organization:shi’ite

Russia says only Syrian army should be on country’s southern border with Israel

Israel believes Russia may agree to withdrawing Iranian forces and allied Shi’ite militias from Israel-Syria border

Noa Landau and Reuters May 28, 2018

▻https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/russia-says-only-syrian-army-should-be-on-country-s-southern-border-1.61198

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Monday that only Syrian government troops should have a presence on the country’s southern border which is close to Jordan and Israel, the RIA news agency reported.
Lavrov was cited as making the comments at a joint news conference in Moscow with Jose Condungua Pacheco, his counterpart from Mozambique.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman will leave on Wednesday for a short visit to Russia. He is scheduled to meet with his counterpart, Russia’s Defense Minister Sergei Shvigo, the ministry said in a statement on Monday. Lieberman is expected to discuss with his hosts the recent events in the Middle East, primarily the tension between Israel and Iran over the Iranian military presence in Syria.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke at the Knesset Monday, saying that “there is no room for any Iranian military presence in any part of Syria.”
Lieberman said that “these things, of course, reflect not only our position, I can safely say that they reflect the positions of others in the Middle East and beyond the Middle East.”
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On Sunday, Haaretz reported that Israeli political and military officials believe Russia is willing to discuss a significant distancing of Iranian forces and allied Shi’ite militias from the Israel-Syria border, according to Israeli officials.
The change in Russia’s position has become clearer since Israel’s May 10 military clash with Iran in Syria and amid Moscow’s concerns that further Israeli moves would threaten the stability of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s regime.
Russia recently renewed efforts to try to get the United States involved in agreements that would stabilize Syria. The Russians might be willing to remove the Iranians from the Israeli border, though not necessarily remove the forces linked to them from the whole country.
Last November, Russia and the United States, in coordination with Jordan, forged an agreement to decrease the possibility of friction in southern Syria, after the Assad regime defeated rebel groups in the center of the country. Israel sought to keep the Iranians and Shi’ite militias at least 60 kilometers (37 miles) from the Israeli border in the Golan Heights, east of the Damascus-Daraa road (or, according to another version, east of the Damascus-Suwayda road, about 70 kilometers from the border).

FILE – Iran’s Army Chief of Staff Maj. Gen. Mohammad Bagheri, left, in Aleppo, Syria, in photo provided October 20, 2017/AP
According to Israeli intelligence, in Syria there are now around 2,000 Iranian officers and advisers, members of the Revolutionary Guards, around 9,000 Shi’ite militiamen from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, and around 7,000 Hezbollah fighters. Israel believes that the Americans are now in a good position to reach a more effective arrangement in Syria in coordination with the Russians under the slogan “Without Iran and without ISIS.”
The United States warned Syria on Friday it would take “firm and appropriate measures” in response to ceasefire violations, saying it was concerned about reports of an impending military operation in a de-escalation zone in the country’s southwest.
Washington also cautioned Assad against broadening the conflict.
“As a guarantor of this de-escalation area with Russia and Jordan, the United States will take firm and appropriate measures in response to Assad regime violations,” State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement late on Friday.
A war monitor, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, reported on Wednesday that Syrian government forces fresh from their victory this week against an Islamic State pocket in south Damascus were moving into the southern province of Deraa.
Syrian state-run media have reported that government aircraft have dropped leaflets on rebel-held areas in Deraa urging fighters to disarm.
The U.S. warning comes weeks after a similar attack on a de-escalation zone in northeastern Syria held by U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. U.S. ground and air forces repelled the more than four-hour attack, killing perhaps as many as 300 pro-Assad militia members, many of them Russian mercenaries.
Backed by Russian warplanes, ground forces from Iran and allied militia, including Lebanon’s Hezbollah, have helped Assad drive rebels from Syria’s biggest cities, putting him in an unassailable military position.

With Lebanon no longer hiding Hezbollah’s role, next war must hit civilians where it hurts, Israeli minister says
▻http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.776419

présenté comme d’habitude, et pour la énième fois, par le propagandiste Amos Harel,

Lebanese President Michel Aoun paid an official visit to Cairo a month ago, ahead of which he gave a number of interviews to the Egyptian media. Aoun was only elected president after a long power struggle in which Iran and Hezbollah finally held sway, and he spoke about the fact that the Shi’ite organization continues to be the only Lebanese militia that refuses outright to disarm.

Hezbollah is a significant part of the Lebanese people, Aoun explained. “As long as Israel occupies land and covets the natural resources of Lebanon, and as long as the Lebanese military lacks the power to stand up to Israel, [Hezbollah’s] arms are essential, in that they complement the actions of the army and do not contradict them,” he said, adding, “They are a major part of Lebanon’s defense.”

Brig. Gen. Assaf Orion from the Institute for National Security Studies wrote recently that Aoun’s comments were a “lifting of the official veil and tearing off of the mask of the well-known Lebanese reality – which widely accepted Western diplomacy tends to blur. The Lebanese president abolishes the forced distinction between the ostensibly sovereign state and Hezbollah. Thus, the Lebanese president takes official responsibility for any actions by Hezbollah, including against Israel.”

Aoun’s declaration also tallies with the facts on the ground. At a meeting of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee this past week, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman said that the Lebanese army is now “a subsidiary unit of Hezbollah.”

What does that mean with regard to an Israeli response against Hezbollah in case another war breaks out on the northern front? This column recently discussed the basic difficulty that faces the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon: limited ability to deal with the threat of high-trajectory rockets directed against both the Israeli civilian population and the strategic infrastructure on the rear front. On the southern front, even though the air force lacks a proper offensive response to rockets, the missile intercept systems – chiefly the Iron Dome batteries – are enough to thwart most of the launches.

In the north, with Hezbollah able to launch more than 1,000 rockets into Israel on a single day of fighting, the offensive solution seems partial and the defensive solution limited.

The state comptroller’s report on the 2014 war in Gaza disappeared from the headlines within a few days, but the difficulties facing Israel in future conflicts in Gaza – and even more so in Lebanon – remain.

At this point, it’s interesting to listen to security cabinet member Naftali Bennett (Habayit Hayehudi), whose opinions the state comptroller accepted with regard to disagreements with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the Hamas attack tunnels in the Gaza Strip.

While in the political realm Bennett seems determined to create unilateral facts on the ground (i.e., settlements in the territories) even at the risk of a potential face-off with the Europeans and embarrassing the Trump administration, it seems his positions on military issues are more complex. More than once he has shown healthy skepticism over positions taken by top defense officials, and he refuses to accept their insights as indisputable conclusions.

Hunting rocket launchers during a war is almost impossible, Bennett told Haaretz this week, adding that he says this “as someone who specialized in hunting rocket launchers.”

During the Second Lebanon War in 2006, when he served as a reserve officer, Bennett commanded an elite unit sent deep into southern Lebanon to find Hezbollah’s rocket-launching squads.

“When we worked in a particular area, we did reduce the teams of rocket launchers there – but they simply moved a little farther north,” Bennett related. Since then, he said, 11 years have passed and Hezbollah has learned to deploy in a more sophisticated manner. “They moved their launchers from the nature reserves, outposts in open areas, to dense urban areas [ reconnaissance éhontée d’un mensonge passé et nouveau mensonge tout aussi éhonté ]. You can’t fight rockets with tweezers. If you can’t reach the house where the launcher is, you’re not effective, and the number of houses you have to get through is enormous,” he explained.

“After I was released from reserve duty, I read all of the books you wrote about the war,” Bennett told me. “I understood in retrospect that the fundamental event of the war took place on its first day, in a phone call between [former Prime Minister] Ehud Olmert and Condoleezza Rice.” President George W. Bush’s secretary of state had asked the prime minister not to hit Lebanon’s infrastructure, and was given a positive response. As a result, “there was no way that Israel could win the war,” Bennett said.

“Lebanon presented itself as a country that wants quiet, that has no influence over Hezbollah,” he continued. “Today, Hezbollah is embedded in sovereign Lebanon. It is part of the government and, according to the president, also part of its security forces. The organization has lost its ability to disguise itself as a rogue group.”

Bennett believes this should be Israel’s official stance. “The Lebanese institutions, its infrastructure, airport, power stations, traffic junctions, Lebanese Army bases – they should all be legitimate targets if a war breaks out. That’s what we should already be saying to them and the world now. If Hezbollah fires missiles at the Israeli home front, this will mean sending Lebanon back to the Middle Ages,” he said. “Life in Lebanon today is not bad – certainly compared to what’s going on in Syria. Lebanon’s civilians, including the Shi’ite population, will understand that this is what lies in store for them if Hezbollah is entangling them for its own reasons, or even at the behest of Iran.”

At the same time, he notes that this is not necessarily the plan for a future war, but instead an attempt to avoid one: “If we declare and market this message aggressively enough now, we might be able to prevent the next war. After all, we have no intention of attacking Lebanon.”

According to Bennett, if war breaks out anyway, a massive attack on the civilian infrastructure – along with additional air and ground action by the IDF – will speed up international intervention and shorten the campaign. “That will lead them to stop it quickly – and we have an interest in the war being as short as possible,” he said. “I haven’t said these things publicly up until now. But it’s important that we convey the message and prepare to deal with the legal and diplomatic aspects. That is the best way to avoid a war.”

Bennett’s approach is not entirely new. In 2008, the head of the IDF Northern Command (and today IDF chief of staff), Gadi Eisenkot, presented the “Dahiya doctrine.” He spoke of massive damage to buildings in areas identified with Hezbollah – as was done on a smaller scale in Beirut’s Shi’ite Dahiya quarter during the 2006 war – as a means of deterring the organization and shortening the war.

That same year, Maj. Gen. (res.) Giora Eiland proposed striking at Lebanon’s state infrastructure. To this day, though, the approach has not been adopted as Israeli policy, open or covert. Bennett’s declaration reflects an attempt by a key member of the security cabinet (albeit Netanyahu’s declared political rival) to turn it into such policy.

The fact that Israel only tied with Hamas in Gaza in 2014 only convinced Bennett that he is right. There, too, Hamas finally agreed to a cease-fire after 50 days of fighting only after the Israel Air Force systematically destroyed the high-rise apartment buildings where senior Hamas officials lived.

#Liban #Israel #Israel #crimes #criminels #victimes_civiles #impunité #Eiland

Will the last newspaper editor to leave Beirut please turn out the lights - Middle East News - Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-1.762702

The Lebanese newspaper As-Safir printed its final edition last Saturday. In a short video posted on YouTube, founder and editor-in-chief Talal Salman can be seen taking his scarf and turning off the lights in his office. Darkness falls as he leaves the building of the newspaper he founded in 1974.
As-Safir, published in Beirut, used to be one of the most important Arabic-language papers in Lebanon. It took a pro-Syrian stance (and, as a result, was suspected of being funded by the Assad regime) but in its early days, the daily opposed Syrian involvement in the long Lebanese civil war. When the first Lebanon war with Israel broke out in 1982, and when the confrontations between Israel and Hezbollah began, the newspaper stood behind the militant Shi’ite organization – even though Salman’s ideology was, and remained, pan-Arab and left-wing. Salman saw As-Safir as a Lebanese national paper, obliged to support the resistance to foreign occupation, especially that of Israel.
Salman blames the paper’s closure on financial reasons and its shrinking circulation figures. Even the newspaper’s website didn’t help to turns things around. As-Safir is a family newspaper: the CEO is one of Salman’s sons, his daughter is the managing editor, while another daughter runs the archive. Unlike other dailies in Lebanon, which enjoy the support of political parties or aid from foreign Arab governments, As-Safir had no stable financial base, especially after the Syrian regime – which probably did provide some funding in the past – ran into its own financial difficulties.
As-Safir is not the only Lebanese newspaper that has failed to go up against online competition. An-Nahar, which was founded in 1933 and was once the most prominent, best-selling paper in Lebanon, is also facing an uncertain future. It recently announced that nearly 100 staffers were to be laid off, and it has had problems paying salaries for over a year.

If Shi’ite militias beat Islamic State in Tikrit, Iraq will still lose
▻http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/03/30/if-shiite-militias-beat-islamic-state-in-tikrit-iraq-will-still-lose

ere is a new Iraqi paradox: whatever progress the Shi’ite Muslim-dominated Baghdad government makes against jihadi insurgents occupying large swathes of north-western Iraq, it is simultaneously undermining what is left of the Iraqi state, whose frailty and malfunctions created the environment in which jihadism was able to surge in the first place.

The dereliction of the Iraqi state was already powerfully illustrated by the takeover of one-third of Iraq, including the city of Mosul, by Islamic State (also known as ISIL or ISIS) in June 2014. Security forces proved rotten to the core despite a decade of training and expansion. Local Sunni Arab elites were revealed to have turned their backs on their constituencies in favor of a corrupt, corrosive relationship with authorities in Baghdad. Power struggles in the capital often deteriorated into sectarian fear-mongering.

Analysis / Brazen Hezbollah renews operations along Israel border - Israel must reexamine the prevailing assumption that Hezbollah is still deterred by the IDF following the 2006 war and is not interested in a confrontation.
By Amos Harel | Oct. 20, 2014 Haaretz
▻http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.621630

A recent article in Al-Akhbar, the Lebanese newspaper considered close to Hezbollah, seems to back Israeli claims that the Shi’ite organization has resumed overt military activity along the Israeli border – a clear violation of UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the Second Lebanon War in 2006. This, along with taking responsibility for the two explosive devices that blew up on Mount Dov two weeks ago, may reflect a worrisome change in Hezbollah policy that in the long term could have problematic ramifications for Israel.

On October 7, Hezbollah activated two explosive devices alongside a group of the Golani Brigade’s Egoz unit and an Engineering Corps bomb squad operating along the Lebanese border. Two Israel Defense Forces sappers were wounded.

Hezbollah later announced that the operation was in response to the explosion of an Israeli spy installation that a Hezbollah sapper was trying to dismantle in south Lebanon on September 5.

Resolution 1701 (from August 2006) forbids armed Hezbollah fighters south of the Litani River. Hezbollah’s claim of responsibility for the explosion is a blatant admission that it violated the resolution, which until now the group had been careful to publicly uphold. In mid-September, the IDF distributed photos in which Hezbollah fighters could be seen near the border fence, presumably gathering intelligence on IDF troop movements.

The Middle East Media Research Institute, which monitors Arab media outlets, posted on its website a translation of the article from Al-Akhbar that appeared on October 8, the day after the explosions. The article states that the group has resumed operations south of the Litani, similar to its operations between the years 2000-2006 after the IDF had withdrawn from the security zone.

The newspaper describes Hezbollah’s activities as a necessary response to the joint efforts by Israel and Sunni opposition groups on the Golan Heights working to depose the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.

The report, based on unidentified Lebanese sources, claims that Israel has intensified its cooperation with various opposition groups (including, it claims, even the Nusra Front, the extremist Sunni group identified with Al-Qaida). It warns that Israel is encouraging Sunni extremists to enter Lebanon through the Hermon region, and that it is planning to stir up residents of the Syrian Druze villages near Mount Hermon, which are trying to stay neutral in the civil war.

The argument is that Israeli meddling in events in the tri-border region obligates Hezbollah to take extraordinary defensive measures. Accordingly, the explosive devices planted at Mount Dov were aimed at an IDF tank and were meant to warn Israel that it would pay a price for changing the rules of the game in Lebanon.

The explosive charges that went off on Mount Dov were more sophisticated and deadly than those Hezbollah detonated there in March, when an IDF vehicle was damaged but there were no casualties. If the IDF forces had not acted carefully when approaching the devices this time, the incident could have ended with several deaths.

These developments require that Israel reexamine the prevailing assumption that Hezbollah is still deterred by the IDF following the 2006 war, is further deterred by Israel’s display of military prowess in Gaza this summer, and, in general, is not interested in a confrontation with Israel because it is deeply entrenched in the Shi’ite-Sunni wars in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq.

But the recent explosions were a gamble for Hezbollah. Assuming the group’s leadership expected the attack to succeed, it means Hezbollah was prepared to absorb at least one round of violence with Israel (based on its expected response to the deaths of its soldiers), if not an all-out war. This indicates Hezbollah’s self-confidence is growing, probably because its fighters are accumulating valuable battle experience in the Syrian civil war.

There could be other reasons for Hezbollah’s actions. It might want to deflect attention from the internal struggles in Lebanon, in which the group has suffered losses at the hands of extremist Sunni groups like Islamic State. Hezbollah might also have been trying to establish a new deterrent balance with Israel, so the latter will stop attacking the group in Lebanese territory.

According to the U.S. administration and Arab media, over the past two years the Israel Air Force has attacked several weapons convoys going from Syria to Lebanon; the most recent time, last February, the attack was on Lebanese soil. Now Hezbollah has raised the bar, Israel may have to rethink how to respond in the future.

The question remains: what did Hezbollah expect to achieve with a direct attack on the IDF like the one at Mount Dov? Is the military experience it has gained in Syria being translated into new combat techniques and a different battle plan if there’s a flare-up with Israel? How will the group approach such a campaign, given its massive rearming with short-term rockets with large warheads over the past year – a move that could be evidence of a readiness to heavily bombard the border region?

A whole line of senior Israeli defense officials say they do not, at this stage, see any change in Hezbollah’s interests or plans, and maintain that the group is not seeking a confrontation with the IDF. Still, it’s hard to forget that overconfidence led Hezbollah to make a bad move in 2006, when it kidnapped reserve soldiers on the border and sparked a war. One can’t rule out the possibility that such bad judgment could repeat itself.