Persian Gulf & Middle East Military News, Reports, Data, etc.

Israel said to warn Turkey: Don’t attack Assad
Syria is likely to retaliate with long-range missiles and chemical weapons, PM’s special envoy reportedly tells Ankara
BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF March 28, 2014, 6:36 pm 6

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s special envoy to Ankara has warned Turkish officials against attacking Syria, according to a report in a Turkish newspaper Friday.


David Meidan recently told the head of Turkish intelligence, Hakan Fidan, that embattled Syrian President Bashar Assad could respond to a Turkish strike by firing long-range missiles and chemical weapons at Turkey, reported Taraf.


Earlier this week, the Turkish military shot down a Syrian fighter jet that it claimed had entered Turkey’s airspace.

A report on Thursday indicated that Meidan and Fidan had reached a deal on rapprochement after four years of strained relations, and that Israel and Turkey would soon reopen their respective diplomatic missions in each other’s countries.


According to that report in Today’s Zaman, Meidan and Fidan also discussed a visit by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to Israel in the coming months.

However, a senior Israeli official denied the report.

“These reports are incorrect. We are not aware of anything new,” the official said.



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‘Netanyahu told Kerry gov’t could fall if prisoners released’
US urged Abbas in vain to extend talks, telling him Israel fears coalition will disintegrate over Arab Israeli inmates, PA sources say
BY YIFA YAAKOV AND AFP March 29, 2014, 10:44 am 36

Yifa Yaakov is a breaking news editor at The Times of Israel.

As deadline passes, PA says Israel has made clear it will not release prisoners‘Israel offers to free 400 more prisoners if Abbas extends talks’Kerry cancels US return en route from MideastPalestinians hope prisoner release delay will be brief
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has told US Secretary of State John Kerry that he fears his coalition could fall apart if Israel frees a fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners who were slated for release this weekend — among them 14 Israeli Arabs.


Citing sources in the Palestinian Authority, the London-based pan-Arab al-Hayat newspaper reported Saturday that US negotiators had told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas Netanyahu feared his coalition, which includes the right-wing Jewish Home and Yisrael Beytenu parties, might disintegrate over the prisoner release.


Kerry and US special Middle East envoy Martin Indyk relayed Netanyahu’s fears to Abbas in order to convince him to accept the postponement of the prisoner release, the sources said. The US negotiators reportedly urged Abbas to agree to extend peace negotiations beyond the April 29 deadline before the 30 prisoners are released. Netanyahu has insisted agreement be reached for extending the talks before the prisoners can go free, and has ruled out releasing Israeli Arab inmates.

However, Abbas refused, insisting that the prisoners must be released before the Palestinian Authority can discuss prolonging the talks.

Meanwhile Saturday, a senior Palestinian official said the release by Israel of Arab prisoners would not go ahead on Saturday as envisaged but he hoped there would only be a short delay.

“Today the prisoners will not be released… maybe in the coming days,” Issa Qaraqae, the minister of prisoner affairs, told AFP.

“We have told the families of the prisoners that they will not be released today,” he added.”

“There are efforts to solve the crisis and I believe that in 24 hours everything will be clearer.”

Under the deal that relaunched peace talks last July, Israel agreed to release 104 Arabs held since before the 1993 Oslo peace accords in exchange for the Palestinians not pressing their statehood claims at the United Nations.

So far, Israel has freed 78 prisoners in three batches but ministers had warned they would block the final release, which had been anticipated for Saturday, if the Palestinians refused to extend the talks beyond their April 29 deadline.

There has been no official Israeli update on the last batch of prisoners, which the Palestinians want to include Arab Israeli citizens, a demand hotly opposed by Netanyahu’s far-right coalition partners and by hardliners within his own Likud party.

The cabinet convenes on Sunday morning for its weekly meeting. A special ministerial panel needs to approve any releases 48 hours before they go ahead, to leave time for petitions against the releases to the Supreme Court.

Palestinian official Jibril Rajoub, a member of Fatah’s central committee, told AFP Friday that “the Israeli government has informed us through the American mediator that it will not abide with its commitment to release the fourth batch of Palestinian prisoners scheduled for tomorrow, Saturday 29.”

The peace talks have been teetering on the brink of collapse, with Washington fighting an uphill battle to get the two sides to agree to a framework for continued negotiations until the end of the year.

Kerry met Abbas in Amman on Wednesday in a bid to salvage the talks, with US special envoy Martin Indyk meeting the Palestinian leader in Ramallah a day later.

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki on Friday denied reports that negotiations had already collapsed.

“Any reports that suggest the talks are off are inaccurate,” she told journalists covering a visit to Saudi Arabia by Kerry and President Barack Obama.

“Ambassador Indyk and the negotiating team remain closely engaged with both parties on the ground and will continue to work over the coming days to help them bridge the gaps and determine the path forward.”

Israeli media say Netanyahu could give a green light to the prisoner release if the US frees Jonathan Pollard, who was arrested in Washington in 1985 and condemned to life imprisonment for spying on the United States for Israel.

Israel is not commenting on such reports, with Netanyahu spokesman Mark Regev saying only that in general the spy’s fate is “often raised at high-level meetings between Israelis and Americans.”

On Wednesday, Psaki said “there are currently no plans to release Jonathan Pollard.”



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Taliban continue to launch suicide assaults in Kabul
By BILL ROGGIOMarch 29, 2014

The Taliban launched two more suicide assaults in the Afghan capital of Kabul over the past 24 hours. In the attacks, the Taliban targeted the headquarters of the Independent Election Commission and a guesthouse run by an American charity.

The first suicide assault took place last night as a four-man Taliban suicide assault team attacked the guesthouse of Roots of Peace, "an international humanitarian organization working to unearth dangerous landmines in war-torn countries and [that] empowers the local communities scarred by these indiscriminate weapons." The charity also helps plant "sustainable crops."

The attack began as a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives outside the main entrance to the charity. Three heavily armed fighters then entered through the resulting breach and stormed the compound.

Afghan forces responded and killed the three remaining members of the Taliban suicide assault team after several hours of fighting. Two civilians outside of the guesthouse were killed in the crossfire. The occupants of the charity survived by hiding in the building during the fighting.

The Taliban claimed last night's attack on Voice of Jihad, their official website, and said they targeted a "church belonging to US embassy for converting the Afghans to Christianity, an abolished religion." The Taliban identified the members of the suicide assault team as "Muhammad Zaman ... from Paktia province ... Zabihullah from Wardak, Muhammad Islmail from Logar and Obaidullah from Kunduz provinces."

In today's attack, a suicide assault team stormed a building next to the Independent Election Commission headquarters. Four or five Taliban fighters occupied the building, then opened fire on the IEC headquarters. The Taliban fighters also reportedly fired up to 15 rockets at the building. Afghan security forces battled the Taliban fighters for five hours before killing them. No IEC workers were killed during the attack.

Over the past nine days, the Taliban have stepped up attacks in Kabul. The al Qaeda-linked group has launched four suicide assaults in the capital since March 20, two of which have targeted the IEC headquarters. On March 25, five members of a suicide assault team killed a candidate for provincial elections in Kabul, two IEC workers, and two policemen, in an attack on the IEC headquarters. And on March 20, a Taliban assault team killed nine people in an attack at the Serena hotel in Kabul.

The recent spate of attacks in the capital is likely the work of what US military officials have previously called the Kabul Attack Network. This network is made up of fighters from the Taliban, the Haqqani Network, and Hizb-i-Islami Gulbuddin, and cooperates with terror groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba and al Qaeda. Top Afghan intelligence officials have linked the Kabul Attack Network to Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate as well. The network's tentacles extend outward from Kabul into the surrounding provinces of Logar, Wardak, Nangarhar, Kapisa, Kunar, Ghazni, and Zabul, a US intelligence official told The Long War Journal.

The Kabul Attack Network is led by Dawood (or Daud) and Taj Mir Jawad, military and intelligence officials have told The Long War Journal. Dawood is the Taliban's shadow governor for Kabul, while Taj Mir Jawad is a top commander in the Haqqani Network. In the US military files that were released by WikiLeaks, Taj Mir Jawad is identified as a key Haqqani Network leader.

The suicide assault, or coordinated attack using multiple suicide bombers and an assault team, is a tactic that is frequently used in Afghanistan by the Taliban and their allies, including the Haqqani Network, the Movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, al Qaeda, and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Suicide assaults are also commonly executed by al Qaeda and allied jihadist groups in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, and Nigeria.



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Syria: the jihadi town where 'brides' are snatched from schools

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Once liberal bastion Raqqa was over-run by al-Qaeda group before secular rebels launched a fight back
Fighters with Northern Storm guard the Sharia court that was controlled by ISIS in Azaz, Syria
Fighters with Northern Storm guard the Sharia court that was controlled by ISIS in Azaz, Syria Photo: Yasmin Al Tellawy/ Corbis
Richard Spencer By Richard Spencer, Aazaz6:14PM GMT 29 Mar 2014
A year ago, the city of Raqqa in northern Syria was sprouting political activist groups and philosophical discussion circles. A “guerrilla gardening” squad promoted environmental awareness by planting vegetables in central reservations.
The liberals who made it a base after the rebels swept in and drove out the regime in March last year are gone, disbanded, accused of supporting democracy and other “kuffar” or infidel beliefs, their members living either underground or in Turkey.
The city has been transformed into a staging ground for displays of the harshest “justice” meted out by the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), the jihadi group too extreme even for al-Qaeda that has imposed its rule over large parts of the country.
Refugees, women still living under its rule and men who have escaped from its prisons have told Telegraph of the life under the shadow of the extremist group’s black flag.
One woman, whose name the Telegraph knows but is withholding, described how she went to the recruiting office of an all-women jihad unit, formed from the women who have flocked to Syria from Europe and elsewhere to serve the cause, some with their children.
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“I went inside their headquarters, which used to be the Christian church,” she said. “I asked what the conditions were to join. They said you have to be 18-25, unmarried, and you would earn 25,000 Syrian pounds.
“But if you joined you had the opportunity to marry one of the foreign fighters. However, they make sure you are a real jihadist.”
She said that outside she met four new recruits, three from Tunisia, and one Frenchwoman, who told her she was divorced and had brought her 12-year-old daughter and four younger sons to Syria to join the militants.
The opportunities for marriage in the Syrian jihad - and before “martyrdom” - is a recurring theme of the blogs and other online forums favoured by ISIS’s foreign fighters in Syria, many of whom write in English.
But the Raqqa woman and other activists from the town say that the imbalance of the sexes means ISIS has begun to “recruit” brides from local schools and colleges.
Among those who resisted, they say, was a 21-year-old student called Fatima Abdullah from a tribal area outside the city, whose brother had joined ISIS and persuaded their father to hand her over for marriage to a Tunisian. She refused, and when her family insisted, killed herself with rat poison. The story was confirmed by other activists from the town.
Since the beginning of January, rival rebel groups including western-backed militias still loyal to the original opposition Free Syrian Army have launched a counter-attack across the north of Syria to drive out ISIS.
Earlier this month, rebels all but completed an operation to remove the extremists from Idlib province while in Aleppo province ISIS have been forced into towns to the east. As they left their former strongholds they killed some of their prisoners, freed others, and loaded many more on to trucks and took them with them.
In Aazaz, a town between Aleppo and the Turkish border, ISIS retaliated for the FSA attack by beheading four captives from other militias and placing their heads on the plinth in the middle of the roundabout in one of the main squares, residents.
“We call it the beheading circle, now,” one, Anwar Mohammed, said.
A photograph of the heads, with a German fighter standing in triumph over them, circulated on jihadi websites.
Ahmed Primo, described how he was saved from a similar fate by a stray shell.
“I heard a voice calling my name for execution,” he said. “Then suddenly there was the sound of an explosion. The guards and the emir, the militia leader, were injured, and carried away. The next day the prison was liberated and I escaped.”
Mr Primo had previously been detained by the Syrian regime in his home city, Aleppo, and held for a month. Asked whether the treatment he received from ISIS, which included beatings, being bound and blindfolded for weeks at a time, and electrocuted in his testicles, was better or worse than his experiences under the regime, he said: “It is not a question of better or worse. It was exactly the same.”

ISIS split last summer from Jabhat al-Nusra, the recognised wing of Al-Qaeda in Syria, and in February was disavowed by Al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman Zawahiri.
But by then its capacity to instill fear by its harsh punishments, and ability to attract fanatical fighters from abroad had enabled it to take control of large parts of northern Syria, with Raqqa province mostly under their sway.
Mr Mohammed, one of the early “citizen journalists” who sent reports of the initial uprising against President Bashar al-Assad to the outside world, was among Aazaz’s luckiest people. He had been seized from his home by ISIS fighters, taken to the group’s headquarters in Aleppo city, a former children’s hospital, for interrogation, and then detained in a prison in another town, Hreitan.
Light of build, he managed to escape one night by squeezing through the bars of his cell and lowering himself to the ground with knotted blankets. When he made it home - and across the Turkish border - his father said ISIS had visited him to tell him his son was to be executed as a spy.
Mohammed Nour, who ran the media centre in Aazaz from where reports by local and international journalists were filed after the town was “liberated” from the regime in July 2012, was the son of a man who had disappeared in the Assad regime’s prisons before he was born.
Last September, ISIS came for the son after it defeated Mr Nour’s Northern Storm brigade. Like his father, he has not been seen since.
His mother said she had visited al-Bab, a town to the south-east still under ISIS control, to try to find him. “I go to the prisons, like I did with his father,” she said. “They say to come back later.”
Now 49, she never remarried, and Mohammed is her only child.
What is perhaps most remarkable is that despite the brutality, many residents of north-west Syria still back ISIS. Samer Amori, Mohammed Nour’s uncle, said that people who supported the regime now support ISIS. A more convincing explanation is that by demanding control of all aspects of its subjects’ lives, ISIS did at least manage to impose some sort of order on a Syria that is becoming more lawless as the war progresses.
But for many men and women, particularly the liberal activists, who have suffered under both the regime and ISIS, the recent fighting has brought the third year of the uprising to deeply depressing close.
Mr Primo, electrocuted by fighters from the regime and Assad, said he had always believed the West would intervene, and that what had happened in Tunisia and Libya would happen in Syria. Now it is clear that with the country little more than a fighting ground for rival warlords, some not even Syrian, the West has little stomach for involvement.
“When I started out I could never have imagined anything like this,” he said. “These people, they do not have our way of life, or of thinking.
It’s very strange to us. I didn’t expect it would turn out this way.”

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delft said:

As usual Israel wants to continue talks as long as an agreement will not be reached.

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TerraN_EmpirE said:

Well that's the pro Palestinian side of it. It fails to mention that the prisoners release was a debacle as those released were welcomed as hero. Mean time the Palestinians have failed at every opportunity to follow through on there agreements and have denied even making any. The Israelis feel they are doing all the giving well the Palestinians are doing all the taking. And then these unilateral actions kick up and are designed to provide opportunities for negotiations between them to breakdown.

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Jeff Head said:

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You can tell from this pic that this thing was never meant to be operational as any kind of carrier. You can see right through the bottom of it. The flight deck is far too flimsy.

It is clearly a structure built on a barge like vessel that it will not even make for a good SINKEX or Live-Fire test because the impact on this thing would not come close to what you would see with the impact of their weapons on a true replica of a carrier that was supposed to tell them anything of value. This thing will go up in flames quickly and sink quickly.

That's why I think it is purely a prop, probably for propaganda purposes. They are building something that exteriorly looks like a US carrier...and painting it up...perhaps put a few of their old, non-flyable, non-working, scavenged F-14s on it, and then blow it up with some missiles for propaganda purposes for their own populace.

Probably try and sell it to their people as a hammer blow against America, their, "Great Satan."

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Jeff Head said:

I'm not sure how much is metal and how much is wood.

Whatever, it just goes to show what lengths such regimes will go to to spread propoganda and buttress themselves.

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Syrian opposition fighters obtain U.S. anti-tank missiles
The White House declined to discuss the origin of the weapons but did not dispute that the rebels have them.
( Karen DeYoung, The Washington Post)

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