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Category: War

The UK professor and the fake Russian agent

The UK professor and the fake Russian agent

A British professor corresponded for months with a man called only “Ivan”, seeking assistance to discredit an organisation that helps bring Syrian war criminals to justice. He also asked “Ivan” to investigate other British academics and journalists. The email exchange, seen by the BBC, reveals how, a decade on from the start of the Syrian conflict, a battle is still being waged in the field of information and misinformation. Chloe Hadjimatheou writes: One chilly December morning there was a ping…

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Bringing Assad to justice after a decade of war in Syria

Bringing Assad to justice after a decade of war in Syria

In an editorial, The Observer says: He turned his country into a graveyard. Hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, including 25,000 children. Millions more have been forced to flee. Terrible crimes – war crimes, crimes against humanity, widespread torture, indiscriminate bombing, chemical attacks – have been committed in his name, and continue to this day. Syria lies in ruins. So why, 10 years after the war began, is Bashar al-Assad still in power? It’s a question with many…

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The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

The Nazi-fighting women of the Jewish resistance

Judy Batalion writes: In 1943, Niuta Teitelbaum strolled into a Gestapo apartment on Chmielna Street in central Warsaw and faced three Nazis. A 24-year-old Jewish woman who had studied history at Warsaw University, Niuta was likely now dressed in her characteristic guise as a Polish farm girl with a kerchief tied around her braided blond hair. She blushed, smiled meekly and then pulled out a gun and shot each one. Two were killed, one wounded. Niuta, however, wasn’t satisfied. She…

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He told the world about his brutal torture in Syria. Then, mysteriously, he went back

He told the world about his brutal torture in Syria. Then, mysteriously, he went back

The Washington Post reports: With his gaunt frame, haunted face and copious tears, Mazen al-Hamada became a poster boy for the suffering of Syrian torture victims. After escaping from Syria to the Netherlands, he traveled widely, sharing with audiences across the United States and Europe stories of the horrors he endured in a Damascus prison. And then, mysteriously, inexplicably and perhaps suicidally, just over a year ago he returned to Syria, to risk once again the cruelties of the government…

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Biden ordered airstrike after determining Iran supported rocket attacks

Biden ordered airstrike after determining Iran supported rocket attacks

The Politico reports: President Joe Biden’s decision to order a U.S. airstrike on a border crossing used by Iran-backed militia groups in eastern Syria on Thursday came after U.S. officials determined Tehran facilitated a series of recent attacks endangering Americans in Iraq, according to defense officials. Planning for a potential military response began soon after Feb. 15, when a dozen rockets targeted coalition forces outside Irbil International Airport, killing one non-U.S. contractor and wounding nine more people, including five Americans,…

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How Assad’s worst chemical weapon attack changed history

How Assad’s worst chemical weapon attack changed history

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: In the early hours of Aug. 21, 2013, Scott Cairns was struggling to sleep in his room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus. Cairns was part of a United Nations mission headed by the Swedish scientist Åke Sellström to investigate the regime’s alleged use of chemical weapons. The mission included representatives from the World Health Organization and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW). As the head of the OPCW contingent, Cairns had…

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How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

How John Gray’s philosophy helped me understand my war experience

Andy Owen writes: I first read the English philosopher John Gray while sitting in the silence of the still, mid-afternoon heat of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. In Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), Gray showed how the United States’ president George W Bush and the United Kingdom’s prime minister Tony Blair framed the ‘war on terror’ (which I was part of) as an apocalyptic struggle that would forge the new American century of liberal democracy, where…

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Erik Prince, Trump ally, violated Libya arms embargo, UN report says

Erik Prince, Trump ally, violated Libya arms embargo, UN report says

The New York Times reports: Erik Prince, the former head of the security contractor Blackwater Worldwide and a prominent supporter of former President Donald J. Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was attempting to overthrow the internationally backed government, according to U.N. investigators. A confidential U.N. report obtained by The New York Times and delivered by investigators to the Security Council on Thursday reveals how Mr. Prince deployed a…

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America’s other forever war

America’s other forever war

Peter Beinart writes: “It is past time,” Joe Biden pledged last year, “to end the forever wars.” He’s right. But his definition of war is too narrow. For decades, the United States has supplemented its missile strikes and Special Operations raids with a less visible instrument of coercion and death. America blockades weaker adversaries, choking off their trade with the outside world. It’s the modern equivalent of surrounding a city and trying to starve it into submission. Wonks call this…

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Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?

Why is America getting a new $100 billion nuclear weapon?

Elisabeth Eaves writes: America is building a new weapon of mass destruction, a nuclear missile the length of a bowling lane. It will be able to travel some 6,000 miles, carrying a warhead more than 20 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It will be able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot. The US Air Force plans to order more than 600 of them. On September 8, the Air Force gave…

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The Taliban close in on Afghan cities, pushing the country to the brink

The Taliban close in on Afghan cities, pushing the country to the brink

The New York Times reports: The Taliban have been encroaching on key cities around Afghanistan for months, threatening to drive the country to its breaking point and push the Biden administration into a no-win situation just as the United States’ longest war is supposed to be coming to an end. Around the northern city of Kunduz, despite the winter’s fierce cold, the Taliban have taken outposts and military bases, using small armed drones to terrorize Afghan troops. In neighboring Pul-i-Khumri,…

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Biden freezes U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, UAE

Biden freezes U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia, UAE

The Wall Street Journal reports: The Biden administration has imposed a temporary freeze on U.S. arms sales to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates as it reviews billions of dollars in weapons transactions approved by former President Donald Trump, according to U.S. officials. The review, the officials said, includes the sale of precision-guided munitions to Riyadh, as well as top-line F-35 fighters to Abu Dhabi, a deal that Washington approved as part of the Abraham Accords, in which the…

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The man who wants to take down Bashar Al Assad

The man who wants to take down Bashar Al Assad

Nate Berg writes: Wolfgang Kaleck, a 60-year-old human rights lawyer with large blue eyes and a wave of sandy brown hair, smiles a lot for someone who has spent his life litigating some of the world’s worst atrocities. “The stories you hear you won’t forget,” he says, sitting at a long table in his office in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district. “But at the same time you learn about these cruel facts of the world, you learn about the light side, which…

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New wave of violence and a growing uncertainty about Afghanistan’s future leaves Kabul gripped in fear

New wave of violence and a growing uncertainty about Afghanistan’s future leaves Kabul gripped in fear

The New York Times reports: In Kabul’s uncertain present, fear and dread intertwine in a vise. Fear has become a way of life. “When you’re in the car you feel fear, when you are walking you feel fear, and when you are in the shop you feel fear,” said Shamsullah Amini, a 22-year-old shopkeeper, while watching over his vats of dried grains and beans in the Taimani neighborhood. “If there was any security at all, we wouldn’t all be thinking…

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U.S. pundits keep comparing Washington to a war zone. People who know war disagree

U.S. pundits keep comparing Washington to a war zone. People who know war disagree

The Washington Post reports: A massive security operation is underway in Washington ahead of President-elect Biden’s inauguration on Wednesday, two weeks after a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol. As images of National Guard troops circulate online, some in the United States have compared the capital to a war zone. The commentary has drawn pushback from people who have lived or worked in areas actually beset by conflict, who say such remarks are misleading and trivializes the reality of war. “It’s…

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Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law, say UN officials

Trump pardon of Blackwater Iraq contractors violates international law, say UN officials

Reuters reports: U.S. President Donald Trump’s pardon of four American men convicted of killing Iraqi civilians while working as contractors in 2007 violated U.S. obligations under international law, U.N. human rights experts said on Wednesday. Nicholas Slatten was convicted of first-degree murder, while Paul Slough, Evan Liberty and Dustin Heard were convicted of voluntary and attempted manslaughter, over the incident in which U.S. contractors opened fire in busy traffic in a Baghdad square and killed 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians. The…

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