Nasser ar-Refai, sheikh of Hawran (Daraa Governorate, Syria) with Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Activists and rebel soldiers based inside Syria say a small but growing number of Islamist radicals affiliated with global jihadi movements have been arriving in opposition strongholds in recent weeks and attempting to rally support among disaffected residents.
Western diplomats say they have tracked a steady trickle of jihadists flowing into Syria from Iraq, and Jordan’s government last week detained at least four alleged Jordanian militants accused of trying to sneak into Syria to join the revolutionaries.
The same thing happened in Bosnia. So-called “Afghan Arabs,” battle-hardened jihadists from all over the Arab world who previously volunteered to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, ran off to Bosnia to fight a jihad against Serbs when no one else would step up to help out the Bosnians. They made virtually no impact on the course of the war, but some of them stuck around after the fighting was finished and are still causing trouble even today.
A Libyan Arab Airlines Airbus A320-200 at Tripoli International Airport (2006). (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
26/04/2012
Now that fighter aircraft like Rafale, the F18 and Eurofighter have all vanished from Libya’s skies a commercial battle is shaping up in their wake. Airbus will be pitted against Boeing in the fight for Libya’s civil airliner market. The United States Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) is planning to send a definitional mission to Tripoli shortly to size up the country’s air transport needs.
In a tender document, USTDA noted that “due to the history of sanctions, the two national airlines have only purchased Airbus aircraft” up to now. It added that only the small private company, Buraq, owned by Safia Farkash, second wife of Muammar Gaddafi, had acquired Boeing 737s.
In other words, the new political situation and lifting of sanctions could well work in favor of the American group. Continue reading →
In the early years of the Iranian Revolution, an obscure cleric named Ayatollah Gilani became a sensation on state television by contemplating bizarre hypotheticals at the intersection of Islamic law and sexuality. One of his most outlandish scenarios — still mocked by Iranians three decades later — went like this:
Imagine you are a young man sleeping in your bedroom. In the bedroom directly below, your aunt lies asleep. Now imagine that an earthquake happens that collapses your floor, causing you to fall directly on top of her. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that you’re both nude, and you’re erect, and you land with such perfect precision on top of her that you unintentionally achieve intercourse. Is the child of such an encounter halalzadeh (legitimate) or haramzadeh (a bastard)?
The Pentagon is launching a new intelligence organization called ‘Defense Clandestine Service’ (DSC), positioned to focus on interests of ‘national intelligence’ rather than battlefield intelligence and tactical support for the warfighter. While the pentagon is not specific where those interests are, the US most pressing intelligence priorities in recent years have included counterterrorism on a global scale (with focus on the Middle East, Asia and Africa), nonproliferation issues related mainly but not exclusively to North Korea and Iran, and the growing military forces of China.
These interests are covered by a plethora of clandestine organizations, including the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA); other agencies focus on specific threats or technologies, such as the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) or National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, responsible for remote sensing by spy satellites. Following the approved last week by Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta the Pentagon is forming another service beside DIA. DOD intends to be operate this joint service complementary to other intelligence efforts, supporting and complementing intelligence activities under the Director of National Intelligence’s work.
According to the Washington Post, Michael Vickers, the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and the main force behind the changes, is best known as one of the architects of the CIA’s program to arm Islamist militants to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s. He is also a former member of U.S. Special Operations forces.
DIA was effectively conducting its traditional, and much larger, mission of providing intelligence to troops and commanders in war zones, it needed to focus more attention outside the battlefields on what is called “national intelligence” — gathering and distributing information on global issues and sharing that intelligence with other agencies. The mission statement of DIA covers these interests, in addition to directly supporting military operations (see video below).
According to the Washington Post, the new service was developed in response to a classified study completed last year by the director of national intelligence, that concluded that the military’s espionage efforts needed to shift from tactical oriented support to broader operations, streamlining the efforts of the Defense Intelligence with other intelligence agencies, providing more complete and actionable picture for decision makers at the military. Continue reading →
Don't Tread On Me 