Russia is reeling from the worst terror strike on its soil in a generation following an attack on March 22, 2024, that killed at least 137 concertgoers in Moscow.

The attack has been claimed by the Islamic State group. And despite Russian authorities expressing doubt over the claim, U.S. officials told The Associated Press that they believed ISIL-K, a South and Central Asian affiliate of the terrorist organization, was behind the assault.

It comes amid heightened concern over the scope of ISIL-K activities following recent terrorist operations in countries including Iran and Pakistan. The Conversation turned to Clemson University’s Amira Jadoon and Sara Harmouch of American University – terrorism experts who have tracked the activities of ISIL-K – to explain what this latest deadly attack tells us about the organization’s strengths and agenda.

What is ISIL-K?

ISIL-K, short for Islamic State Khorasan Province, is a regional affiliate of the larger Islamic State group.

The affiliate group operates primarily in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, although it has presence throughout the historical “Khorasan” – a region that includes parts of the modern-day nations of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, along with other Central Asian countries.

Established in 2015, ISIL-K aims to establish a physical “caliphate” – a system of governing a society under strict Islamic Sharia law and under religious leadership – in the South and Central Asian region.

What to know about ISIS-K, the group that claimed the Moscow attack • FRANCE 24 English Video

ISIL-K’s beliefs follow the ideology of its parent organization, the Islamic State group, which promotes an extreme interpretation of Islam and sees secular government actors, as well as non-Muslim and Muslim minority civilian populations, as legitimate targets.

The group is known for its extreme brutality and for targeting both government institutions and civilians, including mosques, educational institutions and public spaces.

Following the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, ISIL-K’s key objectives have been to diminish the now-ruling Taliban’s legitimacy in the war-ravaged nation, assert itself as the rightful leader of the Muslim community and emerge as the principal regional adversary to regimes it deems oppressive.

Moreover, the Taliban’s transition from an insurgency group to a governing entity left numerous militant factions in Afghanistan without a unifying force – a gap that ISIL-K has aimed to fill.

Why was Russia targeted by ISIL-K?

ISIL-K has long framed Russia as one of its main adversaries. It has heavily featured anti-Russian rhetoric in its propaganda and has attacked Russia’s presence within Afghanistan. This includes a suicide attack on Russia’s embassy in Kabul in 2022 that left two Russian Embassy staff and six Afghans dead.

The broader Islamic State group has targeted Russia for several reasons.

They include long-standing grievances relating to Moscow’s historical interventions in Muslim-majority regions like Chechnya and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, Russia’s partnerships with regimes opposed by the Islamic State group, notably Syria and Iran, have positioned Russia as a primary adversary in the eyes of the terrorist organization and its affiliates.

In particular, Russia has been a key ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the beginning of Syria’s civil war in 2011, providing military support to the Assad regime against various opposition groups, including the Islamic State group.

This direct opposition to the terrorist group and its caliphate ambitions has rendered Russia as a prime target for retaliation.

Moreover, Russia’s cooperation with the Taliban – ISIL-K’s key nemesis in Afghanistan – adds another layer of animosity. The Islamic State group views countries and groups that oppose its ideology or military objectives as enemies of Islam, including actors who seek to establish relations with the Taliban.

By attacking Russian targets, ISIL-K in part seeks to deter further Russian involvement in the Middle East. But also, such attacks provide high publicity for its cause and aim to inspire its supporters worldwide.

As such, for the Islamic State brand, the Moscow attack serves as retribution for perceived grievances held against Russia, while also projecting global reach. This approach can provide significant dividends, especially for its South and Central Asian affiliate, in the form of increased recruitment, funding and influence across the jihadist spectrum.

What does the attack tell us about ISIL-K capabilities?

The mere association of ISIL-K with this attack, whether it was directly or indirectly involved, bolsters the group’s reputation.

Overall, the attack signals ISIL-K’s growing influence and its determination to make its presence felt on the global stage.

Being linked to a high-profile attack in a major city far from its base in Afghanistan indicates that ISIL-K can extend its operational reach either directly or through collaboration with like-minded militant factions.

The scale and sophistication of the attack reflect advanced planning, coordination and execution capabilities. This only reaffirms unequivocally ISIL-K’s intent, adaptability and determination to internationalize its agenda.

Similar to ISIL-K’s attack in Iran in January 2024 that left over 100 dead, this latest atrocity serves to reinforce ISIL-K’s stated commitment to the broader global jihadist agenda of the Islamic State group, and helps broaden the appeal of its ideology and recruitment campaign.

How does this fit ISIL-K’s strategy?

The attack in Moscow serves as a powerful recruitment and propaganda tool by attracting international media attention to the group. This allows it to remain politically relevant to its audiences across South and Central Asia, and beyond.

But it also helps divert attention from local setbacks for ISIL-K. Like its parent organization Islamic State group, ISIL-K has been confronted with military defeats, loss of territory and leadership and diminishing resources.

In the face of such challenges, ISIL-K’s potential links to the attack in Moscow remind observers of its persistent threat and adaptability.

By targeting a major power like Russia, ISIL-K aims to project a broader message of intimidation aimed at other states involved in anti-Islamic State group operations and undermine the public’s sense of security.

Additionally, operations such as the Moscow attack seek to solidify ISIL-K’s position within the broader Islamic State group network, potentially securing more support and resources.

More broadly, the strategy follows a process of “internationalizing” ISIL-K’s agenda – something it has pursued with renewed vigor since 2021 by targeting the countries with a presence in Afghanistan, including Pakistan, India, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, China and Russia, marking a deliberate expansion of its operational focus beyond local borders.

The Moscow attack, following the January assault in Iran, suggests that ISIL-K is intensifying efforts to export its ideological fight directly to the territories of sovereign nations.

It is a calculated strategy and, as the Moscow attack has exemplified, one that has the potential to strike fear in capitals far beyond ISIL-K’s traditional base.

Sara Harmouch, PhD Candidate, School of Public Affairs, American University and Amira Jadoon, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Clemson University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Does that sound like any other armed conflict you’ve heard about recently? What it brings to my mind is, of course, Israel’s response to the October 7th terror assault by the Islamic militant group Hamas on its border areas, which my country and much of the rest of the world roundly condemned.

Many Americans now see the destruction and suffering in Gaza and Jewish settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank as the crises of the day and I agree. It’s hard even to keep up with the death toll in the Palestinian territories, but you can certainly give it a college try. More than 29,000 Gazans have already been killed, more than 12,000 of them reportedly children. The scale of the loss of civilian life has been breathtaking in what are supposed to be targeted missions. For example, in mid-February, in an ostensible attempt to free two Israeli hostages in the southern Gazan city of Rafah, where more than one million civilians are now sheltering under the worst conditions imaginable, Israeli troops killed 74 Palestinians. Between December 2023 and January 2024, four strikes there had already killed at least 95 civilians. And on and on it goes. Anyone with concerns about Israel’s response to Hamas’s bloody attacks has ground to stand on.

But if war deaths among people of color in particular are really that much of a concern to Americans, especially on the political left, then there are significant gaps in our attention. Look at what’s happening in the 85 countries where the U.S. is currently engaged in “counterterrorism” efforts of one sort or another, where we fight alongside local troops, train or equip them, and conduct intelligence operations or even air strikes, all of it in an extension of those first responses to 9/11. Ask yourself if you’ve paid attention to that lately or if you were even aware that it was still happening. Do you have any idea, for instance, that our country’s military continues to pursue its war on terror across significant parts of Africa?

Given Israel’s October 7th tragedy, my mention of that date in 2001, which marked Washington’s first military response to the worst terrorist attacks on our soil, is more than a play on words. Like Israel, the U.S. was attacked by armed Islamic extremists who sought to make gruesome spectacles of ordinary Americans. Some of them, like the Israeli families smoked out of their saferooms only to be shot, flung themselves from their office buildings in New York’s Twin Towers, essentially choosing the least awful deaths under the circumstances. Yet after decades of America’s war on terror, whose benefits have been, to say the least, questionable, our tax dollars continue to fund the longest and bloodiest response to terrorism in our history.

Our own October 7th and its seemingly never-ending consequences suggest that something more sinister may be at play in shaping what violence we choose to focus on and condemn, and what violence we choose to overlook.

An International Smorgasbord of Killings

Too little ink is spilled anymore objecting to the hundreds of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen who died in our global war on terror — and, of course, those are just some of the countries where we’ve fought in these years. Consider, for example, how we continue to arm and train Somali government troops in their deadly counterinsurgency war. And remember that the war on terror, as it still plays out, isn’t just President Biden’s war, though he has indeed continued it (though in 2021, he did at least get us out of the longest-running part of it in Afghanistan).

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Remember as well when you condemn the Israelis for what they’re doing that, thanks to American bombs and missiles, civilians in our own post-October 7, 2001, war zones died as they slept at home, studied, or shopped at marketplaces. Some were run over by our vehicles. Some died in NATO air strikes or in strikes by unmanned American drones, or in fires that erupted in the aftermath of such bombing and shelling. Some were run off the road, gunned down at checkpoints, blown up by bomblets left over from our use of cluster bombs, tortured or executed in U.S.-run prisons, or raped by occupying American troops.

Here are just a few examples: In 2012, an American soldier in Afghanistan shot dead 16 civilians, nine of them children, as they slept in their homes. This was anything but the first such incident of civilian targeting and would be anything but the last. In 2017, after then-President Donald Trump loosened Obama-era air strike restrictions meant to help protect civilians, the U.S. conducted more individually identifiable drone strikes than in any other year except 2012 under — yes! — President Barack Obama.

One January 2017 raid that killed more than a dozen opposition fighters in Yemen also killed Saudi and Yemeni civilians, among them children as young as eight years old. In 2021, two Yemeni families filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights for the unlawful deaths of 34 relatives, including nine children, in U.S. drone strikes between 2013 and 2018, seeking recognition of harm done by the U.S. and its allies. Given that the Pentagon lacks a centralized system for tracking civilian casualties in places where our forces fight and no system at all in areas like Israel where the U.S. only provides military aid, recognition of such horrors has been a rare commodity.

Each time I write about such examples of how, in those years, my country slaughtered civilians, I need to do something like pet my cat or hug my children. That’s how much hurt I feel, especially as a military spouse, when I think about it. I always remember scholar Elaine Scarry’s insight that having to explain how war kills people (not “just” opposing forces but civilians, too!) ought to unsettle us. Only recently, just a few months late, President Biden did indeed finally caution that Israel needed to come up with a “credible plan to protect civilians” before sending its troops into the Gazan city of Rafah, and it certainly should have been a laudable message about preserving life. Unfortunately, it ignored the fact that, when they do so, they’ll be using American weaponry and that funding war — anyone’s war — necessarily means endorsing civilian deaths.

Selective Reckoning on Armed Conflict

I wonder sometimes how many of the Americans now protesting Israel’s incursions into Gaza have ever spoken up about our own country’s endless wars in this century and the human toll that’s gone with them. I suspect most Americans don’t even realize that our war on terror is still ongoing (and younger ones may know little or nothing about what we actually did in all those post-2001 years).

Perhaps such apathy can be attributed in part to the sense of righteous purpose that was first associated with launching a war in Afghanistan on that all-American October 7th of ours, while planning to democratize that country and rid women, in particular, of the Taliban’s oppressive rule. Then came our disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on President George W. Bush’s spurious claims that its ruler, Saddam Hussein, possessed weapons of mass destruction and the initial protests of so many Americans responding to the grim, if flashy, optics of those first air strikes on Baghdad with countrywide protests that soon faded away.

After that, most Americans stopped paying attention to our ongoing mobilization of troops to send abroad, the slow-motion destruction of entire communities in distant lands, and the creation of an estimated 38 million refugees from those conflicts. A case in point: When I do a Google search of the words “Israel, Gaza civilians killed,” I get notice of 13 million articles written on the subject since October 7th of last year. When, however, I search for “War on Terror, civilians killed” without even circumscribing the time range, I get about 850,000 results. Part of the problem undoubtedly lies in semantics and search-engine logistics. After all, in some sense, there was no such thing as the war on terror but instead the war in Iraq, in Somalia, in Pakistan, in Syria, and so on. A framing of our foreign wars that called more attention to the specifics might still focus our attention on the policymakers across the political spectrum who continue to vote for bloated military budgets and all the global destruction that goes with them.

Caring About the Costs of All Wars

Is it possible that one factor in the objections of some Americans to Israel’s war in Gaza isn’t just the ongoing nightmare of civilian deaths, but also a distaste for the nation and people prosecuting this particular war? Consider that the incidence of anti-Semitic attacks and threats on U.S. soil has exponentially risen in recent years, spiking especially dramatically in the months following the start of Israel’s war, or consider the recent mealy-mouthed responses of the leaders of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT to whether calls for the genocide of Jews should be censured on university campuses, or what is reportedly happening at some of the nation’s most highly ranked social-work schools where certain Jewish students have claimed not to feel safe when some of their peers call them “colonizers.” (When I was in social work school in 2017, I heard a Jewish student told in class that she was demonstrating “white fragility” in speaking up about her family’s experiences of anti-Semitism in this country.)

In light of such examples, it’s easy for me to see why a double standard might be applied here to the Jewish state and the U.S. one and, more to the point, in the wake of a rash of anti-Semitic verbal threats, physical attacks, and harassment, it’s striking how readily so many Americans now blame Israelis generally for the war perpetrated by that country’s right-wing government, but not Americans for our wars, which most of us know all too little about. What’s more, we shouldn’t forget that part of what shaped Israel’s very formation was the refusal of the U.S. government to take in Jewish refugees before, during, or after the Holocaust. In the wake of World War II, many Jews needed a safe place to go, so a place needed to be made for them.

Don’t think, by the way, that I’m suggesting we should stop holding Israel accountable for war crimes in Gaza and the West Bank. We shouldn’t. Not for a second. But I’m suggesting that if we care about peace in the Middle East, then we need to focus as well on this country’s foreign policy and the racism that shapes it. If we really care about the costs of war, then we need to be equal-opportunity critics and consider not only the most highly reported conflict of the moment but also the chronic ones fought, whether we realize it or not, distinctly in our names.

Among other tasks, that means we need to think through the long-term consequences of policies that began under the Trump administration, which elevated Israel’s standing in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights and exacerbated Palestinian-Israeli tensions long before the Hamas attack of October 7th. It’s also important that we ask ourselves what it means for us to agitate for an Israeli ceasefire (as well we should!) when, since our own October 7th, our wars overseas have largely been protected by American silence and so complicity. Otherwise, it’s likely that progressives and moderates alike will continue to be divided by whatever conflict rules the day in our capricious mainstream mediasphere, rather than speaking with one voice about the costs of war and how they drain our economy and our culture.

Copyright 2024 Andrea Mazzarino

Tomdispatch.com

I recall rooting for the Israelis, advertised then as crucial American allies, against Egypt, Syria, and other regional enemies at least ostensibly allied with the Soviet Union in that Cold War era. I bought the prevailing narrative of a David-versus-Goliath struggle. I even got a book on the Yom Kippur War that captivated me by displaying all the weaponry the U.S. military had rushed to Israel to turn the tide there, including F-4 Phantom jets and M-60 main battle tanks. (David’s high-tech slingshots, if you will.) Little did I know that, in the next 50 years of my life, I would witness increasingly destructive U.S. military attacks in the Middle East, especially after the oil cartel OPEC (largely Middle Eastern then) hit back hard with an embargo in 1973 that sent our petroleum-based economy into a tailspin.

As one jokester quipped: Who put America’s oil under the sands of all those ungrateful Muslim countries in the Middle East? With declarations like the Carter Doctrine in 1980, the U.S. was obviously ready to show the world just how eagerly it would defend its “vital interests” (meaning fossil fuels, of course) in that region. And even today, as we watch the latest round in this country’s painfully consistent record of attempting to pound various countries and entities there into submission, mainly via repetitive air strikes, we should never forget the importance of oil, and lots of it, to keep the engines of industry and war churning along in a devastating fashion.

Right now, of course, the world is witnessing yet another U.S. bombing campaign, the latest in a series that seems all too predictable (and futile), meant to teach the restless rebels of Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and possibly even Iran a lesson when it comes to messing with the United States of America. As the recently deceased country singer Toby Keith put it: Mess with this country and “We’ll put a boot (think: bomb) in your ass.” You kill three soldiers of ours and we’ll kill scores, if not hundreds, if not thousands of yours (and it doesn’t really matter if they’re soldiers or not), because… well, because we damn well can!

America’s leaders, possessing a peerless Air Force, regularly exhibit a visceral willingness to use it to bomb and missile perceived enemies into submission or, if need be, nothingness. And don’t for a second think that they’re going to be stopped by international law, humanitarian concerns, well-meaning protesters, or indeed any force on this planet. America bombs because it can, because it believes in the efficacy of violence, and because it’s run by appeasers.

Yes, America’s presidents, its bombers-in-chief, are indeed appeasers. Of course, they think they’re being strong when they’re blowing distant people to bits, but their actions invariably showcase a distinctive kind of weakness. They eternally seek to appease the military-industrial-congressional complex, aka the national (in)security state, a complex state-within-a-state with an unappeasable hunger for power, profit, and ever more destruction. They fail and fail and fail again in the Middle East, yet they’re incapable of not ordering more bombing, more droning, more killing there. Think of them as being possessed by a monomania for war akin to my urge to play with toy soldiers. The key difference? When I played at war, I was a wet-behind-the-ears 10 year old.

The Rockets’ Red Glare, the Bombs Bursting in Air

No technology may be more all-American than bombs and bombers and no military doctrine more American than the urge to attain “peace” through massive firepower. In World War II and subsequent wars, the essential U.S. approach could be summarized in five words: mass production enabling mass destruction.

No other country in the world has dedicated such vast resources as mine has to mass destruction through air power. Think of the full-scale bombing of cities in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II, ending in the atomic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Think of the flattening of North Korea during the Korean War of the early 1950s or the staggering bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the 1960s and early 1970s. Or consider the massive use of air power in Desert Shield against Iraq in the early 1990s followed by the air campaigns that accompanied the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003 (and never quite seemed to stop thereafter). The butcher’s bill for such bombing has indeed been high, quite literally millions of non-combatants killed by America’s self-styled “arsenal of democracy.”

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And indeed, as you read this, another country is now faithfully following America’s example. Israel is systematically destroying Gaza, rendering it essentially uninhabitable for those Palestinians who survive the ongoing rampage. In fact, early in its war of annihilation, Israeli leaders cited the Allied destruction of the German city of Dresden in 1945 in support of their own atrocious air and ground campaign against the Palestinians.

Looking at this dispassionately as a military historian, the Dresden reference makes a certain twisted sense. In World War II, the Americans and their British allies in their “combined bomber offensive” destroyed German cities indiscriminately, seeing all Germans as essentially Nazis, complicit in the crimes of their government, and so legitimate targets. Something similar is true of the right-wing Israeli government today. It sees all Palestinians as essentially members of Hamas and thus complicit in last year’s brutal October 7th attacks on Israel, making them legitimate targets of war, Israeli- (and American-) style. Just like the United States, Israel claims to be “defending democracy” whatever it does. Little wonder, then, that Washington has been so willing to send bombs and bullets to its protégé as it seeks “peace” through massive firepower and genocidal destruction.

Indeed, of late, there has been considerable debate about whether Israel is engaged in acts of genocide, with the International Court of Justice ruling that the present government should strive to prevent just such acts in Gaza. Putting that issue aside, it’s undeniable that Israel has been using indiscriminate bombing attacks and a devastating invasion in a near-total war against Palestinians living on that 25-mile-long strip of land, an approach that calls to mind the harrowing catchphrase “Exterminate all the brutes!” from Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.

In a sense, there’s nothing new under the sun. Certainly, the Old Testament itself provides examples of exterminatory campaigns (cited by Bibi Netanyahu as Israel first moved against the Palestinians in Gaza). He might as well have cited a catchphrase heard during America’s war in Vietnam, but rooted in the medieval crusades: “Kill them all and let God sort them out.”

America’s Unrelenting Crusade in the Middle East

In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush got into trouble almost instantly when he referred to the “war on terror” he had launched as a “crusade.” Yet, as impolitic as that word might have seemed, how better to explain U.S. actions in the Middle East and Afghanistan? Just consider our faith in the goodness and efficacy of “our” military and that all-American urge to bring “democracy” to the world, despite the destruction visited upon Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen over the last several decades. Or go back to 1953 and the role the CIA played in the overthrow of Iran’s legitimate democratic ruler and his replacement by the brutally repressive regime of the Shah.

Try to imagine such events from the perspective of a historian writing in the year 2200. Might that future scribe not refer to repeated U.S. invasions of, incursions into, and bombing campaigns across the Middle East as a bloody crusade, launched under the (false) banner of democracy with righteous vengeance, if not godly purpose, in mind? Might that historian not suggest that such a “crusade” was ultimately more about power and profit, domination and control than (as advertised) “freedom”? And might that historian not be impressed (if not depressed) by the remarkable way the U.S. brought seemingly unending chaos and death to the region over such a broad span of time?

Consider these facts. More than 22 years after the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. still has at least 30,000 troops scattered across the Middle East. At least one Navy carrier strike group, and often two, dominate the regional waters, while striking numbers of military bases (“Little Americas”) are still sprinkled across countries ranging from Kuwait to Bahrain, from Qatar to the United Arab Emirates and beyond. So many years later, about 900 U.S. troops still illegally occupy part of Syria (not coincidentally, where that country produces most of its oil) and 2,500 more remain in Iraq, even though the government there would like them to depart.

Yankee Go Home? Apparently Not in My Lifetime

Meanwhile, American military aid, mostly in the form of deadly weaponry, flows not only to Israel but to other countries in the region like Egypt and Jordan. Direct U.S. military support facilitated Saudi Arabia’s long, destructive, and unsuccessful war against the Houthis in Yemen, a conflict Washington is now conducting on its own with repeated air strikes. And of course, the entire region has, for more than two decades now, been under constant U.S. military pressure in that war on terror, which all too quickly became a war of terror (and of torture).

Recall that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 led to the death of roughly a million Iraqis and the displacement of millions more as refugees. How could that not be considered part of a “crusade,” even if a fitful and failing one? Yet, here’s the rub: just as those Catholic crusades of the Middle Ages weren’t entirely or even primarily about religion, so today’s American version isn’t motivated primarily by an anti-Muslim animus. Of course, there is indeed an inescapably religious aspect to such never-ending American war-making, but what drives those wars is largely naked greed, vengeance, and an all-American urge both to appease and amplify the military-industrial-congressional complex.

Of course, as was true in the years after 9/11 and is still true today, Americans are generally encouraged to see their country’s imperial and crusading acts as purely defensive in nature, the righteous responses of freedom-bringers. Admittedly, it’s a strange kind of freedom this country brings at the tip of a sword — or on the nosecone of a Hellfire missile. Even so, in such an otherwise thoroughly contentious Congress, it should be striking how few members have challenged the latest bombing version of this country’s enduring war in the Middle East.

Forget the Constitution. No Congressional declaration of war is believed necessary for any of this, nor has it mattered much (so far) that the American public has grown increasingly skeptical of those wars and the acts of destruction that go with them. As it happens, however, the crusade, such as it is, has proven remarkably sustainable without much public crusading zeal. For most Americans, those acts remain distinctly off-stage and largely out of mind, except at moments like the present one where the deaths of three American soldiers give the administration all the excuse it needs for repetitive acts of retaliation.

No, we the people exercise remarkably little control over the war-making that the military-industrial-congressional complex has engaged in for decades or the costs that go with them. Indeed, the dollar costs are largely deferred to future generations as America’s national debt climbs even faster than the Pentagon war budget.

America, so we were told by President George W. Bush, is hated for its freedoms.  Yet the “freedoms” we’re allegedly hated for aren’t those delineated in the Constitution and its Bill of Rights.  Rather, it’s America’s “freedom” to build military bases across the globe and bomb everywhere, a “freedom” to sell such bellicose activity as lawful and even admirable, a “freedom” to engage in a hyperviolent style of play, treating “our” troops and so many foreigners as toy soldiers and expendable props for Washington’s games.  

It’s something I captured unintentionally five decades ago with those toy soldiers of mine from an imagined glorious military past.  But after a time (too long, perhaps) I learned to recognize them as the childish things they were and put them away.  They’re now long gone, lost to time and maturity, as is the illusion that my country pursues freedom and democracy in the Middle East through ceaseless acts of extreme violence, which just seem to drone on and on and on.

Copyright 2024 William J. Astore

Tomdispatch.com

This latest U.S. attack followed the U.S. bombing of seven targets on February 2, three in Iraq and four in Syria, with 125 bombs and missiles, killing at least 39 people, which Iran called “a strategic mistake” that would bring “disastrous consequences” for the Middle East.

At the same time, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been touring the shrinking number of capitals in the region where leaders will still talk to him, playing the United States’ traditional role as a dishonest broker between Israel and its neighbors, in reality partnering with Israel to offer the Palestinians impossible, virtually suicidal terms for a ceasefire in Gaza.

What Israel and the United States have proposed, but not made public, appears to be a second temporary ceasefire, during which prisoners or hostages would be exchanged, possibly leading to the release of all the Israeli security prisoners held in Gaza, but in no way leading to the final end of the genocide. If the Palestinians in fact freed all their Israeli hostages as part of a prisoner swap, it would remove the only obstacle to a catastrophic escalation of the genocide.

When Hamas responded with a serious counter-proposal for a full ceasefire and Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, Biden dismissed it out of hand as “over the top,” and Netanyahu called it “bizarre” and “delusional.” 

The position of the United States and Israel today is that ending a massacre that has already killed more than 27,700 people is not a serious option, even after the International Court of Justice has ruled it a plausible case of genocide under the Genocide Convention. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish holocaust survivor who coined the term genocide and drafted the Genocide Convention from his adopted home in New York City, must be turning in his grave in Mount Hebron Cemetery. 

The United States’ support for Israel’s genocidal policies now goes way beyond Palestine, with the U.S. expansion of the war to Iraq, Syria and Yemen to punish other countries and forces in the region for intervening to defend or support the Palestinians. U.S. officials claimed the February 2 attacks were intended to stop Iraqi Resistance attacks on U.S. bases. But the leading Iraqi resistance force had already suspended attacks against U.S. targets on January 30th after they killed three U.S. troops, declaring a truce at the urging of the Iranian and Iraqi governments.

A senior Iraqi military officer told BBC Persian that at least one of the Iraqi military units the U.S. bombed on February 2nd had nothing to do with attacks on U.S. bases. Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia Al-Sudani negotiated an agreement a year ago to clearly differentiate between Popular Mobilization Force (PMF) units that were part of the “Axis of Resistance” fighting a low-grade war with U.S. occupation forces, and other PMF units that were not involved in attacks on U.S. bases. 

Tragically, because the U.S. failed to coordinate its attacks with the Iraqi government, al-Sudani’s agreement failed to prevent the U.S. from attacking the wrong Iraqi forces. It is no wonder that some analysts have dubbed al-Sudani’s valiant efforts to prevent all-out war between U.S. forces and the Islamic Resistance in his country as “mission impossible.” 

Aljazeera English Video: “US carried out an airstrike in Iraq killing high-ranking member of an armed group linked to Iran”

Following the elaborately staged but carelessly misdirected U.S. attacks, Resistance forces in Iraq began launching new strikes on U.S. bases, including a drone attack that killed six Kurdish troops at the largest U.S. base in Syria. So the predictable effect of the U.S. bombing was in fact to rebuff Iran and Iraq’s efforts to rein in resistance forces and to escalate a war that U.S. officials keep claiming they want to deter.  

From experienced journalists and analysts to Middle Eastern governments, voices of caution are warning the United States in increasingly stark language of the dangers of its escalating bombing campaigns. “While the war rages in Gaza,” the BBC’s Orla Guerin wrote on February 4, “one false move could set the region alight.” 

Three days later, Guerin would be surrounded by protesters chanting “America is the greatest devil,” as she reported from the site of the U.S. drone assassination of Kataib Hezbollah leader Abu Baqir al-Saadi in Baghdad – which could prove to be exactly the false move she feared. 

But what Americans should be asking their government is this: Why are there still 2,500 U.S. troops in Iraq? It is 21 years since the United States invaded Iraq and plunged the nation into seemingly endless violence, chaos and corruption; 12 years since Iraq forced U.S. occupation forces to withdraw from Iraq at the end of 2011; and 7 years since the defeat of ISIS, which served as justification for the United States to send forces back into Iraq in 2014, and then to obliterate most of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in 2017.

Successive Iraqi governments and parliaments have asked the United States to withdraw its forces from Iraq, and previously scheduled talks are about to begin. But the Iraqis and Americans have issued contradictory statements about the goal of the negotiations. Prime Minister al-Sudani and most Iraqis hope they will bring about the immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces, while U.S. officials insist that U.S. troops may remain for another two to five years, kicking this explosive can further down the road despite the obvious dangers it poses to the lives of U.S. troops and to peace in the region.

Behind these contradictory statements, the real value of Iraqi bases to the U.S. military does not seem to be about ISIS at all but about Iran. Although the United States has more than 40,000 troops stationed in 14 countries across the Middle East, and another 20,000 on warships in the seas surrounding them, the bases it uses in Iraq are its closest bases and airfields to Tehran and much of Iran. If the Pentagon loses these forward operating bases in Iraq, the closest bases from which it can attack Tehran will be Camp Arifjan and five other bases in Kuwait, where 13,500 U.S. troops would be vulnerable to Iranian counter-attacks – unless, of course, the U.S. withdraws them, too.

Toward the end of the Cold War, historian Gabriel Kolko observed in his book Confronting the Third World that the United States’ “endemic incapacity to avoid entangling, costly commitments in areas of the world that are of intrinsically secondary importance to [its] priorities has caused U.S. foreign policy and resources to whipsaw virtually arbitrarily from one problem and region to the other. The result has been the United States’ increasing loss of control over its political priorities, budget, military strategy and tactics, and, ultimately, its original economic goals.”

After the end of the Cold War, instead of restoring realistic goals and priorities, the neocons who gained control of U.S. foreign policy fooled themselves into believing that U.S. military and economic power could finally triumph over the frustratingly diverse social and political evolution of hundreds of countries and cultures all over the world. In addition to wreaking pointless mass destruction on country after country, this has turned the United States into the global enemy of the principles of democracy and self-determination that most Americans believe in.

The horror Americans feel at the plight of people in Gaza and the U.S. role in it is a shocking new low in this disconnect between the humanity of ordinary Americans and the insatiable ambitions of their undemocratic leaders. 

While working for an end to the U.S. government’s support for Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, Americans should also be working for the long-overdue withdrawal of U.S. occupying forces from Iraq, Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Sot al-Iraq, an independent Baghdad daily, reported that the US counter-strike on Qaim on the border of Iraq and Syria killed two civilians and wounded 5 other people.

Although US military analysts and spokesmen will say that the US air strikes are aimed at degrading the militia’s capabilities and at deterring it from future such attacks, it isn’t very likely that either goal will be achieved in this way. Bombing guerrilla groups from 30,000 feet is as close to a futile military tactic as you can get. It is not as though these light, mobile forces were likely sitting around in their known bases and hideouts, oblivious that the US was coming for them.

In any case, the Party of God Brigades already announced that it was pausing its attacks on US forces after the Jordan operation killed three US servicemen. It makes you wonder whether they had been expecting the US to shoot down their drone and were appalled that it got through and killed servicemen. The Saudi owned, London-based daily, al-Sharq al-Awsat alleges that the militia was pressured afterwards by Iran and by Shiite political parties in the Iraqi parliament to suspend their anti-American attacks.

Iraq’s president, Abdul Latif Rashid, and the prime minister Muhammad Shia al-Sudani, warned against Iraq becoming an arena of regional conflict.

Although Friday’s air strikes on the Party of God Brigades’ known facilities are unlikely to spiral into a general war, you never know about these things. People don’t usually start out trying to have a war– they often fall into it.

MSNBC Video: “‘More airstrikes and Tomahawk missiles’: How U.S. may continue targeting Iran-backed militia groups”

President Joe Biden could easily avoid the necessity of bombing Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and the good Lord knows how many other countries in the region. He just has to do three things to make US troop secure in the region.

1. He could cut Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu off from resupply of armaments and ammunition, forcing a ceasefire in Gaza. Whatever is going on there, it isn’t primarily a war on Hamas. It is a total war on Gaza civilians, hundreds of whom are likely dying of hunger daily, on top of the innocent civilians killed by air strikes and sniping. No one can understand Biden’s single-minded dedication to the killing of 27,000 Palestinians, 70% of them women and children.

2. Biden could just pull the US troops out of Syria. It is crazy that they are still there. They only total 900, spread across three small forward operating bases. The Syrian government doesn’t want them there and given the defeat of ISIL (ISIS, Daesh), their presence is no longer required for self-defense. Their presence is by now illegal in international law. They are also exposed to danger, being so few. Bring them home.

3. Biden could also withdraw the 2500 US troops from Iraq. The Iraqi parliament voted against their continued presence in January 2020, so they are there illegally, as well. They are also exposed and vulnerable.

Presto change-o, the extreme tensions and crisis that threaten to draw the US into a wider war would likely evaporate.

Or, Biden could go on the mule-headed and amoral way he is going. It is starting to cast a dark cloud over his presidential campaign. Yesterday his swing through Michigan did not include an appearance in Dearborn, which has a significant Arab and Muslim population. They are an important swing vote in the state. The Biden people tried to set up a meeting, but were rebuffed.

Ceasefire.

In fact, it is U.S. and Israeli actions that are driving the expansion of the war, while Iran and others are genuinely trying to find effective ways to counter and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza while avoiding a full-scale regional war. 

We are encouraged by Egypt and Qatar’s efforts to mediate a ceasefire and the release of hostages and prisoners-of-war by both sides. But it is important to recognize who are the aggressors, who are the victims, and how regional actors are taking incremental but increasingly forceful action to respond to genocide.

A near-total Israeli communications blackout in Gaza has reduced the flow of images of the ongoing massacre on our TVs and computer screens, but the slaughter has not abated. Israel is bombing and attacking Khan Younis, the largest city in the southern Gaza Strip, as ruthlessly as it did Gaza City in the north. Israeli forces and U.S. weapons have killed an average of 240 Gazans per day for more than three months, and 70% of the dead are still women and children. 

Israel has repeatedly claimed it is taking new steps to protect civilians, but that is only a public relations exercise. The Israeli government is still using 2,000 pound and even 5,000 pound “bunker-buster” bombs to dehouse the people of Gaza and herd them toward the Egyptian border, while it debates how to push the survivors over the border into exile, which it euphemistically refers to as “voluntary emigration.”

People throughout the Middle East are horrified by Israel’s slaughter and plans for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, but most of their governments will only condemn Israel verbally. The Houthi government in Yemen is different. Unable to directly send forces to fight for Gaza, they began enforcing a blockade of the Red Sea against Israeli-owned ships and other ships carrying goods to or from Israel. Since mid-November 2023, the Houthis have conducted about 30 attacks on international vessels transiting the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden but none of the attacks have caused casualties or sunk any ships.

In response,  the Biden administration, without Congressional approval, has launched at least six rounds of bombing, including airstrikes on Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. The United Kingdom has contributed a few warplanes, while Australia, Canada, Holland and Bahrain also act as cheerleaders to provide the U.S. with the cover of leading an “international coalition.”

President Biden has admitted that U.S. bombing will not force Yemen to lift its blockade, but he insists that the U.S. will keep attacking it anyway. Saudi Arabia dropped 70,000 mostly American (and some British) bombs on Yemen in a 7-year war, but utterly failed to defeat the Houthi government and armed forces. 

US, UK Launch Fresh Strikes Against Houthi Rebels In Yemen | India Today Video

Yemenis naturally identify with the plight of the Palestinians in Gaza, and a million Yemenis took to the street to support their country’s position challenging Israel and the United States. Yemen is no Iranian puppet, but as with Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s Iraqi and Syrian allies, Iran has trained the Yemenis to build and deploy increasingly powerful anti-ship, cruise and ballistic missiles.

The Houthis have made it clear that they will stop the attacks once Israel stops its slaughter in Gaza. It beggars belief that instead of pressing for a ceasefire in Gaza, Biden and his clueless advisers are instead choosing to deepen U.S. military involvement in a regional Middle East conflict.

The United States and Israel have now conducted airstrikes on the capitals of four neighboring countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. Iran also suspects U.S. and Israeli spy agencies of a role in two bomb explosions in Kerman in Iran, which killed about 90 people and wounded hundreds more at a commemoration of the fourth anniversary of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020.

On January 20th, an Israeli bombing killed 10 people in Damascus, including 5 Iranian officials. After repeated Israeli airstrikes on Syria, Russia has now deployed warplanes to patrol the border to deter Israeli attacks, and has reoccupied two previously vacated outposts built to monitor violations of the demilitarized zone between Syria and the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights.

Iran has responded to the terrorist bombings in Kerman and Israeli assassinations of Iranian officials with missile strikes on targets in Iraq, Syria and Pakistan. Iranian Foreign Minister Amir-Abdohallian has strongly defended Iran’s claim that the strikes on Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan targeted agents of Israel’s Mossad spy agency. 

Eleven Iranian ballistic missiles destroyed an Iraqi Kurdish intelligence facility and the home of a senior intelligence officer, and also killed a wealthy real estate developer and businessman, Peshraw Dizayee, who had been accused of working for the Mossad, as well as of smuggling Iraqi oil from Kurdistan to Israel via Turkey.

The targets of Iran’s missile strikes in northwest Syria were the headquarters of two separate ISIS-linked groups in Idlib province. The strikes precisely hit both buildings and demolished them, at a range of 800 miles, using Iran’s newest ballistic missiles called Kheybar Shakan or Castle Blasters, a name that equates today’s U.S. bases in the Middle East with the 12th and 13th century European crusader castles whose ruins still dot the landscape.

Iran launched its missiles, not from north-west Iran, which would have been closer to Idlib, but from Khuzestan province in south-west Iran, which is closer to Tel Aviv than to Idlib. So these missile strikes were clearly intended as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran can conduct precise attacks on Israel and U.S. “crusader castles” in the Middle East if they continue their aggression against Palestine, Iran and their allies.

At the same time, the U.S. has escalated its tit-for-tat airstrikes against Iranian-backed Iraqi militias. The Iraqi government has consistently protested U.S. airstrikes against the militias as violations of Iraqi sovereignty. Prime Minister Sudani’s military spokesman called the latest U.S. airstrikes “acts of aggression,” and said, “This unacceptable act undermines years of cooperation… at a time when the region is already grappling with the danger of expanding conflict, the repercussions of the aggression on Gaza.”

After its fiascos in Afghanistan and Iraq killed thousands of U.S. troops, the United States has avoided large numbers of U.S. military casualties for ten years. The last time the U.S. lost more than a hundred troops killed in action in a year was in 2013, when 128 Americans were killed in Afghanistan. 

Since then, the United States has relied on bombing and proxy forces to fight its wars. The only lesson U.S. leaders seem to have learned from their lost wars is to avoid putting U.S. “boots on the ground.” The U.S. dropped over 120,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq and Syria in its war on ISIS, while Iraqis, Syrians and Kurds did all the hard fighting on the ground. 

In Ukraine, the U.S. and its allies found a willing proxy to fight Russia. But after two years of war, Ukrainian casualties have become unsustainable and new recruits are hard to find. The Ukrainian parliament has rejected a bill to authorize forced conscription, and no amount of U.S. weapons can persuade more Ukrainians to sacrifice their lives for a Ukrainian nationalism that treats large numbers of them, especially Russian speakers, as second class citizens. 

 Now, in Gaza, Yemen and Iraq, the United States has waded into what it hoped would be another “US-casualty-free” war. Instead, the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza is unleashing a crisis that is spinning out of control across the region and may soon directly involve U.S. troops in combat. This will shatter the illusion of peace Americans have lived in for the last ten years of U.S. bombing and proxy wars, and bring the reality of U.S. militarism and warmaking home with a vengeance. 

Biden can continue to give Israel carte-blanche to wipe out the people of Gaza, and watch as the region becomes further engulfed in flames, or he can listen to his own campaign staff, who warn that it’s a “moral and electoral imperative” to insist on a ceasefire. The choice could not be more stark.

Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies are the authors of War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict, published by OR Books in November 2022.

Medea Benjamin is the cofounder of CODEPINK for Peace, and the author of several books, including Inside Iran: The Real History and Politics of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

Nicolas J. S. Davies is an independent journalist, a researcher for CODEPINK and the author of Blood on Our Hands: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq.

Via Code Pink

This article accompanies an episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast featuring an interview with the author, Ammar Azzouz.

The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes. At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.

Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage. Meanwhile, according to the health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, more than 6,500 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes and more than 17,400 injured.

There is a modern term for what’s happening in Gaza. Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home. It comes from the Latin word domus which means home and cide, which is deliberate killing.

But, home here doesn’t only mean the physical, tangible built environment of people’s homes and properties, it also refers to people’s sense of belonging and identity. We are seeing in many conflicts and wars across the world that alongside the destruction of architecture, people’s sense of dignity and belonging is also being targeted.

There is a link between genocide and domicide: genocide refers to the killing of people and domicide to the erasure of their presence and their material culture. In 2022, a UN expert on housing argued that domicide should be recognised as an international crime.

When people are continuously displaced from their homes, sometimes for decades, or even a lifetime, there’s a sense of grief and sorrow that their history is being erased.

The destruction of Homs

My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.

Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed. Across the country, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of these, 6.8 million people are displaced inside the country, and 5.4 million people live as refugees in neighbouring countries and beyond.

Domicidal campaigns like this also work to erase evidence that a community actually existed in a particular place and that it had a history and culture there. This is an attempt to write people out of history through destroying their homes and heritage in a way that’s systematic and deliberate. In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground. In other cities, such as Damascus and Hama, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out through new land and property laws which designate these neighbourhoods as “informal”.

Listen to Ammar Azzouz talk about his research on The Conversation Weekly podcast.

Domicide in Gaza

There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle. But I’ve been following the news continuously since the Hamas attack on Israel, and I can’t stop looking at the updates about the heavy Israeli bombing. The scale of destruction, the level of mass displacement is just so heartbreaking. Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.

Israel says it has the right to defend itself, and is targeting Hamas positions, but the scale to which ordinary people’s homes, hospitals and “safe areas” have been hit means what’s happening in Gaza is absolutely domicidal. People living in the north of the Gaza Strip were told by Israeli authorities to move to the south of the territory to the supposed “safe areas”, but the southern areas continue to be bombed too. The bombardment is killing civilians, killing their everyday lives and causing the mass destruction of neighbourhoods. As we have seen in videos, entire buildings have been levelled.

NBC: “‘This is a massacre!’: Rescue workers fight to save children in Gaza airstrike rubble”

Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford, who was born in Baghdad, and is considered one of Israel’s critical “new historians”, called Israel’s actions “state-sponsored terrorism”. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.

Catastrophe for Palestinians

It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before. This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.

When one million people are ordered to leave their homes it’s important to understand that these people have attachment to their places, to their neighbourhoods, to their streets. The impact of displacement and loss of home can live with people for their lifetime.

In my interviews with people from the city of Homs, I’ve heard many people say that even if they are still living in Homs, they feel like strangers in their own city, or they feel exiled inside their own city. For people such as the Palestinian diaspora or the Iraqi diaspora or the Syrian diaspora who are unable to return to their home countries, that suffering and pain and trauma of displacement continues.

I imagine people have different mechanisms to cope with these traumatic events, but that’s why it’s so important to have memory projects where people at least can reflect on what happened to heal and grieve, even when, sadly, many are unable to return and some spend their lifetime in exile.

After researching conflicts, wars, dictatorships and occupations for several years, I always say that the pain of people start as a headline in the news media, and turns into a footnote in history. Let us resist that, let us remember the life of every human being and keep the struggle for a free and just world for everyone.

Ammar Azzouz, British Academy Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin both put pressure on Iraqi prime minister Mohammad Shia al-Sudani. Al-Sudani reaffirmed his determination to keep the US military trainers and advisers safe.

The Shiite militia al-Nujaba’ rejected al-Sudani’s stance. Its leaders maintained that Israeli intelligence was using the US presence as a Trojan horse to infiltrate Iraqi bases.

According to Pentagon Press Secretary Air Force Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder, in the past week US troops in Iraq have been subjected to attacks on at least 10 separate occasions, and those in Syria have been attacked 3 times. The attackers used a mix of “one way attack drones and rockets.”

On October 18, a drone attack on US troops stationed at Tanf in southeast Syria lightly injured 20 US troops, according to the Arabic press.

The US is thought to have about 2500 troops in Iraq who have transitioned to roles as instructors in the Iraqi military academy or as advisors on mop-up operations in the north against ISIL remnants. In January, 2020, the Iraqi parliament voted to instruct the prime minister to find a way to expel US troops from the country, but the Iraqi executive has found ways around this parliamentary instruction. The vote to expel US troops was impelled by Trump’s assassination of Qasem Soleimani, the head of the spec ops Jerusalem Brigade of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps.

Also on October 18, a drone strike on US troops in Syria lightly wounded 4 US service personnel.

There are roughly 900 US troops in Southeast Syria, who are helping the Syrian Kurds siphon off petroleum from wells there, which both strengthens a local American ally and denies the petroleum wealth to the Syrian government of Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, which the US wants to keep weak. There is, however, no basis in international law for the presence of US troops in Syria now that ISIL has been defeated, and helping divert Syrian oil from its rightful owner is probably a war crime. The Syrian government has repeatedly asked the US to leave, but has been ignored by Washington.

The Pentagon is worried about these attacks proliferating as the Israeli land invasion of Gaza goes forward.

The US interprets these attacks as coming from Iran. While Iran does give training, weaponry and funding to the “Popular Mobilization Forces” in Iraq, there is no line of command going up to Iranian generals from the militias, which can act independently. Still, if a significant number of US troops is killed by drone or rocket strike, the call to strike at Iran, risking an all out war, may grow in Congress and the halls of power.

For the religious militias in the region, the US presence is a form of colonial domination, and their attacks on US troops are in the way of a sympathy strike in solidarity with the occupied Palestinians.

( Middle East Monitor ) – One of the most pressing issues of the 21st century is the management and allocation of the limited freshwater resources in the world. Since an important number of those water resources are trans-boundary, crossing the political boundaries of more than one nation, the complexity of the problem has increased over the years. In dealing with trans-boundary water disputes, riparian states such as Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Sudan mostly prefer water diplomacy mechanisms that involve the processes and institutions through which the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another.

States’ claim of sovereignty

On the one hand, states have been the main actors in shaping trans-boundary water policies and conducting water diplomacy throughout the last few decades of water disputes. On the other hand, international organisations, international non-governmental organisations and science-policy initiatives joined the water diplomacy processes as new actors, with the coming of issues of scarcity, pollution and the sharing of water resources in order to take the attention of the international community. With the participation of these actors in water diplomacy, new approaches related to the management of trans-boundary water resources, for example, the sharing of benefits such as energy, food and services to be obtained from water resources instead of sharing water resources per se, have been developed.

With the increase in the use of trans-boundary rivers for consumption purposes, such as the expansion of irrigation since the last quarter of the 19th century, many states have claimed mutual sovereignty and rights of use over trans-boundary water resources. As a result of these discourses and actions, a series of international customary law principles have been adopted. The riparian states of trans-boundary waters have signed numerous bilateral and multilateral agreements, protocols and memoranda of understanding on the use, management and sharing of these resources. In other words, treaty (written) and customary (unwritten) international water principles of law, as well as traditional diplomatic methods, have been developed by the states as the main tools for resolving disputes regarding trans-boundary waters.

Trans-boundary water disputes in Middle East

The Middle East is regarded as one of the most challenged regions in terms of trans-boundary surface and groundwater resources management and allocation between two or more countries. In addition to the constraints of natural water resources, the region suffers from an abundance of issues that compound water security, including a rapidly growing and displaced population, uneven economic development, limited amount of water supply that is irregularly distributed, the negative impacts of climate change and variability and poor water management and allocation practices both within and between states. Some 60 per cent of the water in the region flows across international borders, complicating resource management. The geopolitical importance of the region and the conflicts that arise have consequently resulted in aggravating the usual problems of using water in a variety of settings in the Nile or Euphrates-Tigris river basins.

Nile River dispute

The Nile basin is considered one of the world’s hydro-political hotspots, and much has been debated in academic and policy circles about the likelihood of interstate conflict between the Nile countries. In the late 1920s, colonial water-sharing agreements were concluded in the Nile basin under the full control of Great Britain. Following the wave of independence in Africa in the 1950s, all upstream riparians declared void those agreements, including the most important one, namely the 1929 Nile Water Agreement, which was later replaced by the still legally binding 1959 Agreement for the Full Utilisation of the Nile Waters, under which the two riparians agreed to share the waters in proportions of 75 per cent and 25 per cent for Egypt and 25 per cent for Sudan, respectively. The 1959 agreement has never been accepted by any of the upstream riparians, causing recurring tensions and disputes over water. Moreover, tensions in the Nile basin waters were often raised by political rhetoric, particularly between the Egyptian and Ethiopian leadership. Egypt, so heavily dependent on the Nile waters, has used its military might and hegemonic status to warn the upper riparians, primarily Ethiopia, not to undertake any projects that would risk Egypt’s share of the Nile.

Article continues after bonus IC video
Al Jazeera English: “Will Ethiopia compromise on its Grand Renaissance Dam? | Inside Story

Challenging this historical status quo, in March 2011, the Ethiopian government announced plans to construct a hydroelectric dam on the Blue Nile, namely the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which is planned to generate 6,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity, becoming Africa’s largest power plant. Concerns have been raised over the dam’s impact on Egypt. Tensions over the dam increased in May 2011, when Ethiopia temporarily diverted the flow of the Blue Nile as part of the construction process.

After exchanges of harsh rhetoric between the heads of state, the foreign ministers of Egypt and Ethiopia met and agreed to hold further talks on the construction of the dam. Hence, the water dispute in the Nile basin was intimately related to unfair clauses in the historical bilateral sharing agreements. Additionally, the increasing ability and desire of the upstream states, namely Ethiopia, to challenge Egypt’s status as a hydro-hegemon and the overall status quo constitute contemporary reasons for tensions over water. The Nile Basin Initiative (NBI) was established in 1999 to find sustainable technical, institutional, legal and political solutions to the hydro-political challenges centred on a river embedded in regional geopolitical complexity.

Tigris-Euphrates basin

Trans-boundary water issues started to be a part of regional politics when the three major riparian states, namely Turkiye, Syria and Iraq, introduced major water and land resource development projects in the Tigris-Euphrates basin. In this context, large-scale dams and irrigation systems were initiated in the early 1960s. Owing to the competitive nature of these uncoordinated national water development projects, disagreements over trans-boundary water uses surfaced, and the riparian states opted for diplomatic negotiations to deal with their disagreements. As the national water development projects progressed, incompatibilities between water supply and demand occurred throughout the river basin. Even though no hot conflict was reported among the riparian states concerning water sharing, the sporadic technical negotiations could not prepare the ground for a comprehensive treaty on equitable and effective trans-boundary water management in the basin.

In the Tigris-Euphrates basin, the riparian states preferred water diplomacy mechanisms, namely diplomatic negotiations, to resolve the crises. Most of the crises were related to Iraq’s concerns regarding the impact of the construction and filling of the dams in Turkiye and Syria. Thus, diplomats and technocrats from the 3 countries met several times, although on an irregular basis, to exchange information concerning the technical details of the construction and the filling of the dams. In the period between the 1960s and the 1990s, the riparian states were too rigid in their position, emphasizing their absolute water rights over the rivers. With the emergence of a conducive overall political environment in the early 2000s, state representatives adopted a more needs-based approach by concluding a series of memoranda of understanding on the protection of the environment, water quality management, water efficiency, drought management and flood protection, with a view to addressing the adverse effects of climate change.

On the other hand, in the early 1980s, the riparian states in the Tigris-Euphrates basin managed to establish the institutional framework of the Joint Technical Committee (JTC), whose members included participants from all three riparian states. However, the riparian states did not agree to give the JTC clear and commonly agreed-upon functions. On the contrary, the states continued unilateral and uncoordinated water and land development projects, and the JTC meetings did not make an effective contribution to the settlement of the trans-boundary water dispute. It also did not provide a platform for delineating the priorities and needs of the co-riparians as a basis for addressing regional water problems.

Water diplomacy mechanisms, particularly at the trans-boundary level, have been introduced in the Tigris-Euphrates basin with the aim of reaching agreeable solutions between parties that have diverging interests as well as competing water development schemes. With the help of formal institutions like the JTC, high-level water diplomacy frameworks, water-sharing protocols and memoranda of understanding, the national interests and identities of sovereign states are represented to one another. Although these institutions may not have been effective most of the time in terms of the protection and efficient use and management of water and other related resources, they served to place trans-boundary water issues within a legitimate and peaceful realm, rather than mixing them with potentially conflict-laden issues, such as border security and territorial disputes, which might otherwise escalate into hot confrontations. However, there still does not exist a multilateral treaty regime involving all of the stakeholders concerned, including civil society organisations and private companies in energy, agriculture and the environment, as well as relevant development-related sectors, for the effective and equitable use and management of trans-boundary waters in the basin.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.