On March 29, US Secretary of State
Antony Blinken, chairing a virtual UN Security Council meeting on Syria, called on the council to reauthorize the only border crossing for UN assistance and open two others that were shut down last year due to Russian and Chinese objections.
“The current approach is unjustified, ineffective, indefensible, Blinken said. It is directly resulting in the increased suffering of the Syrian people.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister
Sergey Vershinin responded that Russia considers the US posture as discrimination against the Damascus-controlled regions when distributing humanitarian aid; refusal to facilitate the country’s recovery and the return of refugees; the toughening of sanctions during the COVID-19 pandemic; and the desire to maintain a cross border mechanism, which violates the standards of international humanitarian law.”
Leaders of the Islamic State group have even mounted recruiting efforts at refugee camps such as Syria’s infamous al-Hol facility, leading top U.S. military commanders to openly question whether the site has become a breeding ground for the next generation of ISIS fighters.
Renewed fighting across Iraq and Syria is coupled with a troubling uptick in attacks in Afghanistan, a chilling insurgency in Mozambique, a stubborn presence in Somalia, and a host of other evidence that the Islamic State group is gaining footholds across the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
Declarations of victory over ISIS, specialists say, have been premature.
Last month, US Air Force Joint Terminal Attack Controllers (JTACs) trained members of the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) during live-fire attack helicopter exercises. JTACs direct military aircraft during combat and pictures published on a Pentagon website show the JTACs training SDF members to call in airstrikes, which appears
the first time the US is giving non-state actors such training, at least publicly.
Above: A person wearing an SDF patch speaks into radio during training with JTACs (Sgt. Torrance Saunders/Army).
According to a report from
Air Force Times, the pictures might be the first time JTAC training with the SDF is publicized, but the training is nothing new. SDF fighters have had the ability to call in US airstrikes for years now.
Wednesday 7 April 2021, by Gilbert Achcar
The last three decades have witnessed increasing political confusion about the meaning of anti-imperialism, a notion that, in and of itself, hadn’t previously been the topic of much debate. There are two main reasons for this confusion: the victorious end of most post–World War II anticolonial struggles and the USSR’s collapse. During the Cold War, the United States and allied colonial Western powers directly waged several wars against national liberation movements or regimes, along with more limited military interventions and wars by proxy. In most of these cases, Western powers confronted a local adversary supported by a large popular base. Standing against the imperialist intervention and in support of those whom it targeted seemed the obvious choice for progressives the only discussion was whether the support ought to be critical or unreserved.
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The last three decades have witnessed increasing political confusion about the meaning of anti-imperialism, a notion that, in and of itself, hadn’t previously been the topic of much debate. There are two main reasons for this confusion: the victorious end of most post–World War II anticolonial struggles and the USSR’s collapse. During the Cold War, the United States and allied colonial Western powers directly waged several wars against national liberation movements or regimes, along with more limited military interventions and wars by proxy. In most of these cases, Western powers confronted a local adversary supported by a large popular base. Standing against the imperialist inter