Matthew Ferry's List: The Middle East - الشرق الأوسط

• On the contentious issue of the role of Al Qaeda or other international terrorist organizations in the attack on the diplomatic mission, the Senate committee’s report found that individuals “affiliated with” many such groups had participated in the attack but that none of them appeared to have planned or led the assault.
• The report found that among the many terrorist groups with which individual attackers had some affiliation were Ansar al-Shariah, Al Qaeda’s North African affiliate, Al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, and the Egyptian network led by Muhammad Jamal. But the report said “intelligence suggests that the attack was not a highly coordinated plot, but was opportunistic.”
• The American-made video, which denigrated Islam and was posted on YouTube, set off a number of protests across the Middle East. An investigation published by The New York Times last month found that anger over the video had played a significant role in precipitating the Benghazi attack.

• The report notes that Mr. Stevens was aware of all of the intelligence reporting on Libya, including updates on the increased risks of anti-Western terrorist attacks that had prompted the C.I.A. to substantially upgrade the security at its own Benghazi facility in June 2012

  At times Mr. Stevens requested additional security personnel from the State Department in Washington. But the inquiry also found that in June 2012, at approximately the time the threats were mounting, Mr. Stevens recommended hiring and training local Libyan guards to form security teams in Tripoli and Benghazi. The plan showed a faith in local Libyan support that proved misplaced on the night of the attack.

• On Sept. 5, 2012, a week before the attack, the Africa Command issued a warning about a growing threat to Americans “particularly in northeast Libya.”
• The State Department has been racing to fulfill 29 recommendations made in December 2012 by an independent review panel as part of its investigation into the attacks. Those include sending dozens of additional diplomatic security agents to high-threat embassies and installing millions of dollars in advanced fire-survival gear.

4 more annotations...

• Yet as the militiamen snacked on Twinkie-style cakes with their American guests, they also gushed about their gratitude for President Obama’s support in their uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi. They emphasized that they wanted to build a partnership with the United States, especially in the form of more investment. They specifically asked for Benghazi outlets of McDonald’s and KFC.

  • Meeting between Mohamed al-Gharabi and several Americans in Libya.
• Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.
• Mr. Abu Khattala declared openly and often that he placed the United States not far behind Colonel Qaddafi on his list of infidel enemies. But he had no known affiliations with terrorist groups, and he had escaped scrutiny from the 20-person C.I.A. station in Benghazi that was set up to monitor the local situation.
• The other, favored by Republicans, holds that Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
• Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.
• Anger at the video motivated the initial attack. Dozens of people joined in, some of them provoked by the video and others responding to fast-spreading false rumors that guards inside the American compound had shot Libyan protesters. Looters and arsonists, without any sign of a plan, were the ones who ravaged the compound after the initial attack, according to more than a dozen Libyan witnesses as well as many American officials who have viewed the footage from security cameras.

  • Important information regarding the escalation of the incident.

4 more annotations...

• “Innocence of Muslims” purported to be an online trailer for a film about the mistreatment of Christians in contemporary Egypt. But it included bawdy historical flashbacks that derided the Prophet Muhammad. Someone dubbed it into Arabic around the beginning of September 2012, and a Cairo newspaper embellished the news by reporting that a Florida pastor infamous for burning the Quran was planning to debut the film on the 11th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

• In an interview, Mr. Gharabi said that he had known about the building rage in Egypt over the video, but that, “We did not know if it was going to reach us here.”

   

• “We told them that we hoped that the countries which helped us during the war would now help us in development,” he said. “And America was at the top of the pyramid.”

   

  But Mr. Gharabi and two other Libyan militia leaders present said separately that they tried to warn Mr. McFarland. “We told them, ‘Weapons are everywhere, in every home, and there is no real control,' ” Mr. Bin Hamid of Libya Shield said.

   

  Mr. McFarland struggled to make sense of their contradictory signals. “The message was, ‘Don’t come here because there is no security, but come right away because we need you,' ” Mr. McFarland later told colleagues.

1 more annotation...

• The attack began with just a few dozen fighters, according to those officials. The invaders fired their Kalashnikovs at the lights around the gate and broke through with ease.

   
• The compound had a total of eight armed guards that night: five Americans and three Libyans affiliated with the February 17 militia. All of them fell back. The Americans raced to grab their weapons in the compound’s other buildings but then found a swarm of attackers blocking their way to the main villa.

• Reports from the scene ricocheted around the city in frantic phone calls telling competing stories. Abu Baker Habib, a Libyan-American friend of Mr. Stevens, began calling for help from a handful of the most important militia leaders, like Mr. Bin Hamid and Mr. Gharabi. But a false report spread much wider and faster: that guards in the compound had shot and wounded Libyans who had come only to protest.

   

• Of all the major militias in the city, Libya Shield was the best positioned to intervene. It was arguably the most formidable in the country at the time, and its leader, Mr. Bin Hamid received an urgent call from the ambassador’s friend Mr. Habib asking for help. Mr. Bin Hamid arrived at the scene within 30 minutes after the attack began, he said in an interview.

   

  “The situation wasn’t suitable for me to go inside the compound,” Mr. Bin Hamid said. “And when the shooting stopped, we thought the Americans had been evacuated.”

• Later, Mr. Abu Khattala appeared to prepare for another phase of the attack. One young fighter with him told another to “cleanse ourselves for another battle” — an apparent reference to a subsequent attack on the C.I.A. Annex.

   

3 more annotations...

• But the Republican arguments appear to conflate purely local extremist organizations like Ansar al-Shariah with Al Qaeda’s international terrorist network. The only intelligence connecting Al Qaeda to the attack was an intercepted phone call that night from a participant in the first wave of the attack to a friend in another African country who had ties to members of Al Qaeda, according to several officials briefed on the call. But when the friend heard the attacker’s boasts, he sounded astonished, the officials said, suggesting he had no prior knowledge of the assault.

• The leaders of Ansar al-Shariah, the hard-line Islamist group allied with Mr. Abu Khattala, declared in a statement read on television the morning after the attack that they had not participated in it. But they lauded the assault as a just response to the video. They, too, insisted that a “peaceful protest” had “escalated as a result of shooting that came from the consulate, which led to the ambassador’s death by suffocation.”

   

• By last summer, United States investigators had interviewed hundreds of witnesses and formally asked the Libyan government to arrest Mr. Abu Khattala, along with about a dozen others wanted for questioning. The United States military also prepared a plan to capture him on its own, pending presidential approval, officials said. But the administration held back, fearing that unilateral United States military action could set off a backlash that would undermine the fragile Libyan government.

   

1 more annotation...

• The photographs were released as delegates from the Syrian government and the opposition began gathering in Switzerland for long-awaited talks to find a political solution to end almost three years of civil war.

• The team, which included three legal experts with experience in war crimes prosecutions and three forensic analysts, interviewed Caesar extensively, examined the photos and deemed them to be credible evidence that could support charges of crimes against humanity and possibly war crimes.

• That Qatar, which has bankrolled the rebels, funded the project is also likely to raise questions, though the investigators say they worked freely.

• Russia, a major Syrian ally, would probably veto any effort by the United Nations Security Council to refer Syria to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

2 more annotations...

• A wide gap remained between the delegations, with the opposition demanding that the government formally confirm that it accepts the protocols set out at an earlier conference known as Geneva 1, which calls for a fully empowered transitional governing body to be formed by “mutual consent.”

• Syria’s government accepts the Geneva 1 communiqué, or else it would not be in Geneva, and is ready to begin negotiations, Syria’s deputy foreign minister, Fayssal Mekdad, told reporters as he arrived for talks a meeting with Mr. Brahimi.

• The Syrian foreign minister, Walid al-Moallem, who led his country’s delegation, was openly defiant, calling Syrian insurgents evil and ignoring appeals by Ban Ki-moon, the United Nations secretary-general, to avoid invective or even yield the floor as a bell rang signaling that he had exceeded the allotted time for his remarks.

   

   

• On the eve of the conference, Mr. Kerry, Mr. Ban and Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, engaged in a calculated display of comity, a gesture that appeared intended to play down the United States’s successful lobbying effort to persuade the United Nations to withdraw its invitation to Iran to attend the meeting.
• Mr. Lavrov also revived the Russian argument that Iran, Mr. Assad’s regional ally, should be present, challenging the American position that Iran not be allowed to participate until it publicly endorses the mandate for the conference.

1 more annotation...

• Today, two different al Qaeda affiliates, the al-Nusra front and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), are battling each other in Syria’s Raqqa province.

• As if these issues were not complex enough, there is another: the United States should consider whether the fight against al Qaeda is always the strategic priority in the Middle East. It might at times get in the way of other goals, including the efforts to contain Iran and Syria, themselves state sponsors of terrorism with considerable blood on their hands. For example, an exclusive focus on al Qaeda in Syria could leave Iran relatively better off, which could be equally detrimental to the long-term interests of the United States. 
• By advertising his fealty to those men, Suri provided tangible evidence that, as has long been rumored, al Qaeda and Ahrar al-Sham are joined at the hip. If past experience is any guide, Suri’s statement will undoubtedly generate pressure for the United States to designate Ahrar al-Sham as a terrorist organization.
• Those relationships will be important for ensuring that the Front treats Syrian civilians well during the war and after, should Assad ever be toppled. Making a direct enemy of Ahrar al-Sham would also make it extremely difficult for U.S. nongovernmental organizations to move aid through territory controlled by it and the Islamic Front, because U.S. law prohibits working with terrorist organizations.

• Some will say that the United States’ hands are in a bind; public confirmation that an al Qaeda operative is a senior leader in one of the Islamic Front’s most important factions is hard to overlook. But Obama has more discretion when it comes to designating terrorist organizations than one might think.

   

3 more annotations...

• The response was unequivocal. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, declared that his fighters would remain in Syria “as long as we have a vein that pumps and an eye that blinks.”

• Syria’s other Qaeda group, the Nusra Front, remains loyal to Mr. Zawahri, but has also maintained good relations with the wider rebel movement that shares the American goal of getting rid of President Bashar al-Assad.
• Many assumed that the Qaeda-affiliated Shabab in Somalia was local until their gunmen stormed into the Westgate mall in Nairobi. And the shadowy Algerian jihadist Mokhtar Belmokhtar seemed to be focused on his trans-Saharan smuggling and kidnapping business until his group raided a natural gas plant in In Amenas, Algeria, looking for foreigners to capture and kill.
• “No Qaeda threat has ever remained exclusively local,” said Bruce Hoffman, director of security studies at Georgetown University. “They have always eventually crossed borders and become regional in operations and attacks and certainly in fund-raising and recruiting.”

3 more annotations...

• It has never really accepted the idea that Palestine, or Lebanon for that matter, is a separate entity from a greater Syria, which it still aspires to create. And its primary concern has been to ensure as much Palestinian subservience as possible to the Damascus dictatorship’s ideology and interests.

• This madrasa, like so many in Pakistan, was a source of the Taliban resurgence that President Hamid Karzai and other Afghan leaders had long been warning about. In this nondescript madrasa in a poor neighborhood of Quetta, one of hundreds throughout the border region, the Taliban and Pakistan’s religious parties were working together to raise an army of militants.
• The officer told me that I was not permitted to visit the neighborhood of Pashtunabad and that it was forbidden to interview members of the Taliban.
• The Red Mosque leaders tried to make the students stay. “They said if the women and others die, the people will take their side,” one father told me, and I realized then how premeditated this all was, how the girls were pawns in their plan to spark a revolution.
• Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. The information came from a senior United States official, and I guessed that the Americans had intercepted a phone call of Pasha’s or one about him in the days after the raid

• In 2009, Bin Laden reportedly traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas to meet with the militant leader Qari Saifullah Akhtar. Informally referred to as the “father of jihad,” Akhtar is considered one of the ISI’s most valuable assets. According to a Pakistani intelligence source, he was the commander accused of trying to kill Bhutto on her return in 2007, and he is credited with driving Mullah Omar out of Afghanistan on the back of a motorbike in 2001 and moving Bin Laden out of harm’s way just minutes before American missile strikes on his camp in 1998. After the Sept. 11 attacks, he was detained several times in Pakistan. Yet he was never prosecuted and was quietly released each time by the ISI.
• Bin Laden said that Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and the Indian Ocean region would be Al Qaeda’s main battlefields in the coming years, and that he needed more fighters from those areas.

4 more annotations...

• Col. Suhail al-Samaraie, head of the Awakening Council in Samarra, a pro-government Sunni grouping, also confirmed that officials in Salahuddin were aware of large-scale executions having taken place last week, but he did not know how many. “They are targeting anyone working with the government side, anyplace, anywhere,” he said. He said the insurgents were targeting anyone with a government affiliation, whether Sunni or Shiite.

   

• Those who were Sunnis were given civilian clothes and sent home; the Shiites were taken to the grounds of Saddam Hussein’s old palace in Tikrit, where they were said to be executed, their bodies dumped in the Tigris River, which runs by the palace compound.
• A senior Iraqi government official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to make press statements, said news of the executions was slow to circulate because Twitter had been blocked. “I don’t doubt they are real, but 1,700 is a big number,” he said. “We are trying to control the reaction. They are trying to bring back the 2005 to 2006 days.” Sunni and Shiite militias engaged in a wave of tit-for-tat killings of civilians during that period, killing tens of thousands.

1 more annotation...

• The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has vowed to establish a caliphate — a unified Islamic government ruled by a caliph, someone considered to be a successor to Muhammad’s political authority — stretching from western Syria across Iraq to the eastern border with Iran.

• the pamphlet states, “improving their conditions is less important than the condition of their religion.” And one of the most important duties of the group, according to the pamphlet, is something that it has done consistently: free Sunnis from prison.

• Perhaps the best indication of how the group sees itself these days is a recent promotional video called “The Rattling of the Sabers.”

• Most of the Prophet Muhammad's followers wanted the community of Muslims to determine who would succeed him. A smaller group thought that someone from his family should take up his mantle. They favored Ali, who was married to Muhammad's daughter, Fatimah.