Mystery strike on car kills two in Port Sudan.

KHARTOUM – Two people were killed in an attack on a car near Port Sudan on Tuesday, which police suggested was a missile fired from the sea, while state media and a regional government official blamed a foreign aircraft.

Witnesses at the scene near the airport at Sudan’s main port city said the small car was destroyed and the two charred bodies of its passengers could be seen.

“A missile from an unknown source probably bombed the car,” police spokesman Ahmed Al-Tahmi told Reuters. He earlier told local radio the missile had likely been fired from the Red Sea.

The Sudanese Media Center, a news agency linked to Sudan’s state security apparatus, and the speaker of the Red Sea state parliament, Ahmed Tahir, said an unidentified aircraft had flown into Sudanese air space to bomb the car.

The plane came in from the Red Sea and flew back after the bombing, Tahir said. The Sudanese Media Center said the army responded with missiles that the foreign plane managed to evade.

“We heard three loud explosions,” a source at Port Sudan airport told Reuters. “We went outside to see what was happening and eye witnesses told us they saw two helicopters which looked liked Apaches flying past.”

Tahir said the two people killed were traveling into the town from the airport when their car was hit. They have not been identified.

Sudan’s foreign ministry declined to comment. Sudan’s army was not immediately available to comment.

This is not the first time mystery has surrounded a strike in Sudan’s eastern Red Sea state.

In January 2009, unknown aircraft hit a convoy of suspected arms smugglers on a remote road in the state according to Sudanese officials, a strike that some reports said may have been carried out by Israel to stop weapons bound for Gaza.

A total of 119 people were killed in that strike near Sudan’s border with Egypt, according to state media, even though the attack was disclosed only two months after it occurred.

Sudan is on a US list of state sponsors of terrorism, but Washington this year initiated the process to remove it from that list after a peaceful January referendum in which the country’s south voted to secede.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report April 4, 2011, 2:14 PM (GMT+02:00)

Saudi tanks in Bahrain

The accord reached between Saudi King Abdullah and the Bahraini monarch Hamas bin Isa Al Khalifa for the oil island’s virtual annexation by Riyadh has so incensed Tehran that armed Iranian-Saudi clashes with the potential for all-out warfare may soon become unavoidable, debkafile‘s Iranian and Gulf sources estimate. Shiite-ruled Iraq would back Tehran in the first Shiite-Sunni collision to be sparked by the wave of unrest sweeping the Arab world – in contrast to the domestic discord raging in Libya and Yemen.

In the third week of March, debkafile reveals, King Hamad agreed to hand over to Riyadh control Bahrain’s defense, external, financial and domestic security affairs. The Saudi king’s son Prince Mutaib was confirmed by the two monarchs as commander of the Saudi and GCC forces invited to enter the tiny kingdom to put down the Shiite-led uprising, and it was agreed that Saudi Arabia would soon start building a big naval base on the island opposite the Iranian coastline.
The accord between the Saudi and Bahraini monarchs appeared for the first time in DEBKA-Net-Weekly 487 on March 25. It revealed then that King Hamad had allowed his realm to become the de facto 14th province of Saudi Arabia in order to block the Shiite uprising against him and its knock-on impact on Saudi Arabia’s two million restive Shiites next door.
Neither Riyadh nor Manama has made the pact public. The Bahraini province of Saudi Arabia will differ from the other 13 in that it will not be governed by a Saudi prince like the others but by a member of the Al Khalifa royal family who will enjoy equal royal privileges with his Saudi peers.
Our sources report that in closed meetings with senior Saudi princes, King Abdullah explained the fundamental importance of this step for the kingdom’s national security. He reported that Iran and its Hizballah surrogate were actively stirring up Shiite opposition in Manama as the first step toward fomenting a Shiite uprising against the Saudi throne.

On March 21, Riyadh resolved to expand the terms of reference of the Saudi-Gulf military intervention requested by King Hamad.  Instead of just safeguarding the royal palace and strategic facilities against rampaging protesters, our sources report, it was decided to expand the mission to guarding Bahrain’s borders against external attack – i.e. Iran or Iraq.
To this end, Saudi troop reinforcements have been pouring into Bahrain from the last week of March, including armored units and a variety of missiles.  debkafile‘s military sources estimate that some 11,000 Saudi and United Arab Emirates boots have hit the ground in Bahrain since then.

Four days later, on March 25, Manama announced that planes taking off from Iraq or Lebanon would not be permitted to land in the kingdom, thereby cutting of the main route used by Iran and Hizballah to bring over intelligence agents and military instructors to aid the Shiite opposition.
The second important military step afoot at present is the transfer of Saudi fleet units from the Gulf of Oman and Red Sea to the military section of Bahrain’s port, where the US Fifth Fleet has its headquarters and berths its ships.  This is a provisional facility, to serve the Saudis until they finish building a port at Manama for parking their main Persian Gulf naval and marine command center, in response to the expanded facilities on the opposite shore of Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ naval and marine raider units.
March 31, the Iranian parliament’s security and foreign affairs committee strongly condemned Saudi military steps: “Saudi Arabia knows better than any other country that playing with fire in the sensitive Persian Gulf region is not in their interests,” said the statement.

Since then, Iranian media have not stopped denouncing Saudi actions in Bahrain, likening them to Saddam Hussein’s 1990 conquest of Kuwait which triggered the first Gulf War against Iraq. Riyadh was even accused of accepting clandestine US and Israeli support.

Then, Saturday, April 2, Iraq’s Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki chipped in by reviling US Middle East policy as discriminating among the popular movements in motion against the different Arab dictatorial regimes: “Whatever decision is made on Libya should be applied to any government that suppresses its people with iron and fire,” he said.

Sunday, April 3, the threatening recriminations coming from Tehran and Baghdad prompted the Gulf Cooperation Council to hold a special foreign ministers’ meeting. It passed a resolution which “severely condemned Iranian interference in the internal affairs of Bahrain in violation of international pacts.”

Language this blunt has never before been heard from GCC leaders. It is attributed by our Gulf sources to Saudi King Abdullah’s adamant resolve to challenge Tehran headon on every issue affecting the Gulf region’s security, to the point of Saudi military intervention when called for – even at the risk of precipitating an armed clash between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

The Islamic Republic finds itself confronted with its first forthright, no-nonsense challenge: If it backs down in the face of Saudi military activism, the Shiite communities across the region will conclude that Iran is both unable and unwilling to stand up for the Shiite-Arab revolt against Sunni regimes – whether in Bahrain, in other Gulf emirates or in Yemen and Lebanon.

Iraqi Prime Minister al Maliki faces the same quandary with regard to Iraqi Shiites who consider Bahraini coreligionists to be an integral part of their tribes and clans.
It is taken for granted by Saudi Arabia, Gulf capitals and Western military and intelligence observers that Tehran has been pushed into a corner from which it cannot afford to pull back from its overarching commitment to sponsor Bahrain’s Shiites. The Iranians are therefore expected to send their Bahraini Shiite networks into terrorist action against Saudi military targets very soon.  Riyadh is already braced for these assaults – and not just in Bahrain but in other GCC states including Saudi Arabia proper.
They will not go unanswered; hence the dire predictions among seasoned observers that armed hostilities between Shiite Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia may at some point become unavoidable.

The larger game in the Middle East: Iran.

The New York Times

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON  — On a Tuesday afternoon in mid-March in the White House Situation Room, as President Obama heard the arguments of his security advisers about the pros and cons of using military force in Libya, the conversation soon veered into the impact in a far more strategically vital place: Iran.

The mullahs in Tehran, noted Thomas E. Donilon, the national security adviser, were watching Mr. Obama’s every move in the Arab world. They would interpret a failure to back up his declaration that Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi had “lost the legitimacy to lead” as a sign of weakness — and perhaps as a signal that Mr. Obama was equally unwilling to back up his vow never to allow Iran to gain the ability to build a nuclear weapon.

“It shouldn’t be overstated that this was the deciding factor, or even a principal factor” in the decision to intervene in Libya, Benjamin J. Rhodes, a senior aide who joined in the meeting, said last week. But, he added, the effect on Iran was always included in the discussion. In this case, he said, “the ability to apply this kind of force in the region this quickly — even as we deal with other military deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan — combined with the nature of this broad coalition sends a very strong message to Iran about our capabilities, militarily and diplomatically.”

That afternoon in the Situation Room vividly demonstrates a rarely stated fact about the administration’s responses to the uprisings sweeping the region: The Obama team holds no illusions about Colonel Qaddafi’s long-term importance. Libya is a sideshow. Containing Iran’s power remains their central goal in the Middle East. Every decision — from Libya to Yemen to Bahrain to Syria — is being examined under the prism of how it will affect what was, until mid-January, the dominating calculus in the Obama administration’s regional strategy: how to slow Iran’s nuclear progress, and speed the arrival of opportunities for a successful uprising there.

In fact, the Iran debate makes every such chess move in the region more complicated. At the end of this era of upheaval, which the White House considers as sweeping as the changes that transformed Europe after the Berlin Wall fell, success or failure may well be judged by the question of whether Iran realizes its ambitions to become the region’s most powerful force.

Last week, the decisions being made at the White House were about how firmly to back the protesters being shot in the streets in Syria and Yemen, or being beaten in Bahrain. For each of those, White House aides were performing a mostly silent calculation about whether the Iranians would benefit, or at least feel more breathing room.

Only two and a half months ago, things seemed very different. In January, American officials were fairly confident that they had cornered Iran: new sanctions were biting, the Russians were cutting off sophisticated weaponry that Iran wanted to ward off any Israeli or American attack, and a deviously complex computer worm, called Stuxnet, was wreaking havoc with the Iranian effort to enrich uranium.

But that changed with the arrival of the Arab Spring. Suddenly the Arab authoritarians who had spent the last two years plotting with Washington to squeeze the Iranians — “Cut off the head of the snake,” King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was famously quoted as advising in the WikiLeaks cables — became more worried about their own streets than the Iranian centrifuges spinning out nuclear fuel at Natanz. And American and European citizens became distracted, even as oil at $108 a barrel undercut many of the sanctions that the White House had hoped would convince Iranian citizens that the nuclear program was not worth its rising cost.

So when the White House sees the region through a Persian lens, what does it look like?

THE LIBYA LESSON

Mr. Obama argued, in his speech on Monday night, that Libya presented a special case — an urgent moral responsibility to protect Libyans being hunted down by the Qaddafi forces and a moment of opportunity to make a difference with what the president called “unique” American capabilities. (Translation: a multitude of technologies, like Tomahawk missiles, reconnaissance and electronic jamming.) Those are the same capabilities that would be critical in any attack on Iranian nuclear sites. The administration’s top officials knew that a demonstration of that ability would not be lost on Iran. But it is anyone’s guess how Iran would react.

“You could argue it either way,” said one official who was involved in the Libya debate and spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Maybe it would encourage them to do what they have failed to do for years: come to the negotiating table. But you could also argue that it would play to the hard-liners, who say the only real protection against America and Israel is getting a bomb, and getting it fast.”

But at least in public, Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates told members of Congress not to expect that Iran’s nuclear program would accelerate much because of the attack on Libya — or that Iran’s security forces would crack down even more vigorously on the protest movements they have all but strangled. “My view is that, in terms of what they want to try and achieve in their nuclear program, they’re going about as fast as they can,” he said on Thursday. “And it’s hard for me to imagine that regime being much harder than it already is.”

THE ARAB ALLY CARD

The problem gets more complex when dealing with Arab allies who have little compunction about shooting protesters in the streets, even as they seek to undermine Iran. Saudi Arabia and Bahrain are the prime examples. The Saudis see Iran as the biggest threat to their own regional ambitions, and have cooperated in many American-led efforts to hem in Tehran. Yet relations between Washington and Riyadh have rarely been as strained: To King Abdullah, President Obama’s decision to abandon President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt was a sign of weakness, and a warning that he might throw the Saudi leadership under the bus if democracy demonstrations took root there.

Perhaps that explains why there was barely a peep from the White House when the Saudis rolled troops into neighboring Bahrain to help put down the Shiite-majority protests there. Much as Mr. Obama wants to see the aspirations of democracy protesters fulfilled, and urged steps toward reform in Bahrain, he has no desire to see the toppling of the government that hosts the Fifth Fleet, right across the Persian Gulf from Iran.

THE SYRIAN PUZZLE

For years the United States has tried in vain to peel Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, away from Iran and to reconcile with Israel. It fears that if his government collapses, chaos will reign, making Syria unpredictable as well as dangerous. It’s a reasonable fear. But in recent weeks the White House has concluded that it has much less to lose than the Iranians do if Mr. Assad is swept away. And, as some in Mr. Obama’s war council have noted, if protesters succeed in Syria, Iran could be next.

ISRAEL’S OPTIONS

All the Arab turmoil has left many Israelis convinced that America and its Arab allies are too distracted to credibly threaten that they will stop the Iranian nuclear ambitions at all costs, even though Mr. Donilon has pledged that “we will not take our eye off the ball.” Inside Israel, a debate has resumed about how long the Israelis can afford to put off dealing with the problem themselves, fed by fears that Iran’s reaction to the region’s turmoil might be a race for the bomb. That could lead to the worst outcome for Mr. Obama — a war between Iran and Israel — and that consideration alone makes the case for the administration to see little room for error in handling the main act.

James Jones: Iran serves as agitator in Mideast turmoil.

Former national security adviser to US President Barack Obama, James Jones, warned of Tehran’s role in uprisings in the Middle East, saying “you can bet that Iran is affecting virtually everything and trying to play in every one of these countries where we’re having some difficulties … Iran is out there agitating things.” Jones made the comments in an interview with CNN aired on Sunday.

“(Iran) is flying under the radar right now because, you know, you don’t hear too much about their nuclear program because everyone else is focused elsewhere,” Jones stated.

He added that chaos reigning in the region is something the Iranian government is “reasonably happy with.”

Jones expressed worry about unrest in Yemen and President Ali Abdullah Saleh losing control over the country.

“The danger is that Yemen now will become a safe haven for terrorist organizations like al Qaida,” Jones said. “I think proactive engagement is much more economical than waiting until it, you know metastasizes, then you have another Afghanistan or something like that. The good news is I think we know a lot about where these organizations are going. The question is what do we do about it and when.”

Jones also addressed the situation in Libya saying that the international coalition cannot leave the country until Muammar Gaddafi is out of power.

He stated that a transition must be made from the current humanitarian mission to an operation that would prevent Gaddafi from staying in control of Libya.

MESS Report-Israel News – Haaretz Israeli News source..

After a week-long lull in violence along the Gaza border, the southern front is heating up once again following Israel’s assassination of three Hamas men in Khan Yunis.

By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff

After a week-long lull in violence along the Gaza border, the southern front is heating up once again following an Israeli assassination on Saturday of three Hamas men in Khan Yunis, one of them a senior member of the organization’s military wing. According to the IDF, the three men were planning to abduct Israeli tourists in Sinai over the Passover holiday. Hamas denies the allegation.

While the dispute over the facts is important, the overall trend also matters. This is the third round of violence between the two side since February. After two years of quiet, since Operation Cast Lead, tension is once again boiling to the surface.

	Palestinians surrounding the wreckage of a vehicle following an Israeli airstrike that killed three of Hamas militants near Deir Al Balah, central Gaza Strip, April 2, 2011.
	Photo by: AP

A month passed between the first and second clash; only a week between the second and third. The conclusion is that the checks and balances that had influenced the sides with some success are no longer working as well as they used to. The road to Cast Lead II is getting closer, despite both Israel and the Hamas loudly proclaiming that they have no intention of going there.

As far as facts are concerned, Hamas is playing a double game. It says it doesn’t want a war, but it’s ready to risk breaking the rules to gain some strategic advantage, like taking more Israeli hostages. At the same time, it is losing some control – intentionally or not – of the smaller factions, which never lack the motivation to shoot rockets at southern Israel.

Israel, for its part, needs to counter the Hamas denial with a persuasive explanation of how yesterday’s assassination was necessary to prevent a major terrorist attack. Despite Hamas’ threats, by last night the group had still not responded to the assassination. This may not necessarily be significant, though: In the last round of violence, the Islamist organization waited three days before responding to the killing of two of its members with a barrage of 50 mortar shells striking the Negev.

Members of Hamas’ armed wing are well aware that their men are defecting to groups calling for global jihad – Al-Qaida wannabes, to quote incoming Shin Bet chief Yoram Cohen. The group knows that failing to respond to the assassination may lead to even further defections and harm its image as a “resistance” organization, but it also knows that a full-on confrontation with Israel will exact a heavy price.

Hamas is also affected by events further afield – with its primary patron, Syria, embroiled in anti-government protests.

Israel, meanwhile, can draw some satisfaction from a belated declaration by Judge Richard Goldstone, who implied in a Washington Post op-ed published on Friday that his committee made rash and exaggerated conclusions in accusing the IDF of committing war crimes during Operation Cast Lead. He also admitted there was not enough weight given to crimes perpetrated by Hamas, and that the organization did nothing to investigate the claims against it following the report’s publication.

The way things are going right now, Goldstone may soon have a new opportunity to investigate Hamas attacks on civilian populations.

DEBKAfile, Political Analysis, Espionage, Terrorism, Security.
DEBKAfile Exclusive Analysis April 2, 2011, 10:32 AM (GMT+02:00)

Israeli airborne missile kills three senior Hamas gunmen

After nearly two months of rising tension, Israel and Hamas have taken a step towards a full-blown military confrontation: Before dawn Saturday, April 2, an Israeli air strike killed three senior Hamas Izz al-Din Qassam Brigades gunmen in the Gaza Strip in an operation described by an Israeli army spokesman as pre-empting a major Palestinian terror-cum-kidnap campaign scheduled for Passover. A fourth Palestinian was seriously injured by the airborne missile which struck their car between Khan Younes and Deir el Balakh.

The Hamas Brigades warned Israel its “dangerous escalation” would have “consequences.”

debkafile‘s military and intelligence sources predict that the war confrontation which Saturday brought closer to realization will be unlike any previous Israel-Palestinian showdowns in the sense that it will be less the product of the old Middle East order and fall more under the influence of the radical elements rising out of the current Arab unrest, especially in Cairo, amid the decline of Western influence. Hamas may also resort to jihad against  “the Israeli enemy” as a distraction from the rising disaffection of the Gazan population against its increasingly repressive methods of enforcing ever stricter Islamic decrees.

Saturday, after nearly two months of heightened Palestinian terrorist activity and low-key Israeli reprisals, both sides dropped their long pretense of seeking calm.

Ever since the massacre of five members of an Israeli family at Itamar on Feb. 11, Israeli government leaders have tried to sell the line that Hamas was not really seeking to raise the level of violence. They continued to play down Hamas’ motives through a 50-round mortar barrage in a single day (March 19) on Israeli civilian locations abutting the Gaza Strip, several Grad missiles fired at the towns  Ashkelon, Ashdod, Beersheba and Netivot and a bombing attack in Jerusalem on March 23, which killed a tourist and injured 65 after two relatively terror-free years.

In between major attacks, the Palestinians have maintained up until the present a steady trickle of Qassam and mortar fire against Israeli civilians.
While intensifying its attacks, Hamas picked up the convenient Israeli mantra which claimed that the terrorist-rulers of Gaza wanted nothing but a ceasefire which would also embrace all the smaller terrorist organizations taking part on the shooting as well.

The Israeli army statement after the pre-dawn air strike over Gaza Saturday abruptly broke that pose by exposing Hamas’s true intentions for the first time. He admitted that the Palestinian radicals had set up a major murder-cum-kidnap campaign for striking terror across the Green Line and favorite Israeli vacationing spots in Sinai, to be launched during the eight-day Passover holiday April 18-28,
debkafile‘s counter-terror sources add that the three gunmen killed were only one tentacle of the network Hamas has put in place in Sinai, Jordan and on both sides of the Israel-West Bank border.

During the months that Israeli military leaders insisted that Hamas did not seek escalation, special Palestinian military wing squads were undergoing extensive training in methods of abduction so as to add more Israeli captives to Gilead Shalit, the Israeli soldier snatched in 2006 and held since in inhuman conditions.
The difference between the present and past conflicts is that Hamas is now drawing encouragement not just from Tehran but also from the new Egyptian regime. If the head of the military council Field Marshall Mohammed Tantawi wanted to, he could put a stop to Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Elarabi’s active policy of rapprochement with Tehran and reconciliation with Hamas leaders in Damascus and Gaza.

It is Elaraby’s ambition to transfer Hamas’s political center headed by Khaled Meshaal from Damascus to Cairo, lift the Egyptian embargo against Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip for the free movement of people and goods and transform the enclave into Egypt’s launching pad for an anti-Israeli policy harking back to the hostility predating the epic peace relations President Anwar Sadat forged with Israel in 1979.

The new rulers are also distancing themselves from the close alliance the deposed Hosni Mubarak maintained with Saudi Arabia. While Riyadh fights Iranian-backed insurgents in Bahrain and slams the door on further encroachments in the Arab world, Cairo is opening it wide to give the Islamic Republic a foothold both in Cairo and in Gaza. Hamas is encouraged to spread its sphere of aggression from the half million Israeli civilians within missile range to far broader regions.
When US Defense Secretary Robert Gates visited Cairo on March 24, he tried to warn the military rulers that their indulgence of Hamas was bound to end badly in an Israeli military campaign to cut short its belligerent behavior. But three days later, when he was in Israel, he had to admit to his hosts that his warning fell on deaf ears.