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Category: War

‘Killing a generation’ — one million more children at risk from famine in Yemen

‘Killing a generation’ — one million more children at risk from famine in Yemen

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AFP reports: More than five million children are at risk of famine in Yemen as the ongoing war causes food and fuel prices to soar across the country, charity Save the Children has warned. Disruption to supplies coming through the embattled Red Sea port of Hodeida could “cause starvation on an unprecedented scale”, the British-based NGO said in a new report. Save the Children said an extra one million children now risk falling into famine as prices of food and…

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North and South Korea take important steps to demilitarize the Korean peninsula

North and South Korea take important steps to demilitarize the Korean peninsula

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Richard Sokolsky writes: At yesterday’s summit meeting in Pyongyang between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in, the defense ministers of the two countries signed an important agreement to reduce military tensions along the two sides’ heavily militarized border. As of November 1, no-fly zones will be established along the border and both sides will halt artillery and other military drills close to the demilitarized zone (DMZ) separating the two countries. The North and South…

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Only a fool takes Putin at his word in Syria

Only a fool takes Putin at his word in Syria

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Nic Robertson writes: Trusting Russia to keep its word in Syria is rather like believing in good faith that its intelligence agents only visited the UK to see Salisbury Cathedral. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s new peace plan — forged with his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan — to protect the three million civilians crowded in camps in Idlib is staggeringly hard to take at face value for a multitude of reasons — not least, because of Putin’s history of denying…

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New revelations about the Sabra and Shatila massacre

New revelations about the Sabra and Shatila massacre

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Seth Anziska writes: Historians try not to audibly gasp in the reading rooms of official archives, but there are times when the written record retains a capacity to shock. In 2012, while working at the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, I came across highly classified material from Israel’s 1982 War in Lebanon that had just been opened to researchers. This access was in line with the thirty-year rule of declassification governing the release of documents in Israel. Sifting through Foreign…

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France’s Macron admits to military’s systematic use of torture in Algeria war

France’s Macron admits to military’s systematic use of torture in Algeria war

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The Washington Post reports: France will formally acknowledge the French military’s systemic use of torture in the Algerian War in the 1950s and 1960s, an unprecedented step forward in grappling with its long-suppressed legacy of colonial crimes. President Emmanuel Macron announced his watershed decision in the context of a call for clarity on the fate of Maurice Audin, a Communist mathematician and anti-colonial activist who was tortured by the French army and forcibly disappeared in 1957, during Algeria’s bloody struggle…

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3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

3 million people with nowhere to go as Assad’s forces are about to attack

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Kareem Shaheen writes: The first thing that struck me when I saw Idlib, the rebel-held province in northwestern Syria, in April last year was how green the country was. Olive and cherry trees lined the pockmarked roads leading from the Turkish border down to the province’s towns. Smoke rose in the distance in the aftermath of an airstrike or an exploding shell, and the buildings in most towns were scarred by blows from the sky. I had traveled to Idlib…

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How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

How the U.S. government misleads the public on Afghanistan

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The New York Times reports: Seventeen years into the war in Afghanistan, American officials routinely issue inflated assessments of progress that contradict what is actually happening there. More than 2,200 Americans have been killed in the Afghan conflict, and the United States has spent more than $840 billion fighting the Taliban insurgency and paying for relief and reconstruction. The war has become more expensive, in current dollars, than the Marshall Plan, which helped to rebuild Europe after World War II….

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How Assad made truth a casualty of war

How Assad made truth a casualty of war

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Muhammad Idrees Ahmad writes: On February 22, 2012, when the British photojournalist Paul Conroy survived the artillery barrage that killed Marie Colvin, he was rushed to a place of greater danger. Bashar al-Assad’s war of repression has killed civilians indiscriminately, but its targeting of medical facilities has been systematic. Hospitals are the most endangered spaces in opposition-held areas. Of the 492 medical facilities destroyed in the war, Physicians for Human Rights attributes the destruction of 446 to Assad and his…

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China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

China and Russia have set a nuclear collision course with the United States

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Gordon G. Chang writes: China, the New York Times reported last week, “can now challenge American military supremacy in the places that matter most to it: the waters around Taiwan and in the disputed South China Sea.” Therefore, Beijing can, in the words of the paper, “make intervention in the region too costly for Washington to contemplate.” Too costly to contemplate? Unfortunately, assessments like these, often heard in U.S. policy circles, can embolden the already arrogant Chinese and make their…

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Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

Why China and Russia are obsessed with vast new war games

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Peter Apps writes: As the West obsesses over Donald Trump’s legal and political challenges, Brexit and a host of other domestic crises, Chinese troops will join their Russian counterparts for Moscow’s largest military exercises in more than three decades. Coming six months after Beijing’s biggest ever offshore naval drills, the joint war games are another reminder of how central military posturing now is to the world’s two most powerful authoritarian states. While neither likely desires or expects war with the…

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A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

A horrifying and believable path to nuclear war with North Korea

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Robert Jervis writes: Many of us believe that if nuclear missiles were to strike the United States, they would most likely come from North Korea. However, it is hard to dramatize this possibility or to make a convincing case for the exact pathway to a war. Jeffrey Lewis, a respected nuclear analyst, sets this as his task in what he calls a “speculative novel,” The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Nuclear Attacks Against the United States. This way…

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As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

As the world stands by, Assad and Putin are ready to crush the last of the Syrian revolution’s democrats

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Leila Al-Shami writes: The Syrian regime is determined to reconquer all of the territory it has lost. Aided by Russian bombers and Iranian troops, and emboldened by its success in terrorizing the populations of Ghouta and Daraa into submission, President Bashar al-Assad’s government is now preparing to attack Idlib, the last remaining province outside of his control. Idlib is home to some three million people, about half of them displaced, or forcibly evacuated, to the province from elsewhere. Many are…

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‘Time for this war in Afghanistan to end,’ says departing U.S. commander

‘Time for this war in Afghanistan to end,’ says departing U.S. commander

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The New York Times reports: When American Airlines Flight 77 struck the Pentagon on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Lt. Col. John W. Nicholson Jr. survived by chance. That morning, as dozens of his colleagues were killed, he was moving house and wasn’t at his desk — which he said was 100 feet from the nose of the plane. Nearly 17 years to the day, now a four-star general departing as the commander of the American and NATO forces…

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Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

Microwave weapons are prime suspect in attacks on U.S. embassy staff in Cuba

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The New York Times reports: During the Cold War, Washington feared that Moscow was seeking to turn microwave radiation into covert weapons of mind control. More recently, the American military itself sought to develop microwave arms that could invisibly beam painfully loud booms and even spoken words into people’s heads. The aims were to disable attackers and wage psychological warfare. Now, doctors and scientists say such unconventional weapons may have caused the baffling symptoms and ailments that, starting in late…

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Russia softens up West for bloodbath it is planning in Syria’s Idlib province

Russia softens up West for bloodbath it is planning in Syria’s Idlib province

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Simon Tisdall writes: Russia is going to extraordinary lengths to justify in advance the murderous onslaught that observers fear is about to descend on Idlib, a province in north-west Syria that is home to nearly two million internally displaced people. Idlib is the last large populated area outside the control of Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s dictator. And Assad, backed by his Russian and Iranian allies, is determined to get it back – whatever the human cost. In a series of coordinated…

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As final Syrian showdown looms, millions of lives are at risk

As final Syrian showdown looms, millions of lives are at risk

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The Washington Post reports: With Syria’s rebels nearing defeat after seven years at war, President Bashar al-Assad’s army says it is turning its firepower against their final stronghold. The target, Idlib province, is largely controlled by an al-Qaeda-linked militant group. Caught in the middle are millions of civilians with nowhere left to run. Public pronouncements by Syrian and Russian officials foreshadow a devastating attack if diplomacy and the pleas of aid groups for restraint are not heeded. On Wednesday, Russian…

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