Articles by "Middle East"
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October 21, 2018 , , ,
Recep Tayyip Erdogan greets supporters at a ceremony in Istanbul on Sunday
Recep Tayyip Erdogan greets supporters at a ceremony in Istanbul on Sunday
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Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan stepped up the pressure on Saudi Arabia over the death of Jamal Khashoggi on Sunday, casting doubts on Riyadh’s claims that the journalist died in a fist fight and saying he would reveal what happened in “full detail”. Saudi Arabia finally admitted at the weekend that Khashoggi was killed in the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul this month after two weeks of denials. It said it had detained 18 unidentified Saudis over the incident. But Riyadh has changed its story several times and its claims that the 60-year-old columnist was killed in a fight have been widely condemned as lacking credibility. Turkish officials have previously said they believe Khashoggi was killed by a 15-man Saudi hit team that flew into Istanbul and later dismembered his body. Mr Erdogan, who has been restrained in his comments over the past two weeks, referred to that version of events in a speech yesterday. “Why did 15 people come here; why were 18 people detained?” All of this must be explained in full detail,” he said. “On Tuesday, these things will be explained in a very different way at the group meeting [of Turkey’s ruling party]. There I will go into these details.” A Turkish official told the Financial Times that Ankara had successfully “shamed” Riyadh into an admission of guilt. “Now we have to get the full story. We will refute the claim that a fist fight caused this mess.” If Mr Erdogan reveals the details of Khashoggi’s death on Tuesday, it would coincide with the opening of Saudi Arabia’s flagship investor conference in Riyadh. A growing list of western government ministers and executives have withdrawn from the gathering because of the crisis.

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 Western leaders have also demanded that Riyadh provide more details on the death of Khashoggi, one of the Middle East’s most prominent journalists who was living in self-exile in the US. Riyadh, grappling with its biggest diplomatic crisis since the September 11 attacks on the US in 2001, has provided no evidence to back its claims and it is still not clear where Khashoggi’s body is. Faced with a growing backlash in the US, Adel al-Jubeir, Saudi Arabia’s foreign minister, appeared on Fox News to defend his government’s actions. He called Khashoggi’s murder an “aberration” and a “criminal act” that was the result of a “rogue operation” by individuals who exceeded their powers and then tried to cover it up. He said Mohammed bin Salman, the Crown Prince, had no knowledge of the assassination, which was now being investigated. Asked if he knew the whereabouts of Khashoggi’s remains, he said: “We are working on this with our Turkish colleagues, the public prosecutor is continuing his line of questioning. We are intent on determining what happened, we are intent on uncovering all of the facts that exist in this case, we want to make sure we know what happened.” In a joint statement on Sunday, the foreign ministers of the UK, France and Germany “stressed that more efforts are needed and expected towards establishing the truth in a comprehensive, transparent and credible manner”. The statement added that “nothing can justify this killing and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms”. “We will ultimately make our judgment based on the credibility of the further explanation we receive about what happened and our confidence that such a shameful event cannot and will not ever be repeated,” the statement said. After initially hinting that he would accept Saudi Arabia’s claim, US President Donald Trump on Saturday said he was “not satisfied” with its explanation for the death of the journalist, who wrote a column for the Washington Post. “I am not satisfied until we find the answer,” Mr Trump told reporters, adding he was considering imposing sanctions on Riyadh, the main Arab ally of the US. Political pressure in the US is mounting on Mr Trump to take a tougher line, with lawmakers of both parties pinning the blame for Khashoggi’s murder on the highest echelons of the monarchy.

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 “In Saudi Arabia, you do not do something of this magnitude without having clearance from the top. We need to find out who that is and hold him accountable,” Thom Tillis, a Republican senator from North Carolina, said on NBC on Sunday. “If the facts lead to what we all suspect they will, I think it will be very problematic for our relationship, going forward.” Peter King, a senior Republican in the House of Representatives, added: “I would ask the president to try to thread the needle here . . . whether it involves imposing sanctions, whether it involves delaying arms sales, making a clear statement of condemnation at the end but still not hurt ourselves.” Dick Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois, said the crown prince had his “fingerprints all over this” and called on the Trump administration to expel the Saudi ambassador to the US until a “third-party investigation” on the murder was completed. “We should call on our allies to do the same. Unless the Saudi kingdom understands that civilised countries around the world are going to reject this conduct and make sure that they pay a price for it, they’ll continue doing it,” Mr Durbin said. Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said the US should suspend military sales and “certain security assistance” to Saudi Arabia, as well as impose sanctions on the perpetrators of the murder. “This really ought to be something that causes us to do a re-examination of our relationship with Saudi Arabia,” Mr Schiff told ABC news. In a sign that Prince Mohammed will not bear any responsibility for the crisis, his father, King Salman, named the 33-year-old crown prince to head a committee to restructure the intelligence services within 30 days. Turkey and Saudi Arabia already have strained relations and vie for influence in the Middle East. Riyadh was annoyed by Ankara’s support for Qatar after Saudi Arabia and its allies imposed a regional embargo on the Gulf state. It also considers Turkey as sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement that the kingdom describes as a terrorist group.
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April 14, 2017 ,
The Pentagon’s laser- or satellite-guided bombs and missiles almost always hit their intended targets. But because of human error – sometimes compounded by technical glitches – the military has a history of mistakenly killing civilians or allies. Here are five causes.

 Poor Communication 

An American gunship hit a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan, last year, killing 42 people.

In major military blunders, rarely is there just one culprit. Human error as well as equipment and procedural failures can add up to devastating consequences. That was the case in the attack on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan.

The problems started when missile fire forced a lumbering AC-130 gunship, sent to eliminate a compound swarming with Taliban fighters, off course. Its targeting systems homed in on an empty field instead.

The crew spotted a collection of buildings that roughly matched the description of the Taliban compound. The gunship’s navigator called an American Special Forces air controller on the ground to seek guidance.

The response was immediate and unequivocal: Open fire.

That World's News |Satellite image by DigitalGlobe via Bing Maps
The air controller was wrong. Even after Doctors Without Borders frantically alerted American commanders that a gunship was attacking the hospital, the airstrike was not immediately called off because the Americans could not confirm that the hospital was free of Taliban fighters.
Sixteen American military personnel, including a general officer, were given administrative punishments for their roles in the strike. 

Right Target, Wrong People

A coalition airstrike on Tuesday aimed at Islamic State fighters killed 18 Syrian fighters allied with the United States.

In the fog of war, distinguishing between friend and foe can be perilous. Allies and enemies are commingled on the battlefield. What looks like an insurgent from data gathered from spy satellites or surveillance planes may be a more complicated target.
In the airstrike Tuesday in Tabqah, Syria, Syrian fighters allied with the United States were mistaken for insurgents. Allies on the ground had called in the airstrikes and “identified the target location as an ISIS fighting position,” the Pentagon said, using another name for the Islamic State. But the location turned out to be a position for the Syrian Democratic Forces, who have been fighting the Islamic State alongside the Americans. The military is investigating.



Right Target, Wrong People
Aleppo
Mosul
Raqqa
Tabqah
Location of
strike
Deir al-Zour
ISIS
control
Homs


SYRIA
Without eyes on the ground, targets can be misleading. Several missiles fired from a C.I.A. drone in March 2011 struck a meeting in northwest Pakistan among locals and Taliban mediators who had gathered to settle a dispute over a chromite mine. While some of the three dozen people killed were Taliban fighters, Pakistani officials said, most were elders or simply residents. American officials sharply disputed Pakistan's account, saying that all those killed were insurgents. “These people weren't gathering for a bake sale,” an American official said. “They were terrorists.” 

Reliance on Local Allies

An American airstrike called in by Iraqi special forces to kill snipers ended up killing as many as 200 Iraqi civilians.

Ideally, American spotters would be able to call in all American airstrikes to help avoid accidentally striking civilians. But in war zones like Iraq and Syria, where small numbers of American Special Operations forces are advising indigenous troops, the advisers must vet and approve information relayed from allied troops closer to the fight. It’s an imperfect arrangement forged in the crucible of combat.
American commanders in Iraq say that an airstrike in Mosul last month that killed scores, if not hundreds, of civilians hit the right target, but that the choice of target relied on partner forces who may not have the same values or standards, especially when it comes to risks to civilians.

Rescue teams work on the debris of a house destroyed by an airstrike that killed more than 100 people in Mosul.
Rescue teams work on the debris of a house destroyed by an airstrike that killed more than 100 people in Mosul.
The top American commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Stephen J. Townsend, acknowledged that the airstrike most likely led to the building collapse that killed the civilians. But American officials have also said that the Islamic State may have herded the victims into the building as human shields, or that the attack may have set off a larger blast from explosives set by militants inside the building or nearby.

Maj. Gen. Maan al-Saadi, an Iraqi special forces commander, has said his men called in an airstrike to take out snipers on the roofs of three houses in Mosul. The Iraqi forces, General Saadi said, were unaware that at least some of the houses were filled with civilians.

Nearby Civilians

Two American airstrikes in 2016 and one in 2015 – both in Mosul – killed civilians near designated targets.

Often, civilians stray too close to a target after an American or allied warplane has dropped its weapons, and the pilot is unaware or cannot abort the strike.

In a significant number of the 85 strikes involving civilian casualties that the United States has acknowledged in Iraq and Syria, noncombatants entered the so-called killbox after the weapons were released, according to Airwars, a London-based organization that tracks civilian casualties in war zones.

On Feb. 12, 2016, and again four days later, airstrikes were carried out on Islamic State car-bomb factories in Mosul. American commanders concluded that two civilians were unintentionally killed in each strike when they entered the target area after the munition had been dropped.

American commanders also concluded that an attack on an Islamic State headquarters building in Mosul in 2015 killed four civilians in the building and wounded two others.

Flawed Intelligence

A B-2 bomber mistakenly struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, Serbia, in 1999, killing three people and wounding 20.

 American military planners draw on a range of aerial, human and other intelligence to help plot airstrikes, always seeking to prevent civilian deaths. Even so, that planning sometimes goes awry. Most famously, flawed targeting techniques, outdated maps and sloppy follow-up on the ground led to a disastrous result in May 1999.

Satellite-guided bombs from a B-2 bomber struck the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War because C.I.A. analysts misidentified the building, and military databases used to catch such mistakes had the wrong address for the embassy. The intelligence failure led to a deadly case of mistaken identity that killed three Chinese and wounded 20.

When the target was initially checked against electronic mapping data in American military and NATO computers to protect against civilian casualties, no red flags were raised because half a dozen government databases listed the old location of the Chinese Embassy, in another part of Belgrade.

A secret document that President Bill Clinton used in authorizing the strike, obtained by The New York Times in 2000, described the Chinese Embassy as a warehouse.

listed the old location of the Chinese Embassy, in another part of Belgrade.
The intended target was the headquarters of a Yugoslav arms agency. Intelligence analysts in Washington apparently picked the Chinese Embassy, which had been in that location for only two years, without vetting from anyone on the ground.

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