Attention to the Unseen

Alice Su writes: The entrance to Karemlash, a small village in northern Iraq, is marked by a sign featuring Jesus Christ, hands beckoning, next to the words ‘Wellcome Back’ [sic]. His beaming smile has taken on an ironic cast for the residents of this minority enclave. Since the Islamic State (ISIS) militant group destroyed Karemlash in 2014, at least 20 to 30 per cent of the Christian families in the village have left Iraq altogether, according to a local priest….

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With SecDef Mattis to leave office, some folks are worried that President Trump might be more likely to start a war. Sadly, even if Mattis stayed, he could do nothing – NOTHING – to stop Trump from starting a NUCLEAR war, & it takes only minutes. https://t.co/pAXo46OGxS pic.twitter.com/eYRuOD7Rph — Stephen Young (@StephenUCS) December 21, 2018 Lisbeth Gronlund writes: Many people trusted that Secretary of Defense Mattis would be able to rein in the dangerous impulses of his erratic boss who,…

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The International Crisis Group reports: Trump’s decision to pull military forces out of Syria is the latest wild swing in U.S. Syria policy during his presidency, as the U.S. national security staff has repeatedly battled the president’s own instinct to avoid open-ended engagements in the Middle East. Until Trump’s about-face, those officials tied the presence of U.S. troops to ISIS’s “enduring defeat”, which, per their expansive definition, required fundamental change to Syria’s political system and the exit of Iranian-commanded forces…

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The New York Times reports: America’s Kurdish allies in Syria are discussing the release of 3,200 Islamic State prisoners, a prominent monitoring group and a Western official of the anti-Islamic State coalition said on Thursday, a day after President Trump ordered the withdrawal of all American troops from the country. Top officials of the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Kurdish-led and American-supported militia fighting the Islamic State in eastern Syria, met on Wednesday to discuss the option of releasing about 1,100…

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BuzzFeed reports: The US is set to shut a special forces base in Syria that has been the subject of repeated Russian complaints — and that some US officials have cast as a key part of US efforts not just to defeat ISIS but to counter Iranian influence in the country. Muhannad al-Talla, a rebel commander at al-Tanf, a US base near the Syrian border with Jordan, told BuzzFeed News that the base would see the withdrawal of the US…

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The New York Times reports: President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Thursday hailed the decision by President Trump to withdraw United States forces from Syria, calling it “correct” because the American troops were not needed. Mr. Putin’s praise came a day after Mr. Trump said he was ordering the withdrawal because the United States military had achieved its goal of defeating the Islamic State militant group in Syria. Given the unfinished business on the ground in Syria, however, the…

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The New York Times reports: President Trump has ordered a rapid withdrawal of all 2,000 United States ground troops from Syria within 30 days, declaring the four-year American-led war against the Islamic State as largely won, officials said Wednesday. “We have defeated ISIS in Syria, my only reason for being there during the Trump Presidency,” the president said in a Twitter post on Wednesday morning. He offered no details on his plans for the military mission, nor a larger strategy,…

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