Schaut so der Islamistische Frieden aus?

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Dakle tako izgleda islamski mir.

Osetljive osobe neka ne gledaju, nema klanja, ali ima svirepih ubistava vatrenim oružjem.

"Huligani protiv salafista" - izbili nemiri u njemačkom gradu Köln, veći broj ozlijeđenih policajaca


Neo-nacistima su se jučer priključili i anti-imigracijski prosvjednici uzvikujući "stranci odlazite". No, kao i na nekim ranijim prosvjedima u organizaciji krajnje desnice, uskoro ih u centru gradu dočekuje nekoliko stotina do nekoliko tisuća (ovisno o izvoru) anti-fašista. Dolazi do konfrontacije između dvije skupine i do uključenja policije. Anti-fašisti organizirali su kontra prosvjed pod sloganom "Rame uz rame protiv rasizma i religijskog ekstremizma".

For Turkey and U.S., at odds over Syria, a 60-year alliance shows signs of crumbling

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Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a news conference in Riga October 23, 2014. Divergences over how to confront the Islamic State have strained the durability of a six-decade alliance. (Ints Kalnins/Reuters)
By Liz Sly October 29 at 6:46 PM

ANKARA, Turkey — The increasingly hostile divergence of views between Turkey and the United States over Syria is testing the durability of their 60-year alliance, to the point where some are starting to question whether the two countries still can be considered allies at all.

Turkey’s refusal to allow the United States to use its bases to launch attacks against the Islamic State, quarrels over how to manage the battle raging in the Syrian border town of Kobane and the harsh tone of the anti-American rhetoric used by top Turkish officials to denounce U.S. policy have served to illuminate the vast gulf that divides the two nations as they scramble to address the menace posed by the extremists.

Whether the Islamic State even is the chief threat confronting the region is disputed, with Washington and Ankara publicly airing their differences through a fog of sniping, insults and recrimination over who is to blame for the mess the Middle East has become.

At stake is a six-decade-old relationship forged during the Cold War and now endowed with a different but equally vital strategic dimension. Turkey is positioned on the front line of the war against the Islamic State, controlling a 780-mile border with Iraq and Syria. Without Turkey’s cooperation, no U.S. policy to bring stability to the region can succeed, analysts and officials on both sides say.

“If Turkey is not an ally, then we and Turkey are in trouble,” said Francis Ricciardone, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Turkey until the summer. “It is probably the most important ally.”

The Syrian town along the Turkish border remains center stage in the fight against Islamic State militants. (Reuters)
The airdrop by U.S. warplanes last week of weapons to a Kurdish group Turkey regards as a terrorist organization crystallized the apparent parting of ways. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has not disguised his anger at the way President Obama ordered the airdrop. The U.S. president informed him of the decision in a telephone call barely an hour after Erdogan had declared to journalists that Turkey would never allow such assistance to take place.

On a tour of the Baltic states last week, Erdogan blasted Obama at every stop. “Mr. Obama ordering three C-130s to airdrop weapons and supplies to Kobane right after our conversation cannot be approved of,” he said during a news conference in Latvia. “The U.S. did that despite Turkey,” he fumed on another leg of the journey.

U.S. officials have sought to reassure Turkey that the airdrop was a one-time action, and the two countries have agreed on a plan to reinforce the beleaguered Syrian Kurds with Iraqi peshmerga fighters, which Turkey does not object to, because it has friendly relations with Iraqi Kurds.

But the Kobane dispute masked more fundamental differences over a range of issues, some of which have been brewing for years and others that have been brought to light by the urgency of the U.S.-led air campaign, analysts say.

“The Syria crisis is exposing long-unspoken, unpleasant truths about the relationship that were put to one side,” said Bulent Aliriza, a Turkish analyst with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies. “We have this kabuki dance where Washington and Ankara say they agree, but they don’t.”

The tensions are not unprecedented, nor are the doubts about an alliance born in a different era, when fears of Soviet expansionism brought Muslim Turkey under NATO’S umbrella and extended the Western bloc’s reach into Asia.

The United State imposed an arms embargo on Turkey after Turkish troops invaded Cyprus in 1974. In 2003, there was fury in Washington when Turkey’s parliament refused to allow American troops to use Turkish soil as a staging ground for the invasion of Iraq, triggering a deep chill that took years to overcome.

The 2003 rupture may, however, have foreshadowed the beginning of a more fundamental shift in the relationship, with Erdogan embarking on a decade of transformation in Turkey that has perhaps forever changed his country, analysts say. Turkey has grown and prospered under his rule, but it has also begun to tilt toward a more authoritarian, Islamist brand of politics that is increasingly at odds with the model of secularism and pluralism that the United States has held up as a key component of Turkey’s importance to the alliance.

In 2003, as now, Turkey made it plain it did not want to be used as a launching pad for attacks against fellow Muslims in the Middle East, a sentiment Erdogan has repeatedly expressed in his many recent comments critical of U.S. policy. He has accused the United States of being more interested in oil than in helping the people of the region and has made it clear that he does not regard the Islamic State as a greater threat than the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, the organization affiliated with the Kurdish Syrians the United States has been helping in Kobane.

“There are growing doubts over whether the U.S. and Turkey share the same priorities and even whether they share the same goals,” Aliriza said. “Even when it comes to defining the enemy — there is no common enemy.”

Turkish officials bristle at suggestions that Turkey is in any way sympathetic to the Islamic State. It is Turkey that has to live with the jihadist group on its borders, not the United States, and Turkey that is most at risk of being targeted by the Islamic State in retaliation for waging war against it, the officials say.

Turks also do not mask their irritation with what they regard as a shortsighted and potentially dangerous U.S. strategy that they believe will not work and could backfire. Turkey believes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is the root cause of the instability that gave rise to the Islamic State and that leaving him in place will serve only to prolong the war, a senior Turkish official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss policy on the record.


Turkey is hosting more than 1.5 million refugees, a huge social and financial burden that will continue to grow if the conflict in Syria is not resolved, the official said.

“They are across the Atlantic,” he said, referring to the United States. “We are a neighbor of Syria’s. We know that if Assad stays, the problem will continue for decades. The Americans have the luxury of cherry-picking the problems, but we need to see them as an entirety.”

Obama and other top U.S. officials have repeatedly said that Assad cannot be part of any long-term solution to the Syria problem. But, another Turkish official said, “saying it is one thing, and doing it is another.”

“Much, much more needs to be done,” the second official said, also speaking on the condition of anonymity. “To fix this region, we have to think big. We have to think long-term and have a holistic strategy underpinned by values that don’t change according to the season.”

U.S. officials acknowledge that Washington policymakers do not always sufficiently take into account the concerns of allies. They also point to areas where Turkey is expanding its cooperation, including restricting the flow of foreign fighters across its borders and identifying the networks in Turkey that support them.

“We’ve seen some steps recently where they are more engaged on both of those issues,” said a senior administration official in Washington, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive diplomacy. “We’re definitely encouraged there.”


And in some ways, the Syria crisis has brought Turkey and the United States closer after a year of building tensions, officials on both sides say. Obama and Erdogan had not spoken since January until they met in Wales in September to discuss the formation of the anti-Islamic State coalition. Lower-level officials have since been talking multiple times a day, Turkish and U.S. officials say. Vice President Biden has announced plans to visit Turkey in November in an effort to smooth over the ruckus over comments he made suggesting that Turkey is responsible for the rise of the Islamic State.

It is hard, however, to avoid the impression that Turkey and the United States are moving on separate tracks — “parallel tracks that don’t converge,” said Gokhan Bacik, a dean at Ipek University in Ankara.

“From now on, this is only a relationship of necessity,” he said. “There is nothing ideologically that the United States and Turkey share. Turkey has changed.”

Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

Airstrikes against the Islamic State have not affected flow of foreign fighters to Syria

The United States has stepped up airstrikes against Islamic State fighters massed around the embattled Syrian town.
Oct. 28, 2014 A picture taken from the Turkish border near the southeastern village of Mursitpinar, in the province of Sanliurfa, shows smoke billowing after a fighter jet hit Kobane in Syria.

By Greg Miller October 30 at 1:25 PM
More than 1,000 foreign fighters are streaming into Syria each month, a rate that has so far been unchanged by airstrikes against the Islamic State and efforts by other countries to stem the flow of departures, according to U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

The magnitude of the ongoing migration suggests that the U.S.-led air campaign has neither deterred significant numbers of militants from traveling to the region nor triggered a spike in the rate of travel among Muslim populations inflamed by American intervention.

“The flow of fighters making their way to Syria remains constant, so the overall number continues to rise,” a U.S. intelligence official said. U.S. officials cautioned, however, that there is a lag in the intelligence being examined by the CIA and other spy agencies, meaning it could be weeks before a change becomes apparent.

The trend line established over the past year would mean that the total number of foreign fighters in Syria has already exceeded 16,000, a pace eclipsing that of any other comparable conflict in recent decades, including the 1980s war in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials have attributed the flows to a range of factors, including the sophisticated recruiting campaigns orchestrated by groups in Syria such as the Islamic State, as well as the relative ease with which militants from the Middle East, North Africa and Europe can make their way to that country.

American officials also stressed that the stability of the flow is not seen as a measure of the effectiveness of an air campaign that expanded beyond Iraq and into Syria late last month. The latest estimates indicate that strikes in Syria alone have so far killed about 460 members of the Islamic State — the group that has beheaded two American journalists and two British aid workers — as well as about 60 fighters with Jabhat al-Nusra, an al-Qaeda affiliate.

Experts said the foreign fighter population is likely to grow significantly larger as the three-year-old conflict drags on.

“I don’t think 15,000 really scratches the surface yet,” said Andrew Liepman, a counterterrorism expert at Rand Corp. who previously served as the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center.

Since the start of the U.S.-led air campaign, analysts have sought to track whether the bombings would discourage would-be fighters or serve as a rallying cry for Islamists. Liepman said the steady numbers could mean that neither has occurred or, more likely, that both have happened to degrees that offset one another.

The air campaign “has probably discouraged some people and encouraged others,” Liepman said. He and others cautioned, however, that there are significant gaps in U.S. intelligence on the conflict in Syria, making it difficult to have a clear understanding of the scale and composition of the swelling population of foreign fighters.

The vast majority of those militants have come from other countries in the Middle East and North Africa, including Tunisia, which has sent more fighters to Syria than any other nation.

Even so, more than 2,000 fighters have come from countries in Europe, carrying passports that would enable them to travel relatively freely in Western countries.

Many went to fight the government of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and may pose no security threat beyond that country’s civil war. But security officials have expressed mounting concern over more recent arrivals who have fought with the Islamic State or al-Nusra, which has a cell near Aleppo established to plot attacks against Western nations.


The United Kingdom, France, Germany and other nations around Europe have taken increasingly aggressive measures over the past year to stem the flow of fighters to Syria, seizing passports, passing new antiterrorism measures and targeting suspects with stepped-up surveillance and arrests. U.S. officials have said that about 130 Americans have traveled to Syria or tried to do so.

Most militants entering Syria have done so through Turkey, a country that has recently sought to tighten control over its borders and root out Islamist networks that serve as pipelines for fighters from Istanbul into Syria’s civil war. U.S. officials said it could be too soon to see clear indications that such measures are working.

“The Europeans and other allies are taking steps upstream to stem the flow of their citizens to Syria, while at the downstream end, the Turks are taking action to keep their borders from being exploited by jihadists,” said the U.S. intelligence official. “It could take some time for the dampening effect of these measures to start showing up in the foreign fighter intelligence estimates.”

Although U.S. officials have not made public estimates of the rate at which foreign fighters are flowing into Syria, they have provided totals that trace a clear trajectory. The 15,000 figure cited by the White House last month was up sharply from an estimate of 12,000 in July and 7,000 in March.

What Happens When Arming the Rebels Goes Wrong?
October 30, 2014, 12:28 pm ET by Jason M. Breslow
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The rapid and violent rise of the Islamic State, or ISIS, has sparked growing calls for deeper U.S. involvement in the arming and training of rebel forces in Syria.

The trouble is, such efforts might now always work as advertised.

Earlier this month, The New York Times reported on a still-classified internal CIA review — commissioned during the Obama administration’s deliberations over its Syria policy — that concluded that many past attempts by the agency to arm foreign forces have had little effect on the long-term outcome of the conflict. As the Times reported, “They were even less effective … when the militias fought without any direct American support on the ground.”

Although the Times analysis did not detail specific examples from the CIA report, several of the agency’s failed attempts at foreign intervention are widely known.

As recently as 2006, for example, a covert effort to finance secular warlords in Somalia was criticized for leading to the resurgence of Islamic militias in the country. The policy reached a low point that year when Islamist militias broke the warlords’ hold on the capital of Mogadishu. In time, the insurgency would give way to the even more hardline group Al-Shabab, which eight years later, remains the principal threat in war-torn Somalia.

In the 1980s, the CIA armed Nicaragua’s Contras, but the fighters were not only defeated, they were also labeled by Human Rights Watch as “major and systemic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict” for their attacks on civilians. Similarly, the agency’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 ended in defeat for the CIA-sponsored Cuban guerrilla force after just three days.

To be sure, there have been successful covert attempts to train rebels in the agency’s 67-year history, most notably, its support during the 1980s for the mujahedeen in their fight to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan.

“It’s pretty hard to say that that was anything other than a spectacular success at a cost of roughly $4 billion without a single American casualty,” said Bruce Riedel, a 30-year veteran of the CIA and the author of What We Won: America’s Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-1989. “They turned Afghanistan into Russia’s Vietnam, and ultimately made it so costly for the Russians that they withdrew from Afghanistan; within six months the Berlin Wall had fallen … the Cold War was over and we were the winner.”

The big asterisk in Afghanistan, however, is that in time some of the rebels once supported by the U.S. would go on to form the core of Al Qaeda. A second caveat to the operation is that it appeared to contradict a key finding of the CIA’s recent review. As the Times report noted, “the agency’s aid to insurgencies had generally failed in instances when no Americans worked on the ground with foreign forces in the conflict zones, as is the administration’s plan for training Syrian rebels.”

As FRONTLINE reported this spring in Syria: Arming the Rebels, the U.S. has been training small numbers of rebels outside of Syria, but according to a report in The Washington Post, they are only being trained to defend territory, not to seize it back from the Islamic State.

Of course, there is no predicting how U.S. intervention may play out in Syria, but as Marc Lynch, the director of the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University, wrote this summer, there may not be much cause for optimism. As Lynch explained:

In general, external support for rebels almost always make wars longer, bloodier and harder to resolve. … Worse, as the University of Maryland’s David Cunningham has shown, Syria had most of the characteristics of the type of civil war in which external support for rebels is least effective. The University of Colorado’s Aysegul Aydin and Binghamton University’s Patrick Regan have suggested that external support for a rebel group could help when all the external powers backing a rebel group are on the same page and effectively cooperate in directing resources to a common end. Unfortunately, Syria was never that type of war.

That’s not to say there are no advantages to be had, according to Daniel Byman, director of research and a senior fellow at the Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. For one, it’s far cheaper than deploying military force. It also creates opportunities for better intelligence-gathering on the ground. But, he said, there have to be realistic expectations.

“If you’re training foreign fighters, it’s usually not enough to tip the balance in favor of the foreign fighters, but it’s enough to to prevent the regime from winning,” Byman told FRONTLINE. Citing the former Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms, he added, “Covert action is not a foreign policy.”

The administration must also be willing to take on a certain amount of risk, according to Riedel.

“You have to take the risk that some of the people you support are going to be less than Jeffersonian Democrats and that some of the arms that you provide and some of the training you provide are going to end up in the hands of the wrong people,” Riedel said.

Still, Riedel says there are clear lessons from America’s success against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan that can work today in Syria. The key in Afghanistan, he said, was an ally in Pakistan that was willing to host the American-backed guerillas and train them. We have that today with Jordan, according to Riedel. Likewise, in Afghanistan, the U.S. was able to split the costs of the effort with Saudi Arabia, something the gulf nation, along with the United Arab Emirates, appears willing to do again today.

“My sense is this administration is very ambivalent about the whole idea at best,” said Riedel. “They don’t really want to do this, but they don’t really have an alternative anymore.”

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