This is an emerging story that is worth watching very closely. The first two articles below come from Joel Rosenberg:
For months now, Jordan’s King Abdullah II has been urgently warning Western leaders in blunt and stark language that the tidal wave of Syrian refugees into his country and the barbaric violence of the Islamic State poses a clear and present danger to his kingdom. He needs significantly more military and financial assistance than he is currently getting, and he needs it quickly.
ISIS is engaged in “a third world war” against the West and moderate Sunni Arab governments like his own, says the 54 year old monarch.
Jordan has reached “the boiling point,” he adds. “Jordanians are suffering….and sooner or later I think the dam is going to burst.”
“We need the rest of the world to work with us,” the King insists. “This is why I say it [must be] Muslims, Christians, Jews, other religions, all of us fighting this global fight together. It is a war inside of Islam, it is our civil war, but we cannot do it by ourselves.”
The King has taken his message to U.S. and European reporters, news anchors and conferences of world leaders. So far, he hasn’t seen much response. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
Jordan has welcomed in more than 1.3 million Syrian refugees. Its spending a quarter of its annual budget on people who aren’t Jordanian citizens. They are at the breaking point. Yet last year, the international community provided only about 35% of the financial aid they had promised to the Hashemite Kingdom. What’s more, thus far the U.S. and international military effort against ISIS has been half-hearted. Today, the influence of ISIS is steadily growing. Its leaders are emboldened. And they are looking to hit new targets, like Jordan.
In the most-sweeping anti-terrorist operation inside Jordan’s borders in years, government security forces have uncovered, attacked and destroyed an ISIS cell in the northern city of Irbid. The evidence strongly suggests the cell was planning major terrorists attacks against government and civilian targets to destabilize the kingdom.
Jordanian intelligence operatives were reportedly watching the cell for the past two weeks. Officials ordered a preemptive strike on the jihadists late Tuesday night before the cell could carry out its plans.
It was another reminder that ISIS leaders are, in fact, plotting to attack Jordan and overthrow King Abdullah II
Reports indicate the ISIS fighters put up fierce resistance when cornered. “The terrorists refused to surrender and put up strong resistance using automatic weapons,”a spokesman for the General Intelligence Directorate told the BBC, adding “those killed were wearing explosive belts.”
The BBC also reported that “weapons, ammunition, explosives and detonators were also found at the scene.”
The battle in Irbid — which is close to the Syrian border and about 50 miles north of the capital city of Amman — reportedly lasted eleven hours.
Giant refugee camps have sprung up along the Greek border with Macedonia and up to 11,000 migrants have become stuck at the Idomeni border crossing – a bottleneck on the ‘Balkan refugee route’, through which thousands of asylum seekers try to reach Europe.
Some two weeks ago the camp had not even been there – it started blossoming after Macedonian authorities tightened immigration restrictions on February 23, banning Afghans from passing through the country’s borders, following a similar move by Serbian authorities. But with some 30,000 refugees and other migrants stranded in Greece at the moment, the flow of asylum seekers heading for Idomeni has been growing daily. Just on Wednesday, up to 2,500 refugees, tired from days on foot, joined those already stuck at the camp.
On Monday, Macedonian officials temporarily closed the border for all, a move that resulted in heavy clashes between the disgruntled asylum seekers and police, who used batons and fired tear gas to disperse the angry mob that stormed the border, ramming down a metal gate. Macedonian police say they’ve deployed additional troops to prevent further clashes, with two rows of barbed-wire fencing to hold the migrants back set up earlier in the week. The country’s authorities have been defensive of such stance. “Our daily admittance of migrants will depend on how many will be accepted in EU countries,” Interior Minister Oliver Spasovski, told reporters in Skopje on Wednesday, as Reuters reported.
While waiting for a chance to move forward, most of the migrants live in tents, many of them makeshift. “There are 11,000 people here and conditions are very bad,” Antonis Rigas from charity Medicins Sans Frontieres told Reuters. New arrivals face other difficulties as well – from finding ways to cook food for themselves to getting their hands on power sources for their mobile phones.
Greek aid workers and volunteers try to keep everything in order, but say the two official camps in Idomeni are so full that if the numbers exceed 12,000 many worry the situation might get out of hand.
Meanwhile the same day, Greece conceded it was making preparations to help as many as 150,000 migrants stranded while the border remains closed. “In my opinion, we have to consider the border closed,” Greek Migration Minister Ioannis Mouzalas noted. “And for as long as the border crossing is closed, and until the European relocation and resettlement system is up and running, these people will stay in our country for some time.”
Aleksei Pushkov, the Russian State Duma Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman, told Austria’s Presse newspaper that he thinks “the world order” is being decided in Syria.
Pushkov also told the newspaper that the war in the Syria was “not just a local conflict” and that “the U.S. knows they will lose the image of an unavoidable nation if they experience failure in Syria. He added that U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry has been aware of this for months now.
Pushkov described his country as being one of the three world powers of the globe today, placing Russia on par with the United States and China. The Russian official stated that his definition of a ‘world power’ was a nation “which can make decisions at the global level independently” and stressed that Russia, as a world power, intervened in Syria “taking responsibility for the situation in the world.”
Pushkov also stated that he believes the EU is dependent on the U.S. Financially and militarily.
In regard to Russia’s goal in Syria, Pushkov said that his nation will not send ground forces and but will support the Syrian army and all those who fight against IS [ISIS].
“We support Bashar al-Assad because he is still the legitimate president of Syria, and with the exception of the Kurds, the only force in that country which is on the ground, fighting against Islamic State [IS/ISIS].”
Pushkov denied any assertion that Russia was using the Syrian conflict to “teach the West a lesson.”
He did say however that Russia saw no reason to abstain from the conflict, noting that the U.S. had already enjoyed a 20 year monopoly over the region, where instead of solving the problems of the Middle East they have destroyed the area.
Pushkov refereed to this paradox created by the U.S. as a catastrophe rather than a power vacuum.
“Western analysts use the term vacuum, but it’s merely a polite way of saying that Americans experienced a complete failure. Libya, Iraq, Syria, Yemen – the U.S. achieved nothing except chaos,” Pushkov said.
Pushkov said that Russia was responsible for the security of its allies in Central Asia – Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan.
“That is our vulnerable front yard, which is threatened by Islamic State. It is time for someone to restore order in the Middle East,” he added.
According to him, the order in Syria was destroyed “by someone else.” He also reminded that the U.S. wants to overthrow Assad.
“When U.S. President Barack Obama in 2012 realized that the coup against Assad which he prepared would not work, he started, along with Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia, to support radical Islamist groups. We intervened in Syria when the targeted solution of the U.S. did not work. Syria needs a political solution,” said Pushkov.
He pointed out that Assad is supported by a large part of the Syrian population, and that a political solution cannot be based on overthrowing him, but on negotiations between the government and opposition.
Pushkov believes it was only Russia’s military action in Syria that reestablished the balance and enabled a political solution. Without Russia, he is convinced, there would be no ceasefire in Syria now – “no negotiations, while Islamic State and Al Nusra would be partitioning Damascus between them today.”
“The weakening or destruction of Islamic State brings greater security to Russia, but if this terrorist organization is strengthened that is a greater danger to Russia,” he warned.
No comments:
Post a Comment