Tag: InternationalNews

{‘Relative lack of hard evidence’ that Gulen movement as a whole was behind coup attempt, UK Parliament reports says.}

Some followers of cleric and businessman Fethullah Gulen were involved in last summer’s failed coup in Turkey, a UK Parliament report says, adding that there is no evidence to suggest the Gulen Movement as a whole was behind the plot.

The Foreign Affairs Committee’s (FCO) report released on Saturday said the evidence of individual Gulenists’ involvement in the attempt to overthrow the government was “mostly anecdotal or circumstantial, sometimes premised on information from confessions or informants…”.

The report also said that such evidence “is so far inconclusive in relation to the organisation as a whole and its leadership”.

As well as the coup, the 82-page report also focuses on the UK’s ties with Turkey; the threat from the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK); and the status of democracy in the country.

Since the July 15 coup attempt, Turkey has accused Pennsylvania-based Gulen of being behind the push to overthrow President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

During the failed coup, about 300 people, the vast majority of them civilians, were killed across Turkey as rebel soldiers targeted the government by bombing state buildings.

“The FCO knows too little for itself about who was responsible for the coup attempt in Turkey, or about the ‘Gulenists’ … whom the Turkish government exclusively blames for the coup,” the report said.

“We found that the Turkish government’s account of the Gulenists and the coup, which the FCO seems willing to accept broadly at face value, is not substantiated by hard, publicly available evidence, although as yet uncontradicted by the same standard.”

The report cited a “lack of transparency”, adding that it was unlikely Gulenists were the only elements involved in the coup.

Turkey is seeking Gulen’s extradition from the US, a request which has not been granted.

As well as accusing Gulen’s network of staging the coup attempt, Turkey says it is behind a long-running campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary.

The FCO said that while Turkey faced a threat following the coup attempt against the backdrop of increased “terrorism”, it disagreed with some tough measures by the Turkish government under a state of emergency.

“Turkey is an important strategic partner facing a volatile period,” said Crispin Blunt, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee.

“It needs and deserves our support, but that support needs to include our critique where Turkish policy is not in its own, or our joint long-term interests: these are regional security and stability as well as strong and accountable institutions in Turkey.”

Source:Al Jazeera

{A fifth round of UN-backed Syria talks is under way in Geneva amid low expectations as violence on the ground escalates.}

United Nations envoy Staffan de Mistura has warned not to expect “miracles” as a new round of UN-backed talks between rival sides in Syria’s conflict resumed amid ongoing fighting across the country.

As rebel fighters in Syria pushed on with a major offensive against government forces in the central province of Hama, representatives of the two sides in the talks held in Geneva traded allegations over developments on the ground.

Syrian government envoy Bashar al-Jaafari accused the opposition of intentionally undermining the talks, saying an escalation of attacks over the past few days is “pushing everybody toward a total failure and fiasco in the political and diplomatic process”.

For his part, Nasr al-Hariri, the Syrian opposition’s chief negotiator in the talks, accused the government of targeting areas with civilians and carrying out arbitrary arrests.

On the agenda for the fifth round of the Geneva talks is governance – political transition, the constitution and elections – as well as counterterrorism at the request of Damascus.

Deadlock remains over most of the toughest issues, notably President Bashar al-Assad’s fate, with the opposition insisting he cede power and the government declaring the subject off limits.

After a two-hour meeting with de Mistura, Jaafari said “terrorism” needed to be the priority.

In the opposite camp, Hariri said the opposition was committed to finding a political solution, but insisted such a deal could not include Assad.

“We reaffirm that we here to rid our country from terrorism and I say that Syria will not be free from terrorism of Daesh [ISIL] … unless it is liberated first from the state terrorism practised by the regime,” Hariri told reporters.

The two sides are meeting separately with the UN.

“All of them have to talk about all four [issues]”, de Mistura told reporters following the first full day of the round. “That is [the] deal.”

De Mistura said he would aim to mesh the ideas shared on all subjects by both sides when the round ends next Friday.

“I am not expecting miracles, I am not expecting breakthroughs … and I am not expecting breakdowns,” the UN envoy said, reiterating that agreement on the agenda was itself a mark of progress.

De Mistura has recently been shuttling between Moscow, Riyadh, and Ankara, and talking directly with the United States, in preparation for the talks.

He urged the backers of separate talks in the Kazakh capital Astana – which involve Russia and Turkey and are supposed to guarantee a ceasefire – to resume more negotiations in an effort to bring the fighting to an end.

“Our expectation and strong suggestion to the guarantors to the Astana process that they do retake the situation in hand and that hopefully there will be new Astana meeting as soon as possible in order to control the situation, which at the moment is worrisome,” he told reporters.

{{Fighting continues}}

In Syria, rebels were advancing in Hama province, as part of their biggest offensive against government forces in months.

The city of Hama remained under government control, but the opposition has gained ground in the countryside; rebels have seized 11 villages and several ammunition depots since Tuesday.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor reported fresh violence on Friday, including shelling by government forces of areas in Sahl al-Ghab, northwest of Hama, and ongoing clashes in the countryside north of the city, as the army sought to retake territory and stop rebels from capturing a military airport.

Clashes also renewed in the capital, Damascus, witnesses earlier said.

Rebels fought with soldiers on the edge of the city centre in the Jobar district for a fifth day on Thursday.

Forces loyal to Assad’s government conducted artillery and air strikes in a bid to restore control of positions they lost earlier this week, after surprise attacks by rebels in the northeast of the city.

Reporting from Geneva, Al Jazeera’s Andrew Simmons said the talks were not off to a good start given the latest surge fighting in Syria.

“It’s not a good start in the battlefield, in the sense that there is escalation, and it’s not a good start here in terms of encouragement towards … peace,” Simmons said.

‘Assad regime targeting schools, hospitals’

Earlier in the day, Hariri accused the government of not being committed to peace.

“I would like to remind you that since the beginning of the last round of talks, last month in Geneva, at least 11 schools have been targeted, in addition to at least 11 medical centres, including hospitals and makeshift clinics, and five markets by the Assad regime’s air force and the countries that are supporting the regime.”

Al Jazeera’s Hashem Ahelbarra, reporting from Beirut, said that the rebels were aiming to put more pressure on the international community as they tried to bring about a political solution to the crisis.

“This is the first time in months that we’ve seen momentum being built by the rebels to take over ground, particularly in Hama,” he said.

“[The rebels] are sending a clear message to the international community that, despite the fact that they lost Aleppo last year … they can still change the reality on the ground.”

Marwan Kabalan, an analyst at the Doha Institute’s Arab Centre for Research and Policy Studies, told Al Jazeera that little had been achieved in the talks, which were entering their fifth round.

Kabalan said that the parties should be discussing four main themes – governance, fighting “terrorism”, the constitution, and elections – but stressed that little was expected from this latest round.

“Most of the regional and international powers are not yet actually committed to solving this crisis,” he said, adding that the US was focusing more on the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant [ISIL, also known as ISIS] while Turkey’s focus was on the actions of Kurdish groups in Syria.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Russia is ‘perhaps’ aiding the Taliban in fighting against US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, US general alleges.}

The top US general in Europe said on Thursday he has seen growing Russian influence on the Afghan Taliban, and raised the possibility that Moscow was helping supply the fighters.

Russia has been critical of the US over its handling of the war in Afghanistan – now in its 16th year – where the Soviet Union fought a bloody and disastrous war of its own in the 1980s.

But Russian officials have denied they provide aid to the Taliban, which is contesting large swaths of territory and inflicting heavy casualties, and say their limited contacts are aimed at bringing the group to the negotiating table.

“I’ve seen the influence of Russia of late – increased influence in terms of association and perhaps even supply to the Taliban,” Army General Curtis Scaparrotti, who is also NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, told a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Taliban capture key Afghan district; 9 police killed

He did not elaborate on what kind of supplies might be headed to the Taliban or how direct Russia’s role might be.

Taliban officials have told Reuters news agency the group has had significant contacts with Moscow since at least 2007, but added Russian involvement did not extend beyond “moral and political support”.

NATO troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since a US-led invasion in late 2001, following the September 11 attacks.

About 13,000 NATO service members are in Afghanistan – the bulk of them American – under its Resolute Support training mission.

Scaparrotti said the stakes were high. More than 1,800 US troops have been killed in fighting since the war began.

His comment goes one step further than remarks last month by General John Nicholson, the US commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Nicholson testified that Russia is giving the Taliban encouragement and diplomatic cover in order to undermine US influence and to defeat NATO, but he did not address whether Russia is supplying the group.

The US in the 1980s supplied Afghan mujahideen fighters with high-tech weapons as they battled the Soviet Red Army.

After more than 15 years of war, US generals say the Afghanistan conflict is stuck in a stalemate with the Taliban continuing to carry broad regional influence, and NATO-backed Afghan security forces struggling to make progress.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Approve healthcare bill or Obamacare stays in place, is President Donald Trump’s message to lawmakers.}

Abandoning negotiations, President Donald Trump has demanded a make-or-break vote on healthcare legislation in the US House of Representatives, threatening to leave “Obamacare” in place and move on to other issues if Friday’s vote fails.

The move was presented to divided Republican lawmakers behind closed doors on Thursday night after a day of negotiations among conservatives, moderates and others within the president’s own party.

At the end of it the president had had enough and was ready to vote and move on, whatever the result, Trump’s budget director Mick Mulvaney told lawmakers.

“Let’s vote,” White House chief strategist Steve Bannon said as he walked out of the meeting.

“For seven and a half years we have been promising the American people that we will repeal and replace this broken law because it’s collapsing and it’s failing families, and tomorrow we’re proceeding,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said, then walked off without answering as reporters demanded to know whether the bill had the votes to pass.

Conservatives have condemned the Republican-drafted bill because it scraps Obamacare, but puts another government plan in its place. They believe healthcare should be left to the free market.

Democrats and moderate Republicans, meanwhile, fear the new bill will take insurance away from millions of people.

Repealing and replacing former president Barack Obama’s healthcare law was one of the major campaign promises of Trump.

Mark Petersen, a professor of public policy at the University of California, said getting the bill passed is “extremely critical” for Trump’s ability to move forward with his agenda.

“Usually when a president comes in, this stage is what we call a honeymoon period. He’s trying to rack up some big wins in Congress to build momentum,” he told Al Jazeera.

“Right now his White House has been described as in a bit of chaos. He has not been doing well in popular support.” A defeat over the healthcare bill “would be quite a setback,” Petersen said.

Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, in 2010, providing health coverage for 20 million low-income Americans previously uninsured. Many middle-income Americans complained their premiums spiked as a result.

Millions of Americans would lose coverage next year under the Republican plan, according to a review by the Congressional Budget Office made before last-minute amendments to the bill.

Supporters of Obamacare staged rallies in Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles on Thursday denouncing efforts to repeal the law.

The Republican bill would halt Obama’s tax penalties against people who do not buy coverage and cut the federal-state Medicaid programme for low earners, which the Obama statute had expanded.

It would provide tax credits to help people pay medical bills, though generally less than Obama’s statute provides.

It also would allow insurers to charge older Americans more and repeal tax boosts the law imposed on high-income people and health industry companies.

The measure would also block federal payments to Planned Parenthood for a year, another stumbling block for Republican moderates.

Source:Al Jazeera

{David Friedman, a known donor to illegal settlements on Palestinian land, confirmed as ambassador to Israel.}

The US Senate has approved the appointment of President Donald Trump’s former bankruptcy lawyer, a supporter of Israeli settlement building, as Washington’s ambassador to Israel.

Trump’s nomination of David Friedman had raised concerns about America’s commitment to a two-state Middle East peace deal.

But Friedman apologised to lawmakers for his past harsh language at a confirmation hearing last month, and the Senate approved him on Thursday by a margin of 52 to 46.

Two of the chamber’s 52 Republicans did not vote and two of the 48 Democrats voted against their camp to approve Friedman.

Trump’s administration has been slow to appoint new ambassadors to replace those who stepped down at the end of former president Barack Obama’s term, and more than 70 posts lie open.

But the Israel job was seen as a key bellwether of the new administration’s attitude to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and Friedman’s nomination was welcomed by the Israeli right.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Twitter that Friedman “will be warmly welcomed as President Trump’s representative and as a close friend of Israel”.

An Orthodox Jew and the son of a New York rabbi, Friedman is a bankruptcy lawyer who has worked on Trump’s behalf for the past 15 years. He joined the presidential election campaign last year as Trump’s adviser on Israel.

Before becoming the ambassadorial nominee, Friedman was known as a vocal supporter of Israeli causes, including the building of illegal settlements on Palestinian land in Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

Israeli daily Haaretz revealed recently that he was a donor to the American branch of Ateret Cohanim, a far-right Israeli group that settles Jews in key locations in East Jerusalem, and especially around al-Aqsa, the most sensitive Islamic site in the region.

He is also the president of American Friends of Beit El Institutions, which raises millions of dollars each year for a settlement close to the Palestinian city of Ramallah.

He has clashed with American Jewish progressive groups, notably dubbing liberals “worse than kapos,” a reference to Jewish collaborators who worked as guards in Nazi prison camps.

He has also dismissed the two-state solution – the vision of an end to the conflict in which Israel and a future Palestine live side-by-side within agreed borders.

Trump’s administration insists it might support this idea if Israel comes to a deal, but has clearly softened the Obama administration’s tough criticism of Israeli settlements.

Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein voted against Friedman and dubbed him “too divisive to serve in one of our nation’s most sensitive diplomatic positions”.

And liberal Jewish lobby group J Street said it was “heartened” that the level of opposition to Friedman’s confirmation showed that his views were outside the US mainstream.

But the Republican Jewish Coalition welcomed the vote, arguing “there is no question that the relationship between the US and Israel will grow stronger”.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Mourners fill Trafalgar Square after police identify British man who killed four people near parliament.}

Thousands of mourners have filled Trafalgar Square for a vigil for the victims killed in Wednesday’s car-and-knife attack in the heart of London.

MPs and members of the Metropolitan Police were among those who held lit candles in honour of the victims on Thursday.

Police raised the death toll from the attack to five after the death of a 75-year-old.

“Those evil and twisted individuals who tried to destroy our shared way of life will never succeed and we condemn them,” Mayor Sadiq Khan said in an address to the crowd.

“London is a great city full of amazing people from all backgrounds and when Londoners face adversity we always pull together. We stand up for our values and we show the world we are the greatest city in the world,” he said.

Police have identified the assailant in the attack as Khalid Masood, 52, who was born in Kent, southeast England.

Masood drove into pedestrians who were on the Westminster Bridge before being shot dead by police after fatally stabbing Police Constable Keith Palmer.

Twenty-nine people injured in the attack are still being treated at the hospital. Seven are in a critical condition.

Police said Masood had a string of criminal convictions and had been most recently living in central England.

“Masood was not the subject of any current investigations and there was no prior intelligence about his intent to mount a terrorist attack,” a police statement said.

“However, he was known to police and has a range of previous convictions for assaults, including GBH [grievous bodily harm], possession of offensive weapons and public order offences.”

He had not been convicted previously for any terrorism offences, it said.

In a statement to the House of Commons on Thursday, Prime Minister Theresa May said Masood was once investigated by intelligence officers over concerns of “violent extremism”.

“He was a peripheral figure,” she said. “The case is historic, he was not part of the current intelligence picture.”

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group claimed responsibility on Thursday for the attack. It said on its Amaq website the attacker “carried out the operation in response to calls for targeting citizens of the coalition” of countries fighting ISIL in Syria and Iraq.

It was not possible for Al Jazeera to independently confirm the claim, which did not offer any details of the attack or name Masood, casting doubt on whether there is any direct link between ISIL and the London killings.

Joseph Downing, from the London School of Economics, expressed scepticism over ISIL’s claim.

“To me this is something quite common over the last couple of years, over the terrorist attacks in Europe, that ISIL jumps on the bandwagon in the most horrific way and says ‘yeah, this our soldier’, when there’s actually no link between the person carrying out the attack and any particular group,” he told Al Jazeera.

Police said eight people had been arrested after raids on six homes in London, Birmingham and other parts of the country in their investigation into the attack.

Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips, reporting from London, said: “The absolute priority of the police at this point in time would be to know what sort of accomplices, if any, the assailant had. What sort of assistance, if any, did the assailant have and whether he belonged to any sort of network.”

May said those wounded in the attack included 12 Britons, three French children, two Romanians, four South Koreans, two Greeks, and one each from Germany, Poland, Ireland, China, Italy and the United States.

Three police officers were also wounded.

The last major attack to hit London was in July 2005, when a coordinated series of bomb blasts targeted its public transportation system during rush hour. The bombings killed 52 people and wounded more than 700 others.

Source:Al Jazeera

{Senior senator says Turkey watching as decision must be made on arming Kurdish fighters in the coming battle for Raqqa.}

The US-led coalition fighting ISIL faces “tough decisions” on how much it should support Kurdish fighters in an offensive to reclaim Raqqa from the armed group, a senior US politician warned on Wednesday.

Senator John McCain said the Trump administration is weighing the thorny issue of giving the Kurds heavy arms and a major role in the upcoming battle, which would infuriate key ally Turkey.

“The conundrum is that if you don’t use the Kurds, [the battle] takes a lot longer,” McCain told reporters.

“But if you do, you have an enormous challenge as far as relations with Turkey are concerned, including things like the use of Incirlik,” he added, referring to the Turkish airbase used heavily by the coalition to hit ISIL targets in northern Syria.

McCain said he met recently with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the two spoke about the Kurdish issue.

“There’s going to be some tough decisions made here,” McCain said, adding the Kurds were Erdogan’s “first priority”.

In August, Turkey launched Operation Euphrates Shield inside Syria targeting ISIL and the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which are dominated by YPG Kurdish fighters that Ankara says are “terrorists”.

The SDF is the primary ground force encircling Raqqa, which the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or ISIS) group views as its capital, and an offensive on the city is only a matter of time.

The Pentagon on Wednesday said it had provided airlift and artillery support for primarily Arab components of the SDF in a battle for Tabqa, a key town near Raqqa.

In a statement put out on social media on Wednesday, the SDF said the US-coalition had air-dropped US and SDF forces near Tabqa, expanding its campaign against ISIL in the area.

Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon described the operation as a large, high-priority offensive to secure the area around Tabqa and the associated Tabqa Dam on the River Euphrates.

“This is a significant strategic target,” he said. If successful, the operation would “basically cut ISIS off” from the western approaches to Raqqa.

Source:Al Jazeera