WarSclerotic

Official: Syrian troops capture much of Daraya – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Syrian troops gain control of most of strategic Damascus suburb used by rebels as a base; Qatar reiterated call to send an Arab peacekeeping force to Syria

Reuters

Syrian troops have captured most of a strategic Damascus suburb used by rebels as a base to threaten key regime facilities in the capital, a government official said Saturday.

The announcement that regime forces had taken Daraya came a day after anti-government activists said rebels and Islamic militants seeking to topple President Bashar Assad took full control of Taftanaz air base in the northwest. That dealt a significant blow to Assad’s military, with helicopters, tanks and multiple rocket launchers seized.

The back-to-back declarations highlight the see-saw nature of the conflict in Syria, where one side’s victories in one area are often followed by reverses in another.

“The army is battling some small pockets (of rebels) and (Daraya) will be safe within few days,” the official told The Associated Press, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.

Damascus in ruins (Photo: AFP)

Syrian troops have been battling for weeks to regain Daraya from the hands of anti-government fighters. The suburb, just south of Damascus, is on the edge of the strategic military air base of Mazzeh in a western neighborhood of the capital.

It also borders the Kfar Sousseh neighborhood that is home to the government headquarters, the General Security intelligence agency head office and the Interior Ministry, which was the target of a recent suicide attack that wounded the interior minister.

The suburb is also less than 10 km from the People’s Palace – one of three palaces in the capital used by Assad.

Homs in ruins (Photo: Reuters)

Syria’s pro-government media had reported that thousands of rebel fighters from the extremist Jabhat al-Nusra group have holed up in Daraya in preparation to storm Damascus.

Jabhat al-Nusra, which has been branded a terrorist organization by the US and which Washington claims is affiliated with al-Qaeda, has been among the most effective fighting force on the rebel side in the battle to oust Assad.

Syrian official statements regularly play up the role of Islamist extremists within the rebel movement.

Different shades of pressure

The violence came a day after a meeting on Syria’s conflict in Geneva in which international envoy Lakhdar Brahimi said that he doesn’t expect a political solution to emerge anytime soon.

In Moscow, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Saturday it is still strongly against any foreign interference in the war-torn country’s affairs.

Also Saturday, Qatar reiterated its proposals to send an Arab peacekeeping force to Syria. Qatar’s Prime Minister Hamad Bin Jassem Al Thani told Al-Jazeera TV that Arabs should think seriously about sending troops to maintain security in Syria if diplomacy fails to resolve the crisis.

Hamad said that such a move would not constitute military intervention and would not be intended to help one side against the other, rather to help “stop the bloodbath in Syria.”

The Qatari prime minister, who is one of Assad’s harshest critics, said that any solution that does not include a change in who holds power will not stop the bloodbath in Syria. “We support the direction of the opposition and the Syrian people to liberate themselves from this regime,” he said, meaning that Assad must step down.

The issue of whether Assad should step down is one of the key obstacles to any peace settlement. The rebels oppose any transition that does not remove him from power, while the regime would oppose any transition that does.

( For any who are interested, this year’s summary of the site’s activity.  My heartfelt thanks to the comment posters who have made this site truly ALIVE.  – JW )

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

About 55,000 tourists visit Liechtenstein every year. This blog was viewed about 720,000 times in 2012. If it were Liechtenstein, it would take about 13 years for that many people to see it. Your blog had more visits than a small country in Europe!

Click here to see the complete report.

Hugh Hewitt Interviews Ben Shapiro – YouTube.

( Yes, Breitbart is a far-right fringe site.  But this interview is too illuminating to not post it because of its source.  – JW )

Netanyahu, Barak spent NIS 11 bil. on preparations for Iran strike that never happened – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

The issue raised by Ehud Olmert should be at the forefront of this election campaign: Can and should Israel bear the enormous defense budget that has grown to unprecedented levels during Netanyahu’s term?

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, center, with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, right, at a statewide drill, Holon, Oct. 2012. Photo by Moti Milrod

By Reuters | Jan.12,2013 | 3:28 PM | 21

Last year, Yair Lapid launched his campaign with a slogan question: “Where’s the money?” Last night, former prime minister Ehud Olmert provided the answer. The money went toward preparing for an attack on Iran that never materialized. NIS 11 billion went into planning, equipment and training for the mission.

As Olmert sees it, the money was wasted on the reckless “adventurous fantasies” of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak; fantasies that were not – and will not – be implemented. In the eyes of Netanyahu and his supporters, the investment paid off. The world, fearing an attack by Israel, intensified its sanctions against Iran, and the United States embarked on discussions of a military option aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear facilities. All of this would not have happened without Israel’s military preparations, which demonstrated to the international community that Israel was determined to act alone, and was not just issuing idle threats.

The money is already spent, but Olmert raised an issue that should be at the forefront of the election campaign, and of the public debate that follows. Can and should the country bear the enormous defense budget, which has grown to unprecedented levels during Netanyahu’s term? Can the NIS 15-20 billion deficit in the state budget be closed without cuts to the defense budget?

Netanyahu has stated that he will not touch the defense budget “in light of the challenges facing Israel.” In his outgoing term he showered the defense establishment with funds, with a budget of NIS 60 billion last year. Opposition by the Finance Ministry was trampled or bypassed. Earlier this year a smaller budget was allocated, but the military subsequently received billions in additional funds.

During his first term, Netanyahu had shaky relations with the senior commanders of the military that, while still loyal to his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin, perceived the young prime minister as a reckless rookie. Upon his return to power, Netanyahu strived to maintain good relations with the military, even at the expense of increasing budget deficits. This approach was only partly successful. The army stayed away from open conflict with him and avoided leaks or open support for renewed negotiations with the Palestinians. However, the heads of the military and security establishments refused to support an attack on Iran, and, in essence, foiled his most important initiative. This did not give him pause to reconsider the wisdom of increasing the defense budget.

Calls for cuts in the defense budget, or at least a halt in its expansion, are coming from economists. Professor Manuel Trajtenberg has warned that Israel cannot sustain larger defense spending and that further increases will lead to financial collapse. The former director general of the Finance Ministry Yarom Ariav wrote in TheMarker that while Arab regimes collapsed in the Arab Spring along with their military threats, a conspiracy of silence between the defense establishment and politicians has prevented an honest discussion of cuts in the defense budget. Ariav called for utilizing this opportunity to shake up the establishment, reduce the massive armored corps and reconsider the costly pension arrangements that prevail in the Israel Defense Forces.

Ariav is right. Under Netanyahu and Barak’s leadership, the defense establishment has locked itself into what the late researcher Emanuel Wald termed the “curse of the broken tools,” which refers to the trap inherent in a quest for absolute security. The IDF wants more and more, refusing to determine priorities for what is essential and what is dispensable. Thus, it builds an aerial strike force against Iran, a naval deterrent force consisting of 6 submarines, ground forces with new tanks and armored personnel carriers, a home front defense network consisting of Iron Dome and Magic Wand batteries, as well as a planned naval force to defend its natural gas rigs and some Haredi battalions to appease coalition partners.

The budget cuts required after the election will provide an excellent opportunity to determine priorities in defense outlays, to replace the endless outpouring of funds. However, most politicians stay away from raising these issues. According to Ariav, “Likud-Beiteinu cannot refrain from using scare tactics to recruit voters while Shelly Yacimovich, leader of the Labor party, is shamelessly and cynically avoiding any utterance that may taint her as left-wing, treating the defense budget as sacrosanct.”

Even Lapid, who now knows where the money is, will not touch the sacred defense establishment and limits himself to calls (correct but insufficient) to dismantle the “office for strategic threats” and other useless government agencies, which were set up to provide positions for disgruntled, unemployed politicians. The only party leader calling for defense budget cuts is Naftali Bennet from Habayit Hayehudi, who proposes slashing NIS 3 billion a year, coming from overhead and not from combat units. This is reminiscent of Barak’s call in 1991, when he became chief of staff, to cut funds from anything that doesn’t shoot – a call that was never implemented. It will be interesting to see if Bennet fights for this idea or whether it will be shelved along with other campaign messages.

In the past, defense budgets were cut only when Israel ran into severe economic crises, in the 1950s and mid 80s. The situation today is considerably better, the budget deficit notwithstanding. It is therefore unlikely that the IDF will be significantly challenged to size down after the elections, which is unfortunate.

The defense expenditure and its multiple components are crying out for a serious examination and prioritization to reflect current challenges. Any budget cuts can be used to reduce deficits and for investment in education, welfare and infrastructure. The next defense minister should be a politician who dares to slash the budget. Unfortunately, it appears that Netanyahu is still locked into the costly vision of attacking Iran.

A Trail of Bullet Casings Leads From Africa’s Wars to Iran – NYTimes.com.

Views of a cartridge that was traced to its manufacture in Iran, and, at bottom, the projectile contained in the cartridge.

By C. J. CHIVERS

¶ The first clues appeared in Kenya, Uganda and what is now South Sudan. A British arms researcher surveying ammunition used by government forces and civilian militias in 2006 found Kalashnikov rifle cartridges he had not seen before. The ammunition bore no factory code, suggesting that its manufacturer hoped to avoid detection.

¶ Within two years other researchers were finding identical cartridges circulating through the ethnic violence in Darfur. Similar ammunition then turned up in 2009 in a stadium in Conakry, Guinea, where soldiers had fired on antigovernment protesters, killing more than 150.

¶ For six years, a group of independent arms-trafficking researchers worked to pin down the source of the mystery cartridges. Exchanging information from four continents, they concluded that someone had been quietly funneling rifle and machine-gun ammunition into regions of protracted conflict, and had managed to elude exposure for years. Their only goal was to solve the mystery, not implicate any specific nation.

¶ When the investigators’ breakthrough came, it carried a surprise. The manufacturer was not one of Africa’s usual suspects. It was Iran.

¶ Iran has a well-developed military manufacturing sector, but has not exported its weapons in quantities rivaling those of the heavyweights in the global arms trade, including the United States, Russia, China and several European countries. But its export choices in this case were significant. While small-arms ammunition attracts less attention than strategic weapons or arms that have drawn international condemnation, like land mines and cluster bombs, it is a basic ingredient of organized violence, and is involved each year and at each war in uncountable deaths and crimes.

¶ And for the past several years, even as Iran faced intensive foreign scrutiny over its nuclear program and for supporting proxies across the Middle East, its state-manufactured ammunition was distributed through secretive networks to a long list of combatants, including in regions under United Nations arms embargoes.

¶ The trail of evidence uncovered by the investigation included Iranian cartridges in the possession of rebels in Ivory Coast, federal troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Taliban in Afghanistan and groups affiliated with Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Niger. The ammunition was linked to spectacular examples of state-sponsored violence and armed groups connected to terrorism — all without drawing wide attention or leading back to its manufacturer.

¶ The ammunition, matched to the world’s most abundant firearms, has principally been documented in Africa, where the researchers concluded that untold quantities had been supplied to governments in Guinea, Kenya, Ivory Coast and, the evidence suggests, Sudan.

¶ From there, it traveled to many of the continent’s most volatile locales, becoming an instrument of violence in some of Africa’s ugliest wars and for brutal regimes. And while the wide redistribution within Africa may be the work of African governments, the same ammunition has also been found elsewhere, including in an insurgent arms cache in Iraq and on a ship intercepted as it headed for the Gaza Strip.

¶ Iran’s role in providing arms to allies and to those who fight its enemies has long been broadly understood. Some of these practices were most recently reported in the transfer of Fajr-5 ground-to-ground rockets to Gaza. Its expanding footprint of small-arms ammunition exports has pushed questions about its roles in a shadowy ammunition trade high onto the list of research priorities for trafficking investigators.

¶ “If you had asked me not too long ago what Iran’s role in small-arms ammunition trafficking to Africa had been, I would have said, ‘Not much,’ ” said James Bevan, a former United Nations investigator who since 2011 has been director of Conflict Armament Research, a private firm registered in England that identifies and tracks conventional weapons. “Our understanding of that is changing.”

¶ The independent investigation also demonstrated the relative ease with which weapons and munitions flow about the world, a characteristic of the arms trade that might partly explain how Iran sidestepped scrutiny of governments and international organizations, including the United Nations, that have tried to restrict its banking transactions and arms sales.

¶ The United Nations, in a series of resolutions, has similarly tried to block arms transfers into Ivory Coast, Congo and Sudan, all places where researchers found Iranian ammunition.

¶ Ammunition from other sources, including China, Russia, Hungary, the Czech Republic and other former Soviet bloc nations remain in circulation in Africa, along with production by African countries. Why Iran has entered the market is not clear, but ammunition would still be available even if it had not. Profit motives as well as an effort by Iran to gain influence in Africa might explain the exports, Mr. Bevan said. But much remains unknown.

¶ Neither the government of Iran nor its military manufacturing conglomerate, the Defense Industries Organization, replied to written queries submitted for this article.

¶ The researchers involved in the investigation — including several former experts for the United Nations and one from Amnesty International — documented the expanding circulation of Iranian ammunition, not the means or the entities that have actually exported the stocks. They are not sure if the ammunition had been directly sold by the Iranian government or its security services, by a government- or military-controlled firm, or by front companies abroad.

¶ But the long mysterious source of the ammunition appears beyond dispute. The cartridges were made, the researchers say, by the Ammunition and Metallurgy Industries Group, a subsidiary of the Defense Industries Organization.

¶ Matching the cartridges to the producer took time, in part because the ammunition had been packaged and marked in ways to dissuade tracing.

¶ Much of the world’s ammunition bears numeric or logo markings, known as headstamps, that together declare the location and year of a cartridge’s manufacture. Over the years, governments and private researchers have assembled encyclopedic headstamp keys, which can make matching particular markings to particular factories a straightforward pursuit.

¶ The ammunition in these cases included rounds for Kalashnikov assault rifles, for medium machine guns and sniper rifles and for heavy machine guns.

¶ In each case, the cartridges carried headstamps not listed on the publicly available records. The stamps were simple caliber markings and, typically, two digits indicating the year of manufacture.

¶ Similarly, neither the ammunition’s wooden crates nor its packaging in green plastic carry bags or plain cardboard boxes, when these items were found with the ammunition, disclosed the place of manufacture. All of the ammunition shared a unique combination of traits, including the caliber headstamp in a certain font, the alloy of the bullet jackets, and three indentations where primers had been attached to cartridge cases. Those traits suggested a common manufacturer.

¶ Over the years, the researchers bided time and gathered data. They collected samples of used and unused ammunition at conflicts and recorded their characteristics. They collaborated with other specialists, exchanging their finds. Some sources were confidential, others were not. Mike Lewis, a former member of the United Nations Panel of Experts on the Sudan, documented the presence of the ammunition at the Conakry stadium crackdown while investigating for Amnesty International.

¶ One sample — from Afghanistan — was found by The New York Times, which was surveying ammunition used by the Taliban and provided an image of a then-unidentifiable cartridge’s headstamp to Mr. Bevan in 2010.

¶ Once the data was assembled, the breakthrough came in what a soon-to-be-released report by the researchers called “cross-case analysis” and by looking away from the ammunition to other sources.

¶ In late 2011 Mr. Bevan obtained the bill of lading for 13 shipping containers seized by the authorities in Lagos, Nigeria, in 2010. The document showed that the containers originated in Iran and declared the contents to be “building materials.”

¶ But, as the researchers noted in their report, “concealed behind stone slabs and insulation materials” was a shipment of arms, including the same ammunition that they had been finding in the field.

¶ The shipping company was based in Tehran, Iran’s capital.

¶ Declassified documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act by Matthew Schroeder, an arms-trafficking analyst at the Federation of American Scientists, later showed that the American military had identified ammunition packaged in the same materials as Iranian ammunition. Mr. Schroeder shared his documents with Mr. Bevan. This provided another link.

¶ Ultimately, Mr. Bevan noticed that Iran had published limited technical details of its cartridges, including bullet weights. Some of these weights are atypical. Late in 2012 he had samples weighed on a jeweler’s scale, confirming the match.

¶ Mr. Bevan made clear in repeated interviews that he and his fellow researchers are not advocates for military action against Iran. When they began tracing the ammunition, they did not know or expect that the evidence would point to Tehran.

¶ He also noted that while the ammunition is Iranian-made, it may not have been sent directly by Iran to some of the combatants.

¶ “In terms of prescription, if it was clear that there were repeated violations by Iran, I think we could come down more strongly about it,” he said. “But a good portion of this, and in perhaps the majority of these cases, the ammunition was transferred around Africa by African states.”

¶ He added that while the original source of the ammunitions was now clear, many questions remained unanswered, including who organized the delivery to regions under embargo or enmeshed in ethnic conflicts.

¶ Mr. Bevan and his fellow researchers said their findings pointed to a need for further research, to gather facts upon which policy decisions can be based