Author: Théophile Niyitegeka

{Both Merkel and US Vice President Mike Pence attend key security conference in Munich with Russia high on the agenda.{}}

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said Islam is not the source of “terrorism” and that cooperating with predominantly Muslim states in the fight against it is vital.

Merkel, who has been critical of US President Donald Trump’s attempt to impose a temporary travel ban on people from seven Muslim-majority countries, was speaking on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, with US Vice President Mike Pence in the audience.

Merkel said Europe’s ties with Russia remained challenging, but it was important to work with Russia in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, known as ISIS) and similar groups.

She stressed the need to preserve and strengthen multilateral structures such as the EU, NATO and the UN during an address that came as concern grew about the Trump administration’s approach to international affairs and fears that it may have little interest in working in multilateral forums.

Trump’s criticism of NATO as “obsolete”, his praise for Britain’s decision to leave the EU as well as his softer approach towards Russia have unnerved allies.

“Acting together strengthens everyone,” said Merkel. “We must see that the multilateral structures are in many places not efficient enough.

“I am firmly convinced that it is worth fighting for our common international multilateral structures, but we must improve them in many places.”

Pence reassures watchful allies

Pence, though, in his first overseas trip since being named vice president, said Trump would stand by NATO and no one should doubt his commitment after the sacrifices made to defend it.

“The president asked me to be here today to convey a message, a reassurance – the US strongly supports NATO and we will be unwavering in our commitment to this transatlantic alliance,” Pence said. “Let no one doubt our commitment.”

READ MORE: Donald Trump ‘committed to NATO’

Al Jazeera’s Dominic Kane, reporting from the conference, said many people had wanted to hear Pence speak as speculation grew about Trump’s approach to foreign policy.

“Delegates here will be discussing the future of NATO as well as the future of the West,” Kane said. “With all these leaders speaking, it shows how important the conference has become in recent time.

“The fact that Merkel spoke about ISIL and Boko Haram and the need to consign these people to history shows leaders here are in earnest about how they deal with the problem.

“The question is though what policy will emerge from this. Is it likely this conference will arrive at a meaningful policy which will deal with these groups? That’s a much more difficult question to answer.”

Pence is also scheduled to sit down with the leaders of the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko – all countries dealing with the threat of Russian incursion – along with Turkey’s prime minister, Binali Yildirim.

Source:Al Jazeera

{The strongest winter storm in six years hits the western US seaboard with more rain expected through the weekend.}

{At least two people were killed after Southern California was hit with heavy rain and gusty winds on Friday in what was the biggest storm the region has experienced in six years.}

A large tree brought down power lines in Sherman Oaks, California, electrocuting a 55-year-old man.

One person drowned in his car due to sudden flash flooding.

Strong winds also caused hundreds of thousands of homes to lose power across Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties.

As this current storm moves inland, southern California will be seeing a break from the rain and flooding later this weekend.

However, more storms will continue to roll in from the Pacific Ocean and track across northern California later next week.

The downpours in other heavily populated areas of Southern California, including parts of Santa Barbara and Ventura counties also recently hit by wildfires, could create the risk of mud and debris flows there too, the weather service said.

Authorities have warned residents of an area west of Santa Barbara, where another wildfire ravaged vegetation last year, to prepare to leave their homes quickly if ordered to evacuate.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Assad’s future may be off the agenda at meeting of Syrian factions, with elections and governance set to be the focus.}

The office of the UN special envoy to Syria has declined to confirm whether a political transition will be discussed at the forthcoming talks in Geneva.

The development means Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s future will be off the agenda and the main focus of the talks among various Syrian factions will be governance, a new constitution and elections.

Staffan de Mistura, the envoy, is due to convene the new round in the Swiss city on February 23, almost nine months after peace negotiations collapsed.

A spokesman for de Mistura said he was still finalising who would come to the meeting, but there were already positive responses to invitations that had gone out.

Countries opposed to Assad, including the US, back efforts by the UN to broker a political solution to the conflict, Sigmar Gabriel, Germany’s foreign minister, said on Friday.

“It is clear that all who met want a political solution … and that this political solution must be achieved in Geneva under the auspices of the United Nations and that there cannot be any parallel negotiations,” Gabriel said after a meeting in Bonn that included the US, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, France and the UK.

The countries were meeting for the first time since Donald Trump took office as US president in a bid to find common ground in advance of the Geneva meeting.

Gabriel said Rex Tillerson, the new US secretary of state, played an active role in the discussions about how to end the war in Syria, which took place on the sidelines of a meeting in Bonn, Germany, of G20 foreign ministers.

Tillerson, trying to reassure allies that the US was not tilting towards Russia over the Syrian conflict, told them that the US-backed UN efforts to broker a political solution to the war, officials and diplomats said.

READ MORE: Syria’s civil war explained

He also said military ties with Russia depended on its stance towards rebels fighting the Assad government, whom Russia backs.

All eyes have been on the US and its approach to ending the violence in Syria, given promises by Trump to build closer ties to Russia.

Speaking alongside Gabriel, Jean-Marc Ayrault, France’s foreign minister, said the Geneva talks would ultimately fail if Russia did not use its influence on the Syrian government and Iran to stop labelling all those opposed to Assad as “terrorists”.

{{Parallel peace talks }}

On Thursday, Sergey Lavrov, Russian foreign minister, said the US supported Russian-sponsored parallel peace talks on Syria in the capital of Kazakhstan, Astana.

Those talks ended with no joint communique, usually the minimum outcome of any diplomatic negotiation, and saw opposing Syrian groups trading angry accusations.

Russia proposed a series of parallel intra-Syrian negotiations in coordination with Turkey and Iran last year in Astana to reinforce a shaky ceasefire.

It has tried to expand the scope to cover political aspects, a move that has been criticised by Western and Arab states, who argue that UN efforts are the only credible track for a political solution.

With its show of military force, Russia changed the tide of the Syrian civil war. However, it is finding the next phase – brokering an end to the fighting – a tougher proposition.

Russia’s peace drive started hopefully, with the first Astana meeting in January.

The Syrian rebels and government came together for the first time in nine months, and agreement was reached to consolidate a shaky ceasefire.

But for the second round this week, the Syrian rebels debated until the eleventh hour about whether to attend at all, finally sending a smaller delegation which arrived in Astana a day late.

Bashar Jaafari, the Syrian government negotiator, said on Thursday that peace talks in Astana had not produced a communique because of the “irresponsible” late arrival of rebel participants and their Turkish backers which delayed the joint session by a day.

READ MORE: Will Assad ever be tried for his crimes?

He also criticised the rebels and Turkey for downgrading their delegations from the previous meeting.

“Turkey cannot ignite the fire and at the same time act as a firefighter,” he said after the talks.

The rebels, in turn, accused the Syrian government and Iran of routinely violating the ceasefire and Russia of failing to enforce it.

“We know that the Russians have a problem with those for whom they are guarantors,” Yahya al-Aridi, a rebel negotiator, said, referring to Iran and Assad’s forces.

{{‘No common ground’}}

Haid Haid, an associate fellow with the Middle East and North Africa Programme at the London-based Chatham House, says the prospects of the Astana talks’ success were bleak due to virtually “no common ground between Turkey, Russia and Iran”.

Speaking to Al Jazeera on Thursday, he said: “In order to implement the ceasefire, they have to punish those who violate ceasefires.

“[But] Russia and Iran do not want to put any pressure on the Syrian regime … There are no enforcement mechanisms that could be a stepping stone to a political solution.”

Five years since the civil war began, more than 450,000 Syrians have been killed in the fighting, more than a million injured and over 12 million Syrians – half the country’s prewar population – have been displaced from their homes.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Day after deadly ISIL attack, more than 100 gather to wash blood-soaked floors of the shrine and continue ritual.}

Islamabad and Karachi – Sufi devotees have returned to their shrine in Pakistan’s southern Sindh province less than a day after it was targeted in a suicide attack, in defiance of ISIL which claimed the bombing.

Thursday’s blast, which killed at least 88 people and wounded hundreds as they performed a ritual, was the worst attack on Pakistani soil since a 2014 school attack in the northwestern city of Peshawar, which killed at least 154, mostly children.

On Friday evening, about 150 residents of the southern town of Sehwan returned to the shrine of Syed Muhammad Usman Marwandi, better known as Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, a revered 13th-century Sufi philosopher and poet who is venerated by millions across South Asia.

Caretakers washed and cleaned the white marble floors, which were streaked with blood and scattered debris, as others prepared for the evening ritual of the dhamaal – a form of devotional percussion and dance.

As the drums began, the faithful raised their arms and began the ritual, moving rhythmically to the quickening beat.

“This is Lal Shahbaz Qalandar, any terrorist, any number of terrorist attacks will not scare us. The dhamaal will continue, and must continue,” said Ali Otho, a worshipper.

Devotees said they would not allow anyone, attackers nor police seeking to secure the location, to stop them from praying at the grave of their patron saint.

“This is no place for the police,” said Haja Shah, one of the shrine’s caretakers, with tears in his eyes. “This is our place.”

Security forces, meanwhile, launched a series of raids following the attack, killing at least 100 people, all identified as “terrorists”.

Al Jazeera was unable to independently verify that figure, which was cited in a military in a statement on Friday.

The raids followed the closure of Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, where the government says Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other armed groups enjoy safe havens.

On Friday, Pakistan handed Afghanistan a list with the names of 76 “terrorists”, demanding immediate action be taken against them.

The “terrorists” in hiding were planning, directing and supporting fighters across the border, the statement explained.

In a call to the commander of the US-led NATO force in Afghanistan, General John Nicholson, Pakistani army chief General Qamar Javed Bajwa hinted at the possibility of pursuing operations within Afghan territory if action was not taken.

“Such terrorist activities and inaction against them are testing our current policy of cross-border restraint,” Bajwa said, according to a statement.

{{Wave of attacks}}

Armed groups such as the Pakistani Taliban and others have often targeted shrines for not conforming to their strict, literalist interpretation of Islam.

In November, ISIL, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant group, claimed responsibility for a suicide attack on a shrine in a Balochistan town, killing at least 52 people.

Thursday’s attack was the latest in a wave of violence this week that has claimed more than 100 lives.

On Monday, at least 13 people were killed when a suicide attacker targeted police at a protest in Lahore, the country’s second-largest city.

On Tuesday, two police officers were killed while trying to defuse a bomb in the southwestern city of Quetta.

On Wednesday, two suicide attacks in the northwestern city of Peshawar and the Mohmand tribal area claimed at least six lives.

On Thursday, in addition to the 88 killed at the shrine, at least seven security forces personnel were killed in two separate attacks in Dera Ismail Khan and Awaran.

{{Roots of violence}}

Much of that violence, with the exception of Thursday’s attack on the Sufi minority, was claimed by the Pakistan Taliban’s Jamaat-ur-Ahrar faction, which has worked with ISIL, also known as ISIS, in the past but remains separate from it.

“Pakistan has underestimated the potential for ISIL here,” Zahid Hussain, a veteran Pakistan journalist and security analyst, told Al Jazeera.

“Authorities always said that ISIL could not create an organisation here, but there are already organisations operating in Pakistan that agree with their ideology, like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and others.”

Pakistan has repeatedly blamed Afghanistan for giving safe haven to fighters on its side of the border, and vice versa.

However, analysts say that trading blame is proving counterproductive.

“The real issue is that the attacks are happening here. The networks are here, the facilitators are here … it is a flawed view that all of these attackers are coming from Afghanistan,” said Hussain.

{{“The people are here.”}}

Mosharraf Zaidi, former adviser to Pakistan’s foreign ministry, told Al Jazeera: “It doesn’t help anybody to fixate on the problem of Afghanistan as being the only problem that we face.

While there are groups that use safe havens in Afghanistan, the “core of problem Pakistan faces today is inside Pakistan”.

The “network of terrorists exists in this country”, he explained, and the “solution is also inside Pakistan”.

Hussain said while a Pakistani military operation has succeeded in dislodging the Pakistani Taliban from its headquarters, the group’s networks with other armed groups – including those targeting minorities and Indian security forces in Kashmir – remain intact.

“This is not unexpected because half-hearted measures always lead to these situations,” he said.

“The real issue was the network of militants in the heartland, in the main cities. They were intact, and even though we have been hearing reports of thousands arrested … what happens to them?”

Hussain’s views were echoed by Ijaz Khan, a professor at Peshawar University and security analyst.

“What happened when [the military operation] started: terrorists of different organisations felt the pressure and some of their safe havens were destroyed,” he told Al Jazeera.

Sounding a warning of further attacks, he said: “They were dislocated, but not finished. Now, they have regrouped themselves.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{Demonstrators take part in anti-government rally amid growing scandal over bribes paid by Brazilian firm Odebrecht.}

Thousands of people have taken to the streets in Panama in protest over a political scandal involving huge bribes paid by a Brazilian company in exchange for public contracts.

Odebrecht has admitted it paid $788m in bribes to win construction contracts in 12 countries.

It has agreed with the US justice department to pay a world record $3.5bn fine.

“No more governments of thieves and the corrupt,” read some placards as the crowd moved through the centre of the capital Panama City to the Congress building on Friday.

“The goal of the march is to demand that all those corrupt in all the parties and businessmen are investigated, so they return the money and go to jail,” Saul Mendez, a leader of the Suntracs construction union that was among the protest organisers, told AFP news agency.

The scandal surrounding Odebrecht, which US authorities say paid $59m in bribes in Panama between 2010 and 2014, was just “the tip of the iceberg”, he said.

Panama, which is trying to clean up its image after the Panama Papers scandal last year, has asked Interpol to issue wanted alerts for the sons of Ricardo Martinelli, who was president at the time.

Source:Al Jazeera