US wades deeper into Syrian conflictThe United States conducted an airstrike on Thursday against pro-government militiamen in southern Syria, marking its first direct confrontation with forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad since the Syrian civil war began. Coalition aircraft targeted a convoy apparently transporting fighters toward a garrison in al-Tanf held by US and allied forces, US officials said. The militiamen, continuing to advance toward the military base in tanks and construction vehicles after ignoring warning shots, were said to pose a threat to the forces positioned there, according to a coalition statement. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Gennady Gatilov condemned the strike, calling it “completely unacceptable” and “a breach of Syrian sovereignty.”
As part of Afghanistan’s four-year road map to double its 17,000-strong special forces unit and bolster the Afghan Air Force, the U.S. will provide Afghanistan with 159 refurbished UH-60A Black Hawks to replace its aging fleet of Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, according to Afghan and U.S. defense officials. – Military Times
Despite a robust push by the National Democratic Alliance political party to kick-start Make in India defense programs, the highest decision-making body of the Indian Ministry of Defence, the Defence Acquisition Council, on Monday failed to formalize the much-awaited Strategic Partners policy, which aims to roll out all big-ticket defense programs in the country. – Defense News SAUDI ARABIA: Saudi Wealth Fund Starts Defense Company
By Alaa Shahine, Bloomberg: “Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund set up a defense company to help reduce the kingdom’s reliance on foreign purchases and to diversify the economy away from oil.” Strategic Realities: Re-Thinking Afghanistan By Jeff Goodson, RealClearDefense: “Afghanistan may be the most complex theatre of irregular warfare in the world . The country is a black hole of physical, religious, social, ethnic, cultural, political, economic, military and historical cross-currents, rendering conventional strategy there awkward at best and impossible at worst. In re-thinking Afghanistan—and assessing the Pentagon’s new Afghanistan strategy—we need first to confront some hard strategic realities head-on. Four, in particular, stand out.” Suicide bombers stormed the state television offices in the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad on Wednesday, officials said, with heavy fighting underway and a large number of casualties feared. – New York Times
The U.S.’s top military officer is huddling with top NATO commanders this week to discuss the way forward for the war in Afghanistan. – Washington Times Eli Lake reports: A new Afghanistan war strategy approved last month by President Donald Trump's top military and national security advisers would require at least 50,000 U.S. forces to stop the advance of the Taliban and save the government in Kabul, according to a classified U.S. intelligence community assessment. – Bloomberg View President Donald Trump is boning up on policy and protocol ahead of an international trip that begins Friday in Saudi Arabia, but he’s already emerged as a peripheral and perhaps unwitting player in a power struggle between two Saudi princes seeking to succeed the aging King Salman. - Politico
Saudi Arabia is expected to announce a deal to invest as much as $40 billion to help build out U.S. infrastructure when President Trump visits the oil-rich kingdom later this week. – Washington Examiner The United States has signed a new, updated defense accord with the United Arab Emirates that could allow Washington to send more troops and equipment there, the Pentagon said on Tuesday, in the latest sign of deepening ties with the close Gulf ally. - Reuters Josh Rogin reports: When President Trump arrives in Riyadh this week, he will lay out his vision for a new regional security architecture White House officials call an “Arab NATO,” to guide the fight against terrorism and push back against Iran. As a cornerstone of the plan, Trump will also announce one of the largest arms-sales deals in history. – Washington Post David Daoud and David Andrew Weinberg write: Saudi Arabia’s nascent thawing of relations with Israel and the Jewish people is step in a positive direction. However, Riyadh’s permission for its officials to enflame anti-Semitism works at cross-purposes with this objective, and is ultimately bad for American interests. Riyadh understandably wants Israel to acknowledge the Palestinians’ peoplehood and their claim to an independent state. By the same token, Saudis should also stop denying the humanity of Jews and Israelis – and that includes their connection to Jerusalem‘s holy sites. Further, Riyadh should cease its attempts to delegitimize the State of Israel. - The Forward Tunisia’s state of emergency extended for one monthTunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi extended a state of emergency for a month as the fight against terrorism continues, according to a statement released by his office on Tuesday. This measure initially went into effect 18 months ago, when 12 people were killed in an attack claimed by the Islamic State against a bus packed with presidential guards in Tunis in November 2015.
Afghan security forces have regained control of a district center close to the northern city of Kunduz that fell to Taliban insurgents earlier this month, officials said on Tuesday. - Reuters
Michael Waltz writes: Afghanistan will not look like Colombia any time soon. But it can look like one of the Central Asian states — relatively impoverished, but slowly working out of it through natural resources, capable of securing itself with a widely-respected military that can disrupt terrorist sanctuaries, and sustaining a political system that provides a voice to ethnic groups and provides the most basic needs. – War on the Rocks Fethullah Gullen writes: The Turkish government must stop the repression of its people and redress the rights of individuals who have been wronged by Erdogan without due process. I probably will not live to see Turkey become an exemplary democracy, but I pray that the downward authoritarian drift can be stopped before it is too late. – Washington Post Erdogan clashes with Trump over Syrian Kurds at White House meeting Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan met with US President Donald Trump Tuesday at the White House. Last week, the Trump administration decided to arm the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. Turkey fears anti-tank weapons that might be supplied to the Syrian Kurds could be smuggled into Turkey, which is fighting a Kurdish insurgency in the southeastern part of the country. At a joint press conference after meeting Trump, Erdogan said, “It is absolutely unacceptable to take the [YPG] into consideration as partners in the region, and it's going against a global agreement we reached.” President Trump urged the president of Turkey Tuesday to release an American pastor who’s been held behind bars since last October. – Washington Times
Trump offered his administration’s “support” to Turkey in its fight against extremist groups like the Islamic State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known widely as the PKK. Of the complex and bloody civil war in Syria, Trump said: “We … appreciate Turkey’s leadership in seeking an end to the horrific killing.” And, notably, the new U.S. president also pointed to an issue that defined his unlikely rise to the presidency — trade — as a subject of his talks with his Turkish counterpart. – Roll Call The quick and decisive victory—the centerpiece of a broader push last year to defeat AQAP in southern Yemen—was followed by a more time-consuming challenge for the local government: maintaining security and improving daily life, even as the broader Yemen conflict grinds on elsewhere….That is especially true in Al Mukalla, where al Qaeda positioned itself as better than previous governments that had neglected the area. – Wall Street Journal (subscription required)
President Trump met Monday with the leader of the United Arab Emirates, laying groundwork for his first foreign trip and a summit with Muslim leaders in Saudi Arabia that is vital to his plan to confront radical Islamic terrorism. – Washington Times Cholera has killed at least 180 people in Yemen in recent weeks, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday, a day after authorities declared a state of emergency in the capital Sanaa and called for international help. - Reuters Maher Farrukh, Tyler Nocita and Katherine Zimmerman write: U.S. policy for Yemen is now in peril. The U.S. supports the Saudi-led coalition, which has been ineffective at best on the ground in restoring order to Yemen and at worse has added to the challenges, including a major humanitarian crisis….The U.S. could rapidly lose its ability to secure its own interests in Yemen. America must stop out-sourcing its policies to partners and instead take the lead. – AEI’s Critical Threats Andrew Exum writes: The biggest risk for the Emiratis and other Gulf states might be overconfidence. Americans aren’t too excited about Donald Trump these days, even if Gulf leaders are. Just as the Gulf states endured the last few years of the Obama administration, hoping for a new administration, this one will not last forever. A wise man would not want to become too associated with Trumpism. And when Trump is gone, the Gulf states will want to have created enduring partnerships that transcend the partisan era in which Americans are living. – The Atlantic Elliott Abrams writes: I know what you’re thinking: Why would any American favor Ibrahim Raisi, the hardest-line candidate for Iran’s presidency in the May 19 election, over the incumbent Hassan Rouhani, who is widely praised in world capitals as a moderate? There are two reasons, and the first is that Rouhani is not a moderate—or is at best a moderate utterly without influence. - Politico
Tzvi Kahn writes: In the coming days, Trump administration officials and members of Congress should deploy the bully pulpit to draw attention to the hunger strikes. They should urge European officials to discuss the prisoners with their Iranian counterparts. Ambassador Nikki Haley should raise the inmates’ ordeal at the United Nations. And the Treasury Department should impose additional sanctions on Iranian entities linked to the regime’s domestic repression. – Foundation for Defense of Democracies Top officials from the Obama administration are working to stymie congressional pressure on Iran, including through a quiet push in Congress by an organization that has been criticized for helping mislead the public about the Iran deal, according to correspondence obtained by THE WEEKLY STANDARD. – The Weekly Standard US says Syria built crematorium inside notorious prisonUS Assistant Secretary of State Stuart Jones said at a briefing in Washington on Monday that the United States has evidence that the Syrian regime has built a crematorium in the infamous Sednaya military prison complex, north of Damascus. Commercial satellite photographs released during the briefing show what is believed to be a crematorium used by President Bashar al-Assad’s government to dispose of the remains of bodies of prisoners and to cover up evidence of mass murder. In February, Amnesty International reported that between 2011 and 2015, the Syrian government had conducted mass executions in Sednaya, with groups of 20 to 50 people hanged each week. Tony Badran writes: As the revelations about Assad’s prison system demonstrate, “ending the war” does not address the machinery of death in the regime’s dungeons. The unspeakable horror of the Assad prison system is a longstanding tradition of the Assad family, dating back to Bashar’s father...But Bashar has managed to surpass his father. You will not find descriptions of crematoria to dispose of thousands of dead detainees in Syrian prison literature. That picture conjures another event in history. - Tablet
Iran continues to make critical technological strides in its efforts to perfect an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of delivering nuclear weapons over great distances, efforts that violate international prohibitions, according to the director of national intelligence, who informed Congress this week that the Islamic Republic "would choose ballistic missiles as its preferred method of delivering nuclear weapons." – Washington Free Beacon
Robert Ford writes: The saddest part of all this is that the Syrian Kurds, like so many Middle Easterners before them, think the Americans will protect them from their enemies. They have forgotten the bitter experience of Mustafa Barzani, the Iraqi-Kurdish leader whom the Americans backed in the 1970s against the Iraqi Baathist regime, only to sell them out in 1975 when the U.S.-backed Shah of Iran cut a deal with Baghdad…Especially with presidents like Obama and Trump, the Syrian Kurds of today should expect no better of the Americans. – The Atlantic
A prominent Turkish newspaper has demanded the eviction of U.S. troops and warplanes from Incirlik Air Base as fallout there worsens from the Trump administration's controversial move to arm a Kurdish militia fighting the Islamic State in neighboring Syria. – Military Times
The United States is on a collision course with its NATO ally Turkey, pushing ahead with arming Syrian Kurds after deciding the immediate objective of defeating Islamic State militants outweighs the potential damage to a partnership vital to U.S. interests in the volatile Middle East. – Associated Press Editorial: The problem is that Mr. Erdogan’s domestic and foreign policies are linked. Once he prided himself on observing democratic norms and sought membership in the European Union and rapproachment with the same Kurds he now bombs and jails. His domestic turn to autocracy has been accompanied by a nationalist policy of strenuously opposing legitimate Kurdish aspirations and deepening ties with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Mr. Trump should tell him that he is on the wrong track, both in Syria and at home. – Washington Post Soner Cagaptay writes: Despite his immense power, however, Erdogan still regards himself as an outsider. In many ways, he remains the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, clinging to a lifetime of grievance that expresses itself in a politics of coercion and revenge. This is only exacerbating the intense polarization of Turkish society. Erdogan could halt Turkey’s slide into chaos if he were to overcome the psychological burdens of his past. But this seems a thin thread on which to hang the country’s hopes. – Washington Post Elizabeth Teoman and Ethan Beaudoin writes: The U.S. should start to reorient its long-term relationship with Turkey during the upcoming meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Turkish President Recep Erdogan on May 16. The U.S. and Turkey suffer from a deep strategic divergence that goes far beyond operational disagreements over the offensive against ISIS in Ar-Raqqa City. The U.S. must instead prioritize its remaining leverage on efforts to halt and reverse this mounting divide and reenlist Turkey as a legitimate NATO ally against the threats posed by Salafi-Jihadist Groups and the Russo-Iranian Coalition. – Institute for the Study of War |
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