In Ukraine, a day of mourning shows nation divided

Few events illustrate more clearly the bitter chasm that has opened up between east Ukraine and the rest of the country of 45 million. Heroes to some, the 49 killed when a missile hit their plane on Saturday were enemies to others.

"I feel desperate, like it's a betrayal. I don't know what I can do to help," Volodymyr Radchenko, an engineer in his fifties, said on the Maidan, cradle of an uprising which ousted Ukraine's Moscow-backed president in February.

Nearby, an Orthodox priest led prayers on a stage, flanked by men in black masks and camouflage fatigues.

Radchenko's depressed mood and sense of helplessness are shared by many in Kiev, whose euphoria over Viktor Yanukovich's overthrow as president has given way to dismay as Russia annexed Crimea in March and separatists rose up in the east in April.

"I'm very worried," said choreographer Iryna Zhadan, starting to weep. "I cry and pray a lot for the dead soldiers."

WORRIES ABOUT THE FUTURE

More than 100 protesters were killed in clashes on and around the Maidan before their hate figure, Yanukovich, fell. Makeshift shrines have been erected around the square and some protesters are still camping out on its edges, worried about the fragile peace and the direction the country is taking.

Ukraine now has a pro-European leadership and a new president, Petro Poroshenko, who has intensified a military campaign in the east since being elected on May 25 but has also launched tentative peace talks with a Russian envoy.

He has promised a tough response to the shooting down of the plane which some say is needed to crush the separatists but others fear could lead to all-out war with rebels armed with tanks which Kiev and Washington say come from Russia.

Ukraine now has a pro-European leadership and a new president, Petro Poroshenko, who has intensified a military campaign in the east since being elected on May 25 but has also launched tentative peace talks with a Russian envoy.

He has promised a tough response to the shooting down of the plane which some say is needed to crush the separatists but others fear could lead to all-out war with rebels armed with tanks which Kiev and Washington say come from Russia.

Moscow denies backing the rebels. Facing the possibility of further Western sanctions, it disavows any plan for a military invasion to absorb mainly Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine.

But some Ukrainians still fear Russia and the West could fight a proxy war in Ukraine and would rather let the rebellious regions of Donetsk and Luhansk go than face such a conflict.

The downing of the military plane as it came in to land at the airport outside Luhansk killed more government servicemen than any other incident since the conflict began.

It has increased tension as Moscow and Kiev try to agree how much Ukraine should pay for Russian gas before a Monday deadline for Kiev to pay $1.95 billion in debts or have its gas cut off, that could disrupt flows to the rest of Europe.

It also fuelled a violent protest at the Russian embassy in Kiev and a diplomatic spat over insulting comments by Ukraine's foreign minister about President Vladimir Putin.

Source: Reuters

Colombia's Santos wins re-election, to push on with peace talks

Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos won a second term on Sunday with an election victory that allows him to continue peace talks with Marxist guerrillas to end a half-century war.

Santos beat right-wing challenger Oscar Ivan Zuluaga with about 50.9 percent support in a runoff vote after a bitter campaign that forced voters to choose between the incumbent's pursuit of negotiated peace or a likely escalation of combat under his rival.

Zuluaga won 45 percent support and conceded defeat on Sunday evening. (For more on the vote, see (Full Story))

At Santos' campaign headquarters in Bogota, supporters danced, waved flags and chanted "Colombia wants peace" as music blared.

"These were different elections, what was at play wasn't a candidate's name, it was the direction the nation will take."," Santos said, wearing a trademark pin of a white dove on his lapel as he proclaimed victory surrounded by family.

"If people mobilized for me it's because they know that history has its moments and this is the time for peace, the time to end this long and cruel conflict."

Source: Reuters

Asian shares slump, oil firms as market eyes Iraq

   Tokyo Monday 6,June 2014.
"Asian shares fell on Moday, as crude extend gains and tested nine-months highs on fears the insurgency in Iraq could worsen and affect exports.

Sunni insurgents seized a mainly ethnic Turkmen city in northwestern Iraq on Sunday, while the United States boosted security for its diplomatic staff in Baghdad said some staff had evacuated the embassy.

Brent LCOc1 rose about 0.6 percent to $113.20 per barrel, after touching $114.69 on Friday, its highest since September. Brent added more than $4 last week. U.S. crude CLc1 rose about 0.5 percent to $107.43, approaching Friday's nine-month high of $107.68.

On Wall Street on Friday, stocks edged higher, but ended with modest losses for the week.

MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan .MIAPJ0000PUS was slightly lower in early trade, moving away from a three-year high hit a week ago.

Japan's Nikkei stock average .N225 dipped 0.4 percent, as the yen crept slightly higher, getting a safe-haven lift from investors' rising risk aversion.

The dollar JPY slipped about 0.1 percent to 101.95 yen, moving back toward a two-week low of 101.60 yen marked on Thursday. The euro edged slightly lower to buy 137.99 yenEURJPY=R.

Against the greenback, the euro EUR= was steady on the day at $1.3534.

Investors will be focusing on the U.S. Federal Reserve this week, which will conclude a policy meeting on Wednesday. Markets will be watching for any signals on when the U.S. central bank might begin hiking interest rates.

"We expect the Fed to taper asset purchases by a further $10 billion per month and participant projections for growth and unemployment to be revised lower, while inflation is likely to be revised modestly higher," Barclays strategists said.

"As a result, the risk is again tilted toward the Fed's dots conveying a slightly more aggressive path of the hiking cycle," they said, which is likely to provide support for the dollar.

Other data in focus this week is China's latest report on foreign direct investment on Tuesday, and then house price figures on Wednesday".

Source: Reuters

Jihadis Recruitment Drive in Riyadh Revives Biggest Saudi Threat

The evidence showed up last month in Riyadh, where drivers woke up to find leaflets stuffed into the handles of their car doors and in their windshields. They were promoting the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, which has grabbed the world’s attention by seizing parts of northern Iraq. The militant group is also using social media, such as Twitter and YouTube, to recruit young Saudi men.

Already at war with the governments of Iraq and Syria, ISIL also poses a potential threat to the Al Saud family’s rule over the world’s biggest oil exporter. Saudi authorities gained the upper hand in their battle with al-Qaeda, which targeted the kingdom a decade ago, yet analysts said the latest generation of militants may be harder to crush.

ISIL, known as Da’esh in Arabic, has “territorial ambitions and is far more difficult to deal with than al-Qaeda,” Mustafa Alani, an analyst at the Geneva-based Gulf Research Center, said in a telephone interview. “These people are able to hold ground, they have army-like units, and they conduct terrorist attacks.”

In the past, the Saudi oil industry was an al-Qaeda target. The group’s followers, including Saudi veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq who returned to the kingdom, attacked Abqaiq, the world’s largest oil processing plant in the Eastern Province, with car-bombs in 2006.

There are concerns that conflicts in Syria and Iraq will play a similar role to those earlier wars, pulling fighters from different Arab and European countries.

Al-Qaeda’s offshoots such as ISIL are increasingly taking the initiative in the war against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. In Iraq, they control a swathe of territory, and Saudi authorities are on guard against local cells. Saudi Arabia conducted large military exercises along its northern border in April, in a show of force against possible threats.

“The Saudi leadership is seen by many extremist groups, even those groups that Saudis financially support, as corrupt,” said Paul Sullivan, a Middle East specialist at Georgetown University in Washington.

Saudi Arabia is backing the mainly Sunni rebels fighting Assad in Syria, though there is no evidence that authorities are funding ISIL.

ISIL’s printed literature also accused Western nations of using the war on “terror” to assault the Muslim world, a message that may ring true with some Saudis, who are suspicious of the U.S. role in the Middle East.

In the western Saudi city of Taif, a video posted on Youtube showed militant slogans spray-painted on government buildings.

Major General Mansour al-Turki, the Ministry’s of Interior spokesman, said police monitor young Saudis who engage in activities such as spraying graffiti, or filming themselves carrying the banners of radical groups, “in response to requests posted on terrorism-related accounts” on social media. He said several are being questioned by authorities.

There’s a potential audience of sympathizers in Saudi Arabia. Earlier this year, a group of veiled Saudi women posted a video on YouTube calling upon ISIL’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, to topple Al Saud because of “their un-Islamic and unjust reign.” The authenticity of the video couldn’t be independently verified.

The language in the leaflet, and on the video, is reminiscent of Osama Bin Laden, who also urged the overthrow of the Saudi rulers. By taking control of a swathe of territory across northern Iraq and Syria, Al-Baghdadi’s fighters have achieved gains that al-Qaeda never managed. The U.S. has dispatched an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf as President Barack Obama weighs options to halt the group’s advance in Iraq,

“Its members are more brutal in their killings,” Abdulsalam Mohammed, head of the Abaad Studies and Research Center in Sana’a and a specialist in Islamic movements, said in a phone interview. “They have a greater tendency to exploit and promote sectarian division. But they’re also willing to target Sunni groups.”

Source: Bloomberg

WSJ: Iraq radical Sunni Militia Claim Soldier Massacre

              The WSJ reports,"the radical Sunni militia that has plunged Iraq into chaos bragged on Sunday that it had executed hundreds of Shiite Iraqi soldiers", even as the Obama administration said it is preparing to open direct talks with Iran on how the two longtime foes can counter the insurgents.

The U.S.-Iran dialogue, which is expected to begin this week, will mark the latest in a rapid move toward rapprochement between Washington and Tehran over the past year. It also comes as the U.S. and other world powers try to reach an agreement with Iran by late July to curb its nuclear program.

The U.S. and Iran have publicly committed in recent days to provide military support if requested to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and help his government repel an offensive the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, has launched against Baghdad and other major Iraqi cities over the past week.

The U.S. over the weekend repositioned military equipment throughout the region and sent an aircraft carrier to the Persian Gulf as President Barack Obama awaited options for possible military action.

Iraqi officials said on Sunday that ISIS had taken control of Tal Afar in northwest Iraq, where thousands of U.S. and Iraqi forces once fought. The U.S. had hailed the city as a model of its "clear, hold and build" strategy in Iraq.

The possible depth of the ISIS threat became clearer on Sunday when photos were posted on a Twitter  account associated with ISIS claiming to show Sunni militants carrying out a mass execution of captured Iraqi Shiite soldiers, raising the prospect of a broader sectarian war in Iraq.

The photographs, accompanied by captions boasting that as many as 1,700 soldiers had been executed, underscored the mounting sectarian animosity fueling the fighting between Sunni extremists and Mr. Maliki's Shiite-dominated government.

If the claim of carrying out mass executions in Iraq is true, pressure could increase on Shiites to retaliate, raising the prospect of a wave of reprisal killings reminiscent of the bloodshed that convulsed Iraq in the years following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Neither the alleged death toll nor the identity of the purported victims could be verified independently.

But Ahmed Abdullah Al Jibouri, the governor of Salah Al Din province, where the mass atrocity supposedly took place, said that ISIS had captured "hundreds" of Iraqi military personnel and Air Force Academy students and is believed to have executed them.

Mr. Jibouri said that the exact number of dead was unknown, since government officials have been unable to reach the alleged sites of the massacre.

In Washington, State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki said the U.S. couldn't confirm reports of the massacres but called the claim by ISIS "horrifying and a true depiction of the blood lust that these terrorists represent."

U.S. officials said it is imperative for Washington to discuss the security situation in Iraq with Iran and other regional powers in a bid to better coordinate a response against ISIS.

Secretary of State John Kerry communicated Washington's strategy to his Iraqi counterpart, Hoshyar Zebari, in a phone call on Saturday, according to the State Department.

Iranian President Hasan Rouhani said on Saturday that his government was open to cooperating with the U.S. in Iraq and that he exchanged letters with President Obama.

The White House's engagement with Iran on Iraq offers both opportunities and risks, said U.S. defense officials and Arab diplomats.

Iran, a majority Shiite country, has served as Mr. Maliki's closest Mideast ally and has mobilized Tehran's military and religious establishment to support their coreligionists in Iraq in recent days. Iran's elite military unit, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, has an extensive presence inside Iraq, said U.S. officials, and has trained Shiite militias that have joined the Iraqi army in fighting ISIS.

U.S. officials say the IRGC trained many of the largest Shiite militias going back to the Iraq war and maintain contacts. These include the Mahdi Army, Kata'ib Hezbollah, and Asab Ahl al-Haq.

Iran has publicly denied sending forces to fight in Iraq and has said it would give Iran military assistance if Iraq asked.

Even some of Mr. Obama's harshest critics in Washington voiced support on Sunday for coordinating the U.S.'s military response in Iraq with Tehran's. They argued that ISIS poses a much greater near-term threat to the U.S.'s national-security interests than does Iran.

"Why did we deal with Stalin? Because he was not as bad as Hitler," Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said Sunday on CNN. "The Iranians can provide some assets to make sure Baghdad doesn't fall."

A number of U.S. defense officials, however, said Iran has a drastically different vision for Iraq than does the U.S. The Iranian government has also supported Mr. Maliki's policies of marginalizing Iraq's minority Sunni population politically and economically, which has fueled support for the ISIS's military operations in the Sunni regions of Iraq.

Any U.S. military campaign in Iraq that is seen as allied with Iran's and the Shiite majority's risks further polarizing the country, said these officials. It could also alienate Washington's allies in Sunni-dominated countries like Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Jordan.

"This is a case where the enemy of our enemy is still our enemy," said a U.S. defense official who has worked extensively in Iraq. "Any shared interests in Iraq are limited."

U.S. allies in Israel and the Middle East are also concerned that any cooperation between Washington and Tehran on Iraq could complicate the nuclear negotiations.

"Iran and the U.S. are the only two countries with the power to end Iraq's crisis in a peaceful way," tweeted Hamid Aboutalebi, a top political adviser of Mr. Rouhani, on Sunday.

For Iran, the incentive to cooperate with the U.S. on Iraq goes further than just a desire to improve relations with the U.S., many observers say. ISIS is one of the biggest security threats Iran has faced since the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, establishing military bases across the Islamic Republic's borders.

"Iran is definitely willing to cooperate with the U.S. over Iraq because the threat it's facing is one of existential national security," said Saeed Leylaz, a political analyst close to the government, in a phone interview from Tehran.

Iraq arrest that exposed wealth and power of Isis jihadists

Two days before Mosul fell to the Islamic insurgent group Isis (the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant), Iraqi commanders stood eyeballing its most trusted messenger. The man, known within the extremist group as Abu Hajjar, had finally cracked after a fortnight of interrogation and given up the head of Isis's military council.

"He said to us, 'you don't realise what you have done'," an intelligence official recalled. "Then he said: 'Mosul will be an inferno this week'.'

Several hours later, the man he had served as a courier and been attempting to protect, Abdulrahman al-Bilawi, lay dead in his hideout near Mosul. From the home of the dead man and the captive, Iraqi forces hoovered up more than 160 computer flash sticks which contained the most detailed information yet known about the terror group.

The treasure trove included names and noms de guerre of all foreign fighters, senior leaders and their code words, initials of sources inside ministries and full accounts of the group's finances.

"We were all amazed and so were the Americans," a senior intelligence official told the Guardian. "None of us had known most of this information."

Officials, including CIA officers, were still decrypting and analysing the flash sticks when Abu Hajjar's prophecy was realised. Isis swept through much of northern and central Iraq over three stunning days, seizing control of Mosul and Tikrit and threatening Kirkuk as three divisions of the Iraqi army shed their uniforms and fled.

The capitulation of the military and the rapid advances of the insurgents have dramatically changed the balance of power in Iraq, crippled prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, allowed Kurdish forces to seize control of the disputed city of Kirkuk and galvanised a Shia fightback along sectarian lines, posing a serious threat to the region's fragile geopolitics. On Sunday Isis published photographs that appeared to show it capturing and killing dozens of Iraqi soldiers.

"By the end of the week, we soon realised that we had to do some accounting for them," said the official flippantly. "Before Mosul, their total cash and assets were $875m [£515m]. Afterwards, with the money they robbed from banks and the value of the military supplies they looted, they could add another $1.5bn to that."

Laid bare were a series of staggering numbers that would be the pride of any major enterprise, let alone an organisation that was a startup three years ago.

The group's leaders had been meticulously chosen. Many of those who reported to the top tier – all battle-hardened veterans of the insurgency against US forces nearly a decade ago – did not know the names of their colleagues. The strategic acumen of Isis was impressive – so too its attention to detail. "They had itemised everything," the source said. "Down to the smallest detail."

Over the past year, foreign intelligence officials had learned that Isis secured massive cashflows from the oilfields of eastern Syria, which it had commandeered in late 2012, and some of which it had sold back to the Syrian regime. It was also known to have reaped windfalls from smuggling all manner of raw materials pillaged from the crumbling state, as well as priceless antiquities from archaeological digs.

But here before them in extraordinary detail were accounts that would have breezed past forensic accountants, giving a full reckoning of a war effort. It soon became clear that in less than three years, Isis had grown from a ragtag band of extremists to perhaps the most cash-rich and capable terror group in the world.

"They had taken $36m from al-Nabuk alone [an area in the Qalamoun mountains west of Damascus]. The antiquities there are up to 8,000 years old," the intelligence official said. "Before this, the western officials had been asking us where they had gotten some of their money from, $50,000 here, or $20,000 there. It was peanuts. Now they know and we know. They had done this all themselves. There was no state actor at all behind them, which we had long known. They don't need one."

The scale of Isis's resources seems to have prepared it for the improbable. But even by its ruthless standards, occupying two major cities in Iraq in three days, holding on to parts of Falluja and Ramadi, and menacing Kirkuk and Samara, was quite an accomplishment.

Social media postings throughout last week revealed the group's shock at its successes. Some posting showed extremists weeping with joy as dozens of Iraqi army humvess were driven through a sand berm on the border into Syria.

Foreign jihadists, many from Europe, were among those who stormed into Mosul and have spread through central Iraq ever since. Most of their names were already known to the intelligence agencies which had tried to track their movements after they arrived in Turkey, then disappeared, initially across the Syrian border. But noms de guerre given to the new arrivals had left their trails cold. Now officials had details of next of kin, and often phone numbers and emails.

Whether the intelligence haul can do much to reel in Isis after the fact seems a moot point, with the group having already wrought so much carnage in such a short time. "We will eventually find them," said the Iraqi official. "We knew they had infiltrated the ministries and the most frustrating thing about that flash [stick] was it only had initials. We are focusing on the initials that had the annotation 'valuable' next to them."

Other names were clearly of lesser use, he said. They were marked with "lazy", "undecided" or "needs monitoring".

More than ever before is now known about how Isis has gathered steam. The past week has also been an advanced education in its capabilities and ambitions. "Now we have to catch up with them," the official said.

Source: theguardian