Month: December 2006

100,000 Iraqi refugees in Egypt?

A friend writes:

A new Pentagon report out yesterday describes the continuing disaster in Iraq. One item was on refugee flows. It says that:

“The numbers of refugees fleeing the violence are immense: 700,000 have fled to Jordan; 600,000 to Syria; 100,000 to Egypt; 40,000 to Lebanon, and 54,000 to Iran. Over 3,000 refugees per day are now appearing in Syria and Jordan.”

Renewing my visa at the Mugamaa last month I saw people with bundles of Iraqi passports at the window usually reserved for Palestinian sans papiers.

100,000 Iraqi refugees living in Egypt? I need to get out more. Does anyone know of any research done on the Iraqi community in Egypt?

Link to Pentagon report [PDF], which says:

Refugees. Many Iraqis have fled the country, and the number of refugees continues to rise. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) November 2006 Iraq Displacement Report, for Iraqis living outside Iraq, “the figures in the immediate neighbouring states are still imprecise, but we now estimate that there are up to 700,000 Iraqis in Jordan; at least 600,000 in Syria; at least 100,000 in Egypt; 20,000–40,000 in Lebanon; and 54,000 in Iran. Many of those outside the country fled over the past decade or more, but now some 2,000 a day are arriving in Syria, and an estimated 1,000 a day in Jordan. Most of them do not register with UNHCR.”

Here I go again

This is the lead of the New York Times’ article on recent events in Palestine, on the day after Hamas says it wants a truce of up to 20 years and accepts the 2002 Beirut Initiative as a general framework for negotiations:

JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 — The call for early elections by Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate Palestinian Authority president, is part of a Western-backed effort to revive the Middle East peace process in hopes of driving the radical Hamas party, which favors Israel’s destruction, out of power.

I am not disputing that Hamas has advocated Israel’s destruction in the past, Zio-trolls (but then again so has Fatah.) But can any reasonable person continue reading this article after that kind of opening? In one sentence it implies that Mahmoud Abbas is some kind of “moderate,” event though that word has no meaning any longer since people like the al-Sauds are considered “moderate,” creates the idea that there is a strong desire by the West to revive the peace process, even though the West abandoned it when the Bush administration came into power and never showed much interest in enforcing the Oslo process when Israel was flouting it, and finally finishes with the equivalent of “Hamas, which advocates the drowning of kittens and puppies.”

It’s a real shame the article opens that way, because even if I don’t agree with its conclusions (including the idea, implicit in the piece that Hamas is a mere Iranian-Syrian puppet) there’s some interesting stuff in it, such as:

Mouin Rabbani, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group, an independent research group on foreign policy, argues against supporting one Palestinian faction against another. He says that progress will be possible based only on political consensus, even if the West doesn’t love the result.

“Palestinians will remain unable to take significant decisions, or implement them, unless they’re based on a broad consensus that includes at least Fatah and Hamas,” he said. “The international community may have preferences, but this practice of trying to make progress on the basis of divisions in the Palestinian national movement has backfired spectacularly.”

(Mouin Rabbani does fantastic work, by the way, and for an organization that is very much an establishment player while challenging establishment thinking — you’ll see very little of that in Washington, DC.)

Haniyeh: truce, 1967 borders, the works

Palestinian PM (for now!) Ismail Haniyeh gave an eloquent and stirring speech in which, among many, many other things, he said (again) that he was generally in favor of the 2002 Beirut peace initiative (the one that Saudi Arabia backed and Ehud Olmert recently said he was interested in) with a 10-15 year truce with Israel pending a final settlement and the creation of Palestinian state along the 1967 borders. He also gave a long explanation of how Fatah and US at several turns tried to sabotage negotiations to form a national unity government. He spoke respectfully about all parties throughout, clearly going out of his way to be diplomatic and calm things down. In other words, he was extremely impressive.

Perhaps he still doesn’t want to recognize Israel, but frankly I can’t blame him after what that country did to his. At the end of the day, he is offering peace and negotiations.

Kudos to al-Jazeera English for showing it all (I happened upon it by chance, perhaps other channels did too.)

That’s it for now (23)

December 19, 2006

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d been in.

It was a sick and tawdry story and I didn’t want to tell it anymore. I walked into a bad situation one year ago and actually watched it get worse, with the fairly certain belief that it will continue to do so.

One year ago, I left Cairo as the Arab League was holding a reconciliation conference to bring together Iraq’s disparate factions, to get them to talk to each other, to resolve the ever growing crisis.

Continue reading That’s it for now (23)

That’s it for now

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d been in.

It was a sick and tawdry story and I didn’t want to tell it anymore. I walked into a bad situation one year ago and actually watched it get worse, with the fairly certain belief that it will continue to do so.
Continue reading That’s it for now

The plot thickens…

Two must-reads if you’re following the al-Turki / Obaid story, from the WSJ and the Washington Times.

From the first:

Despite the continuing high oil prices, for once U.S. difficulties with Saudi Arabia do not appear to be dominated by immediate energy concerns. The main challenge appears to be to steer Riyadh between a near holy confrontation with Shia Iran and an equally destabilizing alliance with radical Sunnis. As an experienced and well-liked envoy, Prince Turki will be hard to replace.

One early danger is that the kingdom is close to acquiring nuclear weapons rather than continuing to rely on the longstanding security guarantees and understanding of successive administrations in Washington. Last month a Saudi official privately warned the kingdom would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. Pakistan (for bombs) and perhaps North Korea (for rockets) are potential allies. There are already credible reports of facilities in the desert that the Saudis claim are oil-related, although there are no pipelines in sight. Also, North Korean personnel have been spotted at military facilities.

And the second:

Of the 77,000 active members of the insurgency, the “jihadis” number about 17,000, of which some 5,000 are from North Africa, Sudan, Yemen, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
The remaining 60,000 are members of the former military or Saddam’s paramilitary Fedayeen forces. The officer corps of the insurgency has “command and control facilities in Syria as well as bases in strategic locations, where Sunnis constitute the majority of the urban population.”
Given the centuries-old tribal, familial and religious ties between Iraq’s Sunnis and Saudi Arabia, the assessment concludes that “Saudi Arabia has a special responsibility to ensure the continued welfare and security of Sunnis in Iraq.”
Its recommendations to the Saudi government included a comprehensive strategy that would include overt and covert components to deal with the worst-case scenario of full-blown civil war.
It also calls on the government to communicate the assessment to the United States; make it clear to Iran that if its covert activities did not stop the Saudi leadership would counter them; and extend an invitation to the highest Iraqi Shi’ite leader, Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, to reassure the Shi’ite community.

But it’s really worth reading both fully — there are some fun anecdotes in there too.

Is the US/Israel arming Dahlan against Hamas?

From Debka File, so take it with a grain of salt because it might just be provocation:

DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that last week, US and Israel transferred a quantity of automatic rifles to Abu Mazen’s Fatah forces
December 17, 2006, 8:14 AM (GMT+02:00)
The guns reached Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan who handed them over to the faction’s suicide wing, al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Abbas’ only reliable strike force. Dahlan is now in command of the armed campaign against Hamas from presidential headquarters in Ramallah. Israeli officials are turning a blind eye to transfer of the arms into the hands of the most badly-wanted masterminds of Fatah suicide killings, such as Jemal Tirawi from Nablus.

Wouldn’t exactly be surprising, though.

New info on rendition from Italian trial

If you’ve been following the renditions story at all, this is a must-read with tons of new details from testimony to an Italian court by intelligence officers. It combines the worst tradition of shadow government among Italian intelligence and security agencies with the worst you can expect from the CIA, as well as highlight the complicity of several EU governments in the rendition program, against their own citizens. Remember that there has already been at least one case of mistaken identity, not to mention that while I’m not surprised that Morocco or Egypt (or for that matter Italy) don’t care about rule of law it’d be nice to see that at least some European countries do. And spare me the mock surprise, European politicians.

Most frightening, though, is this:

Arman Ahmed al-Hissini, imam of the Viale Jenner mosque in Milan and an acquaintance of Menshawi and Nasr, said both have been silenced by the Egyptian security services.

“The Arab secret services, they give names to the CIA of people who they want, people who are on the outside, such as Europe,” said Hissini, an Egyptian native known locally as Abu Imad. “They give the names to the CIA, because the CIA can go to work in these countries.”

I am quite willing to believe that some of the people targeted by the CIA rendition program are really nasty al-Qaeda types, although I still think it is the wrong way to go about neutralizing them, especially if there is little evidence that they are up to anything serious (indeed, surveillance might allow the uncovering of a bigger network.) But if the CIA just accepts a shopping list from the Egyptian and other services without questions — what, are they trying to meet quotas? — then we can all start worrying.