”

But despite several bombing raids a week in the beginning of 1945, and the resulting displacement of 5 million people, the Japanese remained resolute.

And as US forces prepared a ground invasion, they were acutely aware of the challenges they faced against an iron-willed Japanese population.

tokyo bombing ww2 wwii world war 2 japan

The planning committee for the US invasion expected that “operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organized military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population.”

Nevertheless, the Allied forces prepared to send 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyer ships and escorts to Japan’s coast. The Allies expected 456,000 deaths in the invasion of Japan’s military stronghold at the island of Kyushu alone.

In preparation for what everyone expected to be a bloody, prolonged clash, the US government manufactured 500,000 Purple Hearts to be awarded to troops wounded in the invasion.

At the same time, 32 million Japanese braced for war. That figure includes all men ages 15 to 60, and all women ages 17 to 45. The US anticipated them to bear whatever weapons they could muster, from bamboo spears, to antique cannons, to machine guns.

Children had even been trained to act as suicide bombers, strapping explosives to themselves and rolling under Allied tank treads.

But on July 16, 1945, the US secretly and successfully carried out the world’s first atomic-bomb detonation, giving the US another option in the war against Japan.

atomic bomb

After the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, where 140,000 lost their lives, on August 8, the USSR then declared war on Japan as well, and on the next day they attacked Japanese-occupied Manchuria, China. On that same day, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing another 40,000 instantly.

hirohito japan

Japanese Emperor Hirohito.

Japan had previously been presented the Potsdam Declaration, or terms for an unconditional surrender, but the country had refused it.

Even after the two atomic bombs, Japan would not surrender for fear of how Emperor Hirohito would be treated after the war.

Emperor Hirohito was not merely a constitutional monarch, but a living god in the eyes of the Japanese. They would not see him treated as a war criminal by Allied forces — and after Pearl Harbor and 20 million or so Asian lives lost to Japanese imperialism, the Allies would accept nothing less than an unconditional surrender.

Japan and the Allies spent mid-August arguing over the exact language of the surrender, but on August 15, Emperor Hirohito addressed his nation via radio for the first time ever to announce the country’s surrender. Because of a difference in time zones, this anniversary is remembered on August 14 in the US.

Just last month, Japan officially released the master audio recording of Hirohito’s surrender. A version of this recording can be heard below:

 

 

al Qaeda and Taliban New Allegiance in Afghanistan

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The Taliban has raised their flag after they take control of the Helmand district in Afghanistan. Afghan soldiers bailed out and the Taliban has seized military gear supplied to the Afghanistan forces after killing 40 Afghan soldiers and police.

Sharia will be imposed and wield deeper power in the region.

After the official declaration of the deal of Mullah Omar was announced, the Taliban leadership was fractured due to a sense of betrayal. During many tribal meetings, it was soon announced that Mullah Akhtar Mansour would be the new leader.

 Omar

 Mansour

Ayman al Zawahiri, who took control of al Qaeda after the death of Usama bin Ladin made a declaration of pledge and cooperation with Akhtar Mansour where new threats against America have been officially broadcasted.


al Zawahiri has been thought to be hiding in the Pakistan border region and recently produced an audio raising news fears in the region. Additionally, while there have been several attempts at peace talks with the Afghanistan government, the Taliban is now formally opposed.

In part from Reuters: The swift announcement that Mansour, Omar’s longtime deputy, would be the new leader has riled many senior Taliban figures, and Omar’s family said this month that it did not endorse the move.

Mansour’s position could be shored up by the vote of confidence by al Qaeda, the global militant group that has maintained ties with the Taliban for almost two decades since the tenure of its founder and late leader Osama bin Laden.

“As leader of the al Qaeda organization for jihad, I offer our pledge of allegiance, renewing the path of Sheikh Osama and the devoted martyrs in their pledge to the commander of the faithful, the holy warrior Mullah Omar,” Zawahiri added.

Reiterating support for the Taliban is also a tacit rejection of Islamic State, the new ultra-radical Sunni Muslim movement that is ensconced in Iraq and Syria and has gained the support of a few Afghan insurgent commanders.

Al Qaeda is being challenged by Islamic State for leadership of the global jihadist movement, as determined backers of IS have cropped up in Libya and Yemen this year.

Al Qaeda was set up by Arab guerrillas who flocked to Afghanistan to fight Soviet occupation forces in the 1980s. It thrived under the Taliban’s 1996-2001 rule in Afghanistan before the U.S. invasion that followed Al Qaeda’s Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington drove both groups underground.