DTN News: Pakistan TODAY August 4, 2010 - Assassination Sets Off Wave of Killings In Pakistani City

DTN News: Pakistan TODAY August 4, 2010 - Assassination Sets Off Wave of Killings In Pakistani City

Source: DTN News / The New York Times By Salman Masood

(NSI News Source Info) ISLAMABAD, Pakistan- August 4, 2010: A wave of violence after the assassination of a senior politician on Monday has left at least 47 people dead in Pakistan’s largest city, the southern port of Karachi. The violence erupted after the politician, Raza Haider, a provincial lawmaker and the leader of the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, was shot to death along with his bodyguard. Within hours, mobs spread out across Karachi, setting fire to public and private property, including dozens of vehicles. Business centers were forced to shut down. Normal life has since come to a virtual standstill, and schools and government offices remained closed on Tuesday. President Asif Ali Zardari ordered an immediate inquiry into the assassination, according to the presidential spokesman, Farhatullah Babar. Karachi, a sprawling city of more than 16 million people, has a long history of sectarian and ethnic violence, as well as violent political clashes over the economic spoils and ties to criminal syndicates that come with political control of the city. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or M.Q.M., controls the city government with the support of Urdu speakers who migrated to Pakistan after partition in 1947. The party has been criticized for its strong-arm tactics in the past. Most of those killed since Monday have been ethnic Pashtuns, who have migrated to Karachi in increasing numbers from the north, where the army has opened a series of campaigns against the Pakistani Taliban in recent years. The Taliban are mostly Pashtun, and the influx to Karachi has led to charges by the M.Q.M. and its supporters of a creeping “Talibanization” of the city. In recent months, the M.Q.M. has clashed violently with the Awami National Party, a political party that draws its strength from the Pashtuns in the city and elsewhere. The M.Q.M. says 150 of its workers have been killed in the past three weeks. Local news media have reported that at least 300 people have been the victims of political killings in Karachi this year. Pakistani analysts say the struggle between the parties may be one for spoils. “The current violence could have to do with a battle that is political but could also have to do with the various vested interests that have a stake in the criminalized system that runs Karachi — in terms of say, land, water and revenue generation and apportionment,” said Omar R. Quraishi, editor of the editorial pages of The Express Tribune, an English-language newspaper in Karachi. Nasreen Jalil, a senior leader of the M.Q.M. and a former deputy mayor of the city, blamed leadership of the Awami National Party in Karachi for supporting the Taliban and other militants working with drug traffickers and land-grabbing gangs operating in the city. “We have pointed out several times that Taliban are present in Karachi,” Ms. Jalil said in an interview. “They are residing in Pashtun localities, most of which are illegally occupied by land mafia,” she said. “Many Pashtuns are involved in drug trade, selling arms and ammunitions. Whenever there is an anti-encroachment drive, killings increase in the city in retaliation.” Leaders of the Awami National Party deny the allegations. Ms. Jalil also blamed some elements of President Zardari’s Pakistan Peoples Party for supporting criminal gangs in the city. Rehman Malik, the country’s interior minister, on Tuesday blamed Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, a banned militant group, which is involved in a series of terrorist attacks against Shiites and other minorities, for the assassination that set off the violence. Responding to the interior minister’s claims, Ms. Jalil said that Islamic militants had joined hands with the local A.N.P. leadership. “It is syndicate,” she said. “A council of criminal elements.” Pakistan Related News;

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DTN News: Turkish Funds Helped Group of Activists To Test Blockade

DTN News: Turkish Funds Helped Group of Activists To Test Blockade

Source: DTN News / By SABRINA TAVERNISE and MICHAEL SLACKMAN NY Times

(NSI News Source Info) ISTANBUL, Turkey - June 2, 2010: Since 2007, a small group of hard-core activists has repeatedly tried to sail cargo-laden ships into Gaza in an effort to thwart Israel’s blockade. But when the Free Gaza Movement teamed up with a much wealthier Turkish organization to assemble a flotilla, it became more than a nuisance, supercharged by the group’s money, manpower and symbolic resonance into what Israel sees as a serious and growing threat. After a botched raid that killed nine activists, an international uproar is intensifying pressure on Israel’s blockade. And the movement has hit on a strategy that, even when it fails in its aims, succeeds in tactical terms: the world sees Israel use military force against civilians. On Tuesday in a bustling neighborhood in Istanbul, the Turkish organization was celebrating a strange success. “We became famous,” said Omar Faruk, a board member of the group, Insani Yardim Vakfi, known by its Turkish initials, I.H.H. “We are very thankful to the Israeli authorities.” The group brought large boats and millions of dollars in donations to a cause that had struggled to meet its objectives. Particularly galling to Israel is the fact that the group comes from Turkey, an ally, but one whose relations with Israel have become increasingly strained. Israeli authorities say I.H.H. bolsters Hamas, which runs Gaza and which they see as doctrinally committed to destroying the state of Israel. It also charges that the group has links to Al Qaeda and has bought weapons, charges the group denies. The organization is financed entirely by donations, its members said, money that comes from Turkey’s religious merchant class, an affluent section of Turkish society that has brought the party of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to power. Inside the group’s tidy three-story office building in central Istanbul on Tuesday, women in colorful scarves brought money and were given receipts. The group bought three boats, including the Mavi Marmara, the one that was raided, from a company owned by the Istanbul city government for $1.8 million. The boats carried aid that included building materials — cement, tiles and steel, which Israel bans because it says they could be put to military means — worth about $10 million, members said. Mr. Faruk argues that his organization was crucial in helping to project Free Gaza’s cause. “We changed the balance,” he said. The Turkish group is a charity, members said, but the Israeli government’s public relations firm, the Israel Project, sent an Internet link to journalists with references to what it described as the group’s “radical Islamic, anti-Western orientation.” The link alleges that the group supports Hamas, in part through a branch it opened in the Gaza Strip, the charity it sends them and in meetings and speeches by Bulent Yildirim, its leader, and Hamas officials. Israeli authorities said the group had been raided in 1997 by Turkish authorities, who turned up weapons in one of their offices. Ali Adakoglu, another board member, said there had been a raid on the house of a member in 1997, but he argued that it was politically motivated, because that was the year of a Turkish military crackdown on Islamist groups. They denied that weapons had been found. “This is an Islamist charity, quite fundamentalist, quite close to Hamas,” said Henri J. Barkey, a professor of international relations at Lehigh University. “They say they do charity work, but they’ve been accused of gunrunning and other things, and their rhetoric has been inflammatory against Israel and sometimes against Jews.” The organization was founded in the early 1990s, first as a charity for the poor in Istanbul, Turkey’s largest city, and later for Bosnian war victims. It now runs charity and relief work in more than 100 countries, including Haiti and nations in Africa, according to the deputy director, Yavuz Dede. The Free Gaza Movement was formed in September 2006 by a group of passionate Palestinian supporters, most of whom had been barred from ever returning to Israel. The group says it receives most of its money in donations. “We asked ourselves, what can we do to make a difference?” said Greta Berlin, the group’s 69-year-old co-founder and spokeswoman. “We said, ‘Let’s sail a boat to Gaza.’ That was literally how it started.” At first, no one seemed to care much. Five times the Free Gaza Movement sailed from Cyprus, where they are based, to Gaza. Israel ultimately came to believe that a threat was evolving, fearing that ships coming into port could transport weapons. Israeli officials said they feared the prospect of Hamas being as powerfully armed as Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. The Free Gaza Movement has its roots in the International Solidarity Movement, another organization that sought to take direct action in defense of Palestinians, using nonviolent strategies to impede Israeli military actions in the occupied territories. Members would often act as human shields. In 2003, an Israeli Army bulldozer crushed to death an American woman, Rachel Corrie, who had kneeled in the dirt to prevent it from destroying a Palestinian home. It took the members two years to raise money necessary to buy the first two fishing boats, maintain and fuel them, Ms. Berlin said. But after that first landing, she said, the group quickly received enough donations to buy a small yacht, which they named Dignity. With the new boat, four more times Israel let the group dock at Gaza.

On the sixth attempt to land in Gaza, Israel decided that was enough. The shift came after Israel invaded Gaza in December 2008, saying it needed to retaliate after thousands of rockets had been fired into civilian neighborhoods. They loaded the boat with activists and headed to Gaza. It was dark and Ms. Berlin said that an Israeli ship rammed the boat three times, until it retreated to Lebanon. That ship eventually sank when it returned to port in Cyprus. The group raised more money and managed to buy a small ferry that could hold 30 passengers. This one they called The Spirit of Humanity. They tried three more times, with no success. On their last try, in July 2009, she said, Israel boarded the boat and detained the passengers. Israel never returned the ship, she said. “We were pretty dismayed because we had no boats and no money,” Ms. Berlin said. She said that former Malaysia officials and the Perdana Global Peace Organization, which describes itself on its Web site as opposed to war, helped them raise enough to buy two yachts and a cargo ship. Then they decided to team up with other groups to stage a multiship flotilla. The movement has grown into a diverse coalition of organizations and activists, often with little in common apart from opposition to the Israeli blockade of Gaza, making it difficult to generalize about its financing, views or radical connections, according to several analysts. Evan F. Kohlmann, a veteran terrorism analyst with Flashpoint Global Partners in New York, said American diplomats and politicians, Holocaust survivors and leftist writers all have offered their names, time or money to the cause, ignoring or oblivious to the role of others with more militant connections, he said. Ms. Berlin, the outspoken co-founder, is originally from Los Angeles. She was married for 14 years to a Palestinian, with whom she had two children, and for 14 years to an American Jew. She likes to joke and says that makes her the most qualified “anti-Semite.” But when she is not joking she says that her detractors in Israel are right, that she is not just pro-Palestinian, but does not accept Israel as a Jewish state, though she contends that is part of a larger philosophy that opposes all national borders. “You decide in your life what you are passionate about,” she said. “I happen to be passionate about the Palestinians who have had no rights since 1948.”

*Sabrina Tavernise reported from Istanbul, and Michael Slackman from Jerusalem. Scott Shane contributed reporting from Washington, and Sebnem Arsu from Istanbul.

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*Israel Faces Pressure on Gaza After Raid (June 2, 2010)

*After Israel Raids Flotilla, U.S. Is Torn Between Allies (June 2, 2010)

*Rethinking the Gaza Blockade Is there a way to prevent attacks against Israel while providing humanitarian relief to the Palestinians?

DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY May 19, 2010 ~ Taliban Attack American Base Outside Kabul

DTN News: Afghanistan TODAY May 19, 2010 ~ Taliban Attack American Base Outside Kabul

Source: DTN News / NYTimes By DEXTER FILKINS

(NSI News Source Info) KABUL, Afghanistan- May 19, 2010: Taliban insurgents launched a brazen assault on the American base at Bagram on Wednesday morning, sparking a large and confusing gun battle that left at least five American soldiers wounded and seven guerrillas dead. Taliban leaders claimed that seven suicide bombers had blown themselves up at the gates of the base, clearing the way for more than 20 other fighters to get inside. The Taliban reports appeared exaggerated, as they often are. But American officials confirmed that the base, one of the largest in Afghanistan, had come under an ambitious and unusual assault. An American official said that the base had come under attack by as many as many as 30 insurgents. Another American spokesman, Col. Wayne Shanks, said that no suicide bombs had exploded and that no insurgents had entered the base. “At no time were Bagram defenses breached,” he said. American officials said that the attack had ended by midmorning. Still, details were sketchy. The main road leading to the base was sealed, and helicopters could be seen flying over the area. Local residents reported hearing gunfire around the base. The Bagram base, located about 50 miles north of Kabul, the capital, is one of the main hubs of the American campaign in Afghanistan. Bagram serves as the headquarters for the military’s efforts in eastern Afghanistan. It is ringed by several layers of defenses. The assault on Bagram comes on the heels of an attack Tuesday by a suicide bomber in Kabul, who rammed an explosives-laden bus into an American convoy, killing 18 people, including five American soldiers and a Canadian officer. That attack — and the one on Bagram on Wednesday — appeared to be part of a larger campaign directed at the capital and its environs. In recent days, the Taliban have smuggled five suicide bombers into the area, an American military official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The back-to-back attacks came as American and Afghan leaders were preparing to launch a major offensive in the city of Kandahar to break the hold of the insurgents in southern Afghanistan.

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