World update: June 13 2019
Stories from the Gulf of Oman, China, Russia, and more
MIDDLE EAST
SYRIA
The Turkish government says that one of its military outposts in Idlib province, which are intended to oversee the ceasefire that’s supposed to be in place in northwestern Syria, was shelled by the Syrian army on Thursday in an attack that left three Turkish soldiers wounded. However, the Russian government, which negotiated that ceasefire with Turkey, insists that it was rebels who attacked the outpost. In fact, the Russians say they conducted four airstrikes against rebel positions in response to the shelling after being asked to do so by the Turks. Something isn’t right here, clearly. Either way, monitor groups reported that airstrikes resumed in northwestern Syria after a lull on Wednesday, so those reports that Russia and Turkey were about to reimpose the aforementioned ceasefire appear not to have been accurate.
YEMEN
The Saudi-led coalition carried out multiple airstrikes in and around Sanaa on Thursday in retaliation for the Houthis’ cruise missile strike against the kingdom’s Abha Airport on Wednesday. That missile strike hit the airport’s arrivals hall and wounded at least 26 people. There’s no word on casualties from the coalition strikes. The Houthis then retaliated with a drone strike against the same airport on Friday morning, at least according to their media outlet.
ISRAEL-PALESTINE
A couple of rockets were fired out of Gaza overnight, which led to the inevitable Israeli airstrikes in retaliation on Thursday. The rocket strikes do not appear to have caused any casualties and there’s no word on casualties from the Israeli response.
Meanwhile, the Jordanian government is now saying it hasn’t decided whether or not to attend the Bahrain conference later this month where Jared Kushner’s Israel-Palestine peace plan will start to be unveiled. Previously the Trump administration had said that Jordan would attend, alongside Egypt, Morocco, and the Gulf states. But Palestinian leaders have been urging Arab governments not to attend, and Jordan is more sensitive to Palestinian pressure than other Arab states.
EGYPT
Six Egyptian police officers were wounded on Thursday when their car was struck by a roadside bomb outside of the city of Arish in northern Sinai.
GULF OF OMAN
Two more tankers were struck by someone with something in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, fairly near the area where four other tankers were similarly attacked last month. CNN is running a live file on the story that actually seems to be relatively non-war mongering (I know, I’m stunned as well), so if you want to really stay on top of this story that might be a decent option.
The vessels were the Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous, carrying methanol, and the Norwegian-owned Front Altair, carrying naphtha. I am no chemist but I would imagine the latter would be in more danger and indeed there have been reports that it sank, though its owners have denied them. The Kokuka Courageous seems to be OK. Both ships’ crews were evacuated, though there appears to be some dispute over whether they were rescued by the Iranian navy or the US navy, or both. There also seems to be some dispute over how the ships were attacked. Early reports about torpedos were probably inaccurate, and they may well have been struck by limpet mines as appears to have been the case with those four ships last month. In fact there are now reports that something looking very much like a limpet mine has been observed attached to the hull (they’re magnetic) of one of the stricken ships.
This attack is absolutely going to push everybody closer to war, though how much closer is an open question. Any act that looks like it’s threatening oil and oil products shipments through the Strait of Hormuz is inevitably going to put things on a knife’s edge, that’s just how the global economy works, and now we’ve had two such acts in about a month. The initial reaction is pretty much what you’d expect: Iran is denying any involvement and calling the attack “suspicious,” the US has already determined (obviously without investigating) that Iran was responsible, as has Saudi Arabia, and Russia is trying to chart a middle but Iran-friendly course.
At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, one of two things is true here: either the Iranians did it or they didn’t:
“This is a way station to a wider conflict breaking out between Iran and the United States,” said Ali Vaez, senior Iran analyst and Iran project director for the International Crisis Group.
“If Iran was behind it, it is very clear the maximum pressure policy of the Trump administration is rendering Iran more aggressive, not less,” he said. “If Iran was not behind it, then it’s clear some other actor in the region could be trying to engineer a Gulf of Tonkin incident. Spoilers might be concerned the mediators are succeeding in reducing tension and be trying to put them back onto a collision course.” (The original Gulf of Tonkin incident took place off the coast of North Vietnam in August 1964 and led to greater U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.)
Actually there are multiple variations on those two alternatives, involving rogue IRGC commanders, political power struggles within Iran, various Iranian allies deciding to take matters into their own hands, and so on. But the Trump administration won’t permit that kind of nuance in its deliberations, because nuance doesn’t help build the case for war and people like John Bolton and Mike Pompeo are still very much trying to build that case. They’ve even started blaming Iran for attacks carried out by the Taliban in Afghanistan, which is absurd but a clear attempt to bring a hypothetical war with Iran under the 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force to get around a potential congressional vote.
Of those two alternatives, the likelier is one of the scenarios that the Trump administration will categorize as “Iran did it.” These attacks are threatening shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the Iranians have openly talked about shutting the strait down if their oil exports were ever cut off, which the Trump administration is trying to do. Reliable Pentagon stenographer Barbara Starr says the US has “imagery” of the Iranians removing an unexploded mine from the hull of the Kokuka Courageous, which if (and I stress if) true would certainly be an interesting piece of evidence, albeit a circumstantial one.
But it is undeniably true that Iran has gained nothing from either of these strikes and has put itself at greater risk of a conflict with the US that only the most terrifyingly hardline Iranian officials could possibly want. It especially doesn’t gain anything from attacking a Japanese ship with the Japanese prime minister in Tehran (meeting with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, no less—see below) trying to engage in some diplomacy. A rogue element within Iran or tied to Iran is possible. That said, so is a scenario in which one of the countries that would appreciate a US-Iran war is trying to cause one. But none of those states—not Israel, not Saudi Arabia, not the UAE—jumped on last month’s attack to make the case for war, the way you’d expect had they pulled off a “false flag” operation. There are non-state actors that would love to see a US-Iran war, but if any of them have the capability to lay mines in the Gulf of Oman I don’t think anybody is aware of it.
The safest thing to say here is that we simply don’t know enough to make a determination as to the perpetrator. What we do know is that even if this attack was carried out by Iran, or some rogue element connected to Iran, it’s not happening in a vacuum. If these are Iranian attacks they’re a response to the economic violence the Trump administration has already inflicted on Iran, and they’re a clear sign that the “maximum pressure campaign” has only made the Middle East less, not more, stable. Of course, maybe that’s been its purpose.
SAUDI ARABIA
Obviously there are bigger fish to fry, so to speak, in the Gulf today, but even so let’s check in with Mohammad bin Salman’s war against extremism:
When Mohammed bin Salman became Saudi Arabia’s crown prince this month two years ago, he announced an aggressive crackdown against extremist clerics, pledging to return the kingdom to the “moderate Islam” he said was hijacked by hard-liners in 1979. “We will not waste another 30 years of our lives dealing with extremist ideas,” he told a forum later that year. “We will destroy them today.”
Over the past two years, however, the majority of the clerics that the crown prince has targeted have been anything but extreme. Many of those whom Mohammed bin Salman has sent to languish in prison have long records of advocating the type of reform and religious moderation he purports to support. Meanwhile, religious hard-liners and known critics of his supposed reform plan continue their work in Saudi Arabia unimpeded.
In September 2017, dozens of clerics, along with other journalists and academics, were arrested by Saudi security forces. Over the next year, according to an Arab official close to the Saudi government, 5,000 other clerics were quietly summoned and forced to give pledges that they would not criticize the government. Contrary to how the crown prince framed his crackdown in the West, the campaign did not target extremist views. Instead, the government is simply going after those who could challenge his policies and potentially mobilize the masses against his rule.
Well, at least we can’t say this comes as a surprise.
IRAN
As I mentioned above, Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō held his second day of meetings with Iranian officials in Tehran on Thursday. In this case, he sat down with Khamenei, who assured him both that Iran has no designs on nuclear weapons and that no Iranian official will be sitting down for a chat with Donald Trump anytime soon. Which is, apparently, fine with Trump:
The beatings will continue until morale improves.
ASIA
AFGHANISTAN
A suicide bomber killed at least nine people (five civilians) and wounded 12 more in Jalalabad on Thursday. No group has claimed responsibility but ISIS is particularly active in that city. Elsewhere, details are emerging about a clash between US and Afghan forces in Kunduz province on Tuesday in which at least six Afghan soldiers were killed. It seems to have been a case of mistaken identity, in which a joint US-Afghan patrol came under heavy fire from another Afghan unit and called in airstrikes. Whether there was any Taliban involvement at all seems to be an open question. The incident has raised suspicions about the US and its recurring friendly fire incidents targeting Afghan forces. There’s no evidence that those incidents are deliberate but if you’re looking at it from the Afghan perspective you can see why some people might start to wonder about that.
CHINA
There were isolated clashes between Hong Kong protesters and police on Thursday, as popular resistance to a bill that would authorize regional leaders to extradite fugitives to mainland China continued for a sixth day. Nothing matched Wednesday’s violence, when protesters shut down government offices and police responded with rubber bullets and tear gas, for which they are now being heavily criticized:
Videos of the protests in which officers appear to be using excessive force circulated widely across social media, and the police action was condemned by pro-democracy activists, human rights groups and opposition lawmakers.
Footage of unarmed protesters fleeing like ants from clouds of tear gas or facing off with riot police officers pointing batons at them was broadcast around the world, an unfamiliar sight in the wealthy Asian financial hub famed for its glitzy skyscrapers.
Even a number of former senior officials joined in criticizing the police actions, as well as the bill. Joseph Wong, a former civil service secretary, told a local broadcaster that Mrs. Lam’s decision to push ahead with the [extradition] measure despite such strong opposition was “nothing short of a dictator’s act,” and called for an independent review of the police’s use of force.
Estimates of Thursday’s crowd size topped out at around 1000, considerably fewer than in previous days. Protest leaders seem to be taking a pause while they wait for the regional legislature to take up debate on the bill again—the legislative session scheduled for Wednesday was canceled amid the violence.
Elsewhere, Chinese officials on Thursday renewed their invitation for United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet to visit Xinjiang so they could prove to her, I guess, that they’re not herding Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities into reeducation camps. Bachelet wants to conduct an investigation into reports of mass detentions in Xinjiang and I’m not sure the official tour would suffice.
Not to worry though, because the UN is sending an official to the region—Vladimir Ivanovich Voronkov, the head of its counterterrorism office. The UN is only saying that Voronkov will visit China, which is the only one of the five permanent Security Council states he hasn’t visited, and that seems reasonable enough. But if the UN counterterrorism chief really does visit Xinjiang it will be an inexplicable PR gift to Beijing that ratifies its contention that the Uyghurs pose a radicalization threat and must be treated in that light.
AFRICA
SUDAN
Sudan’s ruling junta said on Thursday that it’s arrested several people in connection with the violent crackdown against civilian protesters in Khartoum earlier this month and also with a number of “coups” that have been attempted against its Transitional Military Council. It’s unclear how many people it’s arrested over these things. US Assistant Secretary of State for Africa Tibor Nagy visited Khartoum on Thursday and met with the junta’s nominal leader, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and reportedly stressed the need for a peaceful resolution to the country’s political crisis. Also on Thursday, the junta announced that it’s bringing former president Omar al-Bashir to trial over corruption charges. Bashir hasn’t really been seen since he was ousted back in April, but this move probably diminishes the chances that the junta will pack him off to The Hague to face war crimes charges over Darfur.
Speaking of Darfur, the United Nations-African Union Mission there says that 17 people were killed and over 100 houses burned in an attack by Janjaweed militia fighters on a village called Deleij earlier this week. The incident apparently grew out of an argument between militia members, who are predominantly drawn from nomadic Arab tribes, and residents in the village market. The Janjaweed have committed some of the worst atrocities of the Darfur genocide. Many of its fighters were incorporated into the Sudanese military’s Rapid Support Forces, which has been behind much of the recent bloodshed in Khartoum and Omdurman. Others have remained with the militia and operate to some degree outside of government control.
LIBYA
The president of the legislature in Tobruk that oversees/is subordinate to Libyan warlord Khalifa Haftar, Aguila Saleh Issa, rejected the idea of peace talks with the Government of National Accord in Tripoli on Thursday. Saleh told Reuters, effectively, that there is no political solution to Libya’s civil war and that the fighting will only end once Haftar’s “Libyan National Army” has captured Tripoli. Which seems like it could take a while.
ALGERIA
Algerian officials on Thursday arrested yet another former prime minister, Abdelmalek Sellal, over corruption charges. He joins fellow ex-PM Ahmed Ouyahia, who got tossed in the pokey on Wednesday for the same thing. It’s all part of a very showy anti-corruption crusade that’s supposed to mollify protesters while allowing the core of Algeria’s ruling elite to continue running the country at pretty much the same level of corruption.
NIGERIA
Militants, likely ISIS-West Africa though it wasn’t immediately clear, reportedly captured a Nigerian military base near the village of Kareto in northern Borno state on Wednesday. No casualty figures have been released but they reportedly killed at least the base commander before withdrawing.
EUROPE
RUSSIA
The US is intensifying its accusations about alleged Russian nuclear tests:
The new statement from the Defense Intelligence Agency amounted to a more direct accusation against Russia, compared to hedged comments about Russian nuclear testing that DIA Director Lt. Gen. Robert P. Ashley Jr. made in a speech in Washington in late May.
“The U.S. Government, including the Intelligence Community, has assessed that Russia has conducted nuclear weapons tests that have created nuclear yield,” the DIA statement released Thursday said. The agency didn’t give any details about the alleged tests or release any evidence backing the accusation.
Previously, the agency’s director said that Russia “probably” was not adhering to the “zero-yield” standard the United States applies for nuclear testing. He suggested that Russia was likely conducting tests with explosions above a subcritical yield as part of its development of a suite of more sophisticated nuclear weapons.
The lack of evidence is the key to this story. US officials have been accusing Russia of conducting illicit nuclear tests for years now, mostly because they’d like the US to start conducting nuclear tests again and they’re trying to find an excuse.
UNITED KINGDOM
Boris Johnson unsurprisingly won the first round of intra-party voting, among Tory MPs, to replace Theresa May on Thursday. Johnson took 114 of 313 votes cast, with Jeremy Hunt in second place all the way back at 43. Three candidates—Mark Harper, Andrea Leadsom, and Esther McVey—were knocked out in the vote, and a fourth—Matt Hancock—is reportedly thinking about withdrawing. That Johnson would win this first round was really never in question. What is in question is how much support he can win among Tories who aren’t already supporting him. There will be three votes next week to whittle the number of candidates down to two. At that point the entire Conservative Party membership will be able to pick between them, whoever they are.
AMERICAS
UNITED STATES
Finally, there are signs of a personnel exodus within Donald Trump’s Defense Department that is beginning to rival the one that occurred in his State Department earlier in his administration:
Guy Roberts, the U.S. Defense Department’s top civilian in charge of nuclear, chemical, and biological defense programs, quietly stepped down in April for reasons that remain murky, one of the latest in a series of high-profile exits from the Pentagon over the past six months.
The news of Roberts’s resignation comes on the heels of a report that Owen West, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, is also leaving his post, to spend more time with his family. The departures leave yet another hole in the Pentagon’s senior leadership, as acting U.S. Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan still waits for President Donald Trump to formally submit his nomination for the permanent job to the Senate. The Pentagon has now been without a permanent leader for nearly six months.
Robert Daigle, the director of the Department of Defense’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, stepped down in May. Earlier departures in recent months included Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson; Phyllis Bayer, the Navy civilian in charge of energy, environment, and installations, including basing and housing; chief spokesperson Dana White; and Defense Secretary James Mattis himself, to name a few.