Confronting the Taliban

 

   The Taliban regime, which swept away Afghanistan’s government on August 15, 2021, is far from secure.  It is facing determined resistance from two main sources:  contingents of the fallen Afghan republic, which are recruiting guerrilla fighters from among the hundreds of thousands of Western-trained security forces that served the former government but lost their jobs after the Taliban takeover, and a group calling itself ISIS-K, or sometimes ISKP (Islamic State in Khorasan Province).

In what seems to be an uncoordinated offensive, disaffected elements of the previous Afghan administration are claiming responsibility for attacking the Taliban in many provinces across Afghanistan.  Anti-Taliban groups “are popping up everywhere in Afghanistan,” a former foreign ministry official is reported to have said. “They were just waiting to see how things would go under the Taliban.” The official said former government leaders involved in the resistance are trying to unite behind a vision in ongoing negotiations.

There are also signs that former Afghan Army leaders are trying to rally their troops. Former Lieutenant General Sami Sadat fought some of the most challenging battles against the Taliban last year.  He has said: “The Taliban has left us no choice but to pick up our weapons again to win back our freedom.” Former leaders of the West-backed republic hope the rebellion will eventually turn into a national uprising.

A former official of the Afghan foreign ministry who is close to the emerging resistance is certain of it.  He is reported as saying: “I am sure we will see a much bigger uprising against the Taliban.”

One of the most visible anti-Taliban groups is the National Resistance Front, led by Ahmad Massoud.  

Massoud is the son of the Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud, who prevented the Taliban from overrunning Afghanistan in the mid-1990s, following the Soviet withdrawal, until he was killed by Al-Qaeda assassins two days before 9/11 in 2001. 

Massoud’s close ally is former vice-president Amrullah Saleh, and their supporters have been launching sporadic attacks against the Taliban in remote Panjshir valleys. Regular attacks are launched against the Taliban in Andrab, a high-altitude valley in the northern province of Baghlan, by supporters of former Interior minister, Masud Andrai.   Attacks have also been reported in recent weeks in seven other provinces.

Some reports suggest that supporters of late anti-Taliban police commander Abdul Raziq are ready to join the resistance in Kandahar. Former defense minister Bismillah Khan, ex-General Staff chief Yasin Zia, and militia leader Abdul Ghani Alipur are other notable names in the resistance.

As for ISIS-K, shortly after the Taliban took power in August 2021 its full resurgence was proclaimed to the world by way of the suicide bombing outside Kabul International airport, followed by another at the nearby Baron Hotel — explosions that killed 170 civilians and 13 US service personnel.  The group had already launched no less than 77 attacks in the first four months of 2021, demonstrating its intention to inflict mass casualty and destabilize Afghanistan’s already precarious security situation. 

Early in March 2022 the UN issued its first major human rights report since the Taliban seized power.  Covering the period from August 2021 to the end of February, it said that 397 civilians had been killed, 80% of them in attacks by the ISIS-K group.

ISIS-K is the Afghanistan affiliate of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).  It emerged in January 2015, nearly two years after ISIS first declared its caliphate. Back then, the group’s aims include toppling the Pakistani government, punishing the Iranian government for being a “vanguard” of Shia Islam, and “purifying” Afghanistan by dislodging the Taliban as the main jihadi movement.

Over the years, ISIS-K’s anti-Pakistan and anti-Iran priorities have been overtaken by a more pragmatic agenda that concentrates on violent opposition to the Taliban and Afghani religious minorities.  Now ISIS-K’s strategic objective is to bring Afghanistan within the Islamic caliphate envisaged by the ISIS movement.

On April 21 explosions inside the Seh Dokan mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, the capital of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan, killed at least 12 worshipers and wounded scores more.  ISIS-K claimed responsibility on its Telegram account, posting: “The soldiers of the caliphate managed to get a booby-trapped bag” inside the mosque, and once the place was packed with worshipers, detonated it from afar.

One week later, missiles targeted vehicles in Mazar-i-Sharif.  Two explosions within minutes of each other killed at least nine people and wounded 13. 

ISIS-K sees the Taliban as an irreconcilable enemy that needs to be defeated militarily. The enmity between the two organizations stems from their sectarian differences. ISIS-K subscribes to the Jihadi-Salafism ideology, while the Taliban adhere to the Hanafi madhab, a school of religious law noted for its reliance on systematic reasoning.  Moreover ISIS-K, in line with its caliphate philosophy, fiercely rejects nationalism, while the Taliban is strictly concerned with ruling Afghanistan.

The Taliban regime in Afghanistan is still unrecognized by the international community.  Most of the development aid which had been sustaining the previous Afghan government has ceased, and the country is in the midst of an economic crisis. Since the takeover at least half a million Afghans have lost their jobs.  It is estimated that by mid-2022 up to 97% of people could be living below the poverty line.

Human Rights Watch has reported executions and enforced disappearances of former government officials.  Patricia Gossman, an associate director, said: “Revenge killings, crushing women’s rights, strangling the media – the Taliban seem determined to tighten their grip on society, even as the situation grows increasingly unstable.”

The UN resolved on March 17 to re-establish its presence in Afghanistan.  UNAMA (the UN mission to Afghanistan) will respond to the immediate humanitarian and economic crisis. The UN resolution also obliges UNMA to work towards establishing peace and stability in the country.  Unfortunately, the new remit provides no indication of how to reconcile the religious objectives of ISIS-K, the political purposes of the anti-Taliban factions, and the utter determination of the Taliban to retain its grip on power.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and the Jerusalem Post on-line, 19 May 2022
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-707071

Published in Eurasia Review, 20 May 2022:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/20052022-confronting-the-taliban-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 22 May 2022:
https://mpc-journal.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=13185&action=edit

Published in Jewish Business News, 20 May 2022:
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/05/20/confronting-the-taliban/

Israel-Iran: could the proxy war ignite?

 

On Wednesday April 27, 2022, according to Syria’s defense ministry backed by the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), Israel launched a missile attack on positions near Damascus killing four Syrian soldiers.  The Syrian state news agency claimed the missiles had been launched from Tiberias in north-eastern Israel. According to the head of SOHR, Rami Abdel Rahman, the missile attacks hit arms depots in several suburbs of Damascus used by Iran-backed groups.  At least five separate sites were targeted.

The SOHR was established in 2006 to catalogue human rights violations by the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.  Since the Arab Spring rebellion against the Assad regime in 2011, it has set up a vast intelligence-gathering network in every region of Syria, and become an authoritative source of information about the effects on the civilian population of Assad’s ruthless conduct of the conflict, backed – as his forces are – by both Russia and Iran. 

   Israel issued no statement on the reported April 27 attack, nor about one reported on April 14 when several missiles hit Syrian army positions near Damascus.  What Israel has said in the past is that any Iranian or Iranian-supported presence near its northern frontier is a red line, and that it targets the bases of Iran-allied militias, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah group, which has fighters in Syria backing the Assad regime.  

Israel has also said it attacks arms shipments believed to be bound for the Iran-supported militias.  For example, in December 2021, hours after the Israeli military reportedly struck arms shipped from Iran in Syria’s Latakia port, Defense Minister Benny Gantz said: “Israel will not allow Iran to stream game-changing weapons to its proxies and to threaten our citizens.”

Of the many conflicts in the Middle East, the ongoing proxy war between Iran and Israel is potentially the most explosive.  Built into the DNA of the Iranian Revolution from its start in 1979  was the aim of destroying Israel, as a preliminary step toward the destruction of Western democracy as exemplified by the US.  In pursuit of this fundamental objective, Iran’s leaders have provided funding, weapons, and training to groups including Lebanese Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)) which have carried out attacks on Israel, and which have been designated terrorist organizations by many countries,

Because Israel perceives the Iranian regime as a threat to its very existence, it has consistently opposed Iran’s nuclear weapon and missile programs.  It seeks also to downgrade Iran's allies and proxies, and prevent Iranian entrenchment in Syria, another sworn enemy of Israel.

For years, Iran and Israel have engaged in a shadow war, quietly attacking each other –directly or by proxy – on land, by air and at sea.  Escalation to all-out war has been deliberately avoided, and attacks usually remain either unattributed or plausibly denied. For example, the assassination of five Iranian nuclear scientists between 2010 and 2020 remains unexplained and unacknowledged, to say nothing of the series of mysterious explosions at various of Iran’s nuclear facilities in 2020. In April 2021, Iran blamed Israel and vowed revenge for an explosion at its largest uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, which it said caused significant damage to its centrifuges. It was the second time in less than a year that the site had been hit by a suspicious blast. Israel neither confirmed nor denied it was responsible for either attack.

A cyber attack that paralyzed Iran’s gas stations nationwide on October 26, 2021, has also not been acknowledged.

Backed heavily by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Hezbollah’s military forces in Lebanon have, if the boasts of its leaders are to be believed, accrued a vast arsenal of rockets and missiles along the border. Israeli forces have repeatedly struck at Hezbollah’s rocket pipeline within Lebanon, and Hezbollah has on occasion retaliated by firing rockets into Israel and attacking Israeli troops along the border.

As for Syria, ever since the civil conflict started in 2011 Iran has been strengthening its military presence in the country in support of Assad.  Using its so-called “Shia Crescent” Iran transfers weaponry meant for Hezbollah through Iraq and Syria. In an effort to stop the arms flow and counter this second hostile presence on its northern border, Israel has conducted an increasingly open campaign of air strikes in Syria against the flow of weaponry and its storage.

At sea, tit-for-tat attacks on commercial vessels in and around the Gulf of Hormuz began in 2019 – again with little by way of explanation for each incident.  Since several targets have been Iranian tankers carrying oil towards Syria, media and the public have been left free to speculate.

There is always a risk of this long-standing proxy war suddenly igniting into direct military conflict between Israel and Iran.  Whether this nightmare scenario ever materializes turns on how Iran’s nuclear program emerges from the current negotiations in Vienna around reviving the nuclear deal.  The administration of President Joe Biden seems dead set on concluding a new agreement which, all reports indicate, would delay but not eliminate Iran’s eventual acquisition of a nuclear military capability.  Iran‘s leaders say they have no ambition to build nuclear weapons. The hoard of secret documents spirited out of Iran in 2018 suggests otherwise.

In Washington on October 20, 2021 foreign minister Yair Lapid warned that Israel was prepared to use military force to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons capability.

“Iran has publicly stated it wants to wipe us out,” said Lapid. “We have no intention of letting this happen.”

          Should force be required to stop an Iranian bomb, Israel would have to act, and almost certainly act alone. That is how the long-standing Israel-Iran proxy war could assume a terrible reality. 

Published in the Jerusalem Post and Jerusalem Post on-line, 12 May 2022:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-706449

Published in Eurasia Review, 13 May 2022:
https://www.eurasiareview.com/13052022-israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 14 May 2022:
https://mpc-journal.org/israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite/

Published in Jewish Business News, 13 May 2022:
https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/05/13/israel-iran-could-the-proxy-war-ignite/

Kurdish independence remains Erdogan’s nightmare

On April 18, 2022 Turkey launched a new ground and air offensive against Kurdish militants in northern Iraq.  Supported by helicopters and drones, Turkish jets and artillery struck suspected targets of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and then commando troops crossed into the region by land or were airlifted by helicopters.  In short, in a move disturbingly akin to Russian president Vladimir Putin’s in Ukraine, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan invaded the territory of a sovereign nation – Iraq – in pursuit of a political purpose of his own.

          Erdogan is acutely anxious about where political change might be taking the Kurdish nation as a whole, including Turkey’s substantial Kurdish minority. The 14 million Kurds living in Turkey make up 18 percent of Turkey's population.

Once upon a time the Kurds were a proud and independent nation thriving in their own land.  Subject to many foreign invasions, they refused to be integrated with their various conquerors and retained their distinctive culture.  At the start of the First World War, their country, Kurdistan, was a small part of the Ottoman empire.  Afterwards, in shaping the future Middle East the Western powers, in particular the UK, promised to act as guarantors of their freedom.  It was a promise subsequently broken.  Denied independence in their own homeland, the Kurdish people were split largely between four states newly endorsed by the League of Nations.  They became minorities in the mountains and valleys of southeastern Turkey,  northwestern Iran, northern Iraq, and northern Syria.

The PKK, founded in 1978, was and is an armed political group.  Claiming to represent all people in historically Kurdish regions, it has affiliated itself with other political and social groups including leading political parties in Turkey and Syria. The PKK is also present in Iran, where members fought against the Iranian regime for several years before agreeing to stop military hostilities in 2011.

The PKK’s original objective was to establish a socialist Greater Kurdistan uniting the Kurdish regions of Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Since the mid-2000s, however, there has been a new goal, master-minded by Abdullah Ocalan, the PKK leader imprisoned by Turkey since February 1999 on İmralı island in the Sea of Marmara, where he is serving a life sentence.. Setting to one side the political aim of uniting the Kurdish people in their own homeland, the new objective, dubbed “democratic confederalism”, seeks to establish autonomous Kurdish areas in Iran, Turkey, Syria, and Iraq.  Something of the sort now exists in both Syria and Iraq.

Erdogan is unconvinced.  He is aware that the idea of an amalgamated Kurdish state, involving a change of national borders, remains a dream among Kurdish extremists, and that conflict within Turkey remains a possibility.  The attack on April 18, named Operation Claw Lock, struck shelters, bunkers, caves, tunnels, ammunition depots and headquarters belonging to the PKK, which maintains bases in northern Iraq from where it has attacked Turkey in the past.  Turkey’s Defense Ministry said the new offensive was launched after it was determined that the militants were regrouping and preparing for a “large-scale attack.”

Erdogan is also keen to stamp on the idea that disparate Kurdish communities might amalgamate or integrate. This came to the fore during the conflict in Syria against Islamic State. For example, in 2014 Kurdish volunteers from across the Middle East mobilized behind Syrian Kurdish fighters in the battle for the northern Syrian town of Kobane.  Syrian Kurds benefited from the fighting experience of the Kurdish commanders who had fought with the PKK in its longstanding conflict against the Turkish state.

Guney Yildiz, a researcher and journalist based in London, focuses on Turkey, the Kurds and Syria. He has advised the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee on Turkey, worked for BBC News and also the Middle East Institute based in Washington D.C.  Yildiz maintains that Kurds across all four nations – Turkey, Iran. Iraq and Syria – are today receiving public and moral support from each other and from the Kurdish diaspora abroad. He believes it is relevant to ask whether Kurds will be content to continue as confederated autonomous areas within nation states, or whether they will seek political independence.

The answer, he believes, lies in how cross-pollination, political recognition, and geography will connect Kurds in Turkey (known to political Kurds as “Northern Kurdistan”), with Kurds in Iraq (known as “Southern Kurdistan”), with Kurds in Iran (“Eastern Kurdistan”), to Kurds in Syria (“Western Kurdistan”). 

This is Erdogan’s nightmare scenario.  The PKK has been an armed group within Turkey’s body politic for decades, seeking Kurdish independence through acts of terror.  As such it was viewed by the Turkish establishment as an existential threat to the state.  In 2016 Joe Biden, then US Vice President, confirmed that Washington regarded the PKK as a danger to Turkey’s integrity and, comparing it to Islamic State, said it was "a terror group plain and simple".

Nothing like unity of policy or purpose reigns within the Kurdish camp as a whole. The Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq has an uneasy relationship with the PKK group, whose presence complicates the region’s lucrative trade ties with Turkey.  Erdogan’s Operation Claw Lock was launched two days after a rare visit to Turkey by the prime minister of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, Masrour Barzani, suggesting that he went to be briefed on Ankara’s plans. Barzani said after his talks with the Turkish president that he welcomed “expanding cooperation to promote security and stability” in northern Iraq.

Turkey routinely carries out attacks in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, where the PKK has bases and training camps in Sinjar and on the mountainous border with Turkey. But the offensives have strained Turkey’s ties with Iraq’s central government in Baghdad.

. Iraq’s President Barham Salih termed the latest incursion “unacceptable”, describing it as a threat to the country's national security and a violation of its sovereignty.  He is certainly not wrong about that.

Published in the Jerusalem Post and in Jerusalem Post on-line, 4 May 2022:
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-705807

Published in the Eurasia Review, 7 May 2022:

https://www.eurasiareview.com/07052022-kurdish-independence-remains-erdogans-nightmare-oped/

Published in the MPC Journal, 7 May 2022:

https://mpc-journal.org/kurdish-independence-remains-erdogans-nightmare/

Published in Jewish Business News, 6 May 2022:

https://jewishbusinessnews.com/2022/05/06/kurdish-independence-remains-erdogans-nightmare/

Visiting the President

  

By the end of March most of Israel had had quite enough of one of the coldest and rainiest winters in decades. Heating bills were soaring and Lake Kinneret was just a few centimeters shy of reaching its upper limit.  And then, literally out of the blue, dawned the harbinger of the summer to come – a cloudless sky and sunshine.  It chanced to be the day set aside months ago for a visit by members of the long-established IBCA (Israel, Britain and the Commonwealth Association) to Beit Hanassi – the President’s Residence in Jerusalem.

Conceived and organized by IBCA’s dynamic chairperson, Brenda Katten, the visit was in no sense a political event – IBCA is not a political organization. Its purpose, unchanged since its foundation back in 1953, has been to encourage, develop and extend social, cultural and economic relations between the peoples of Israel, Britain and the Commonwealth. One of its earliest chairpersons was the President’s father, Chaim Herzog, who had been a senior officer in the British army during the Second World War. His son, Isaac, who has followed in his footsteps in the presidency, has maintained a link with IBCA throughout his career.

            So, despite the presence of members of the Diplomatic Corps, including the British, Australian and Canadian ambassadors to Israel, the occasion was essentially social.  A few speeches there inevitably were, but the highlights of the occasion were a group photograph of IBCA members with the President, an informed explanation of the artwork that adorns the splendid reception area of Beit Hanassi, and a guided tour of the gardens in which the Presidential residence is sited – an experience enhanced by the unexpected sunshine.

            The group photograph was in the capable hands of Charles Green, for twenty years official investiture photographer at Buckingham Palace, who made Aliyah a few years ago. The guests were grouped on the steps leading down into the gardens, President Herzog joined them in the center of the front row, and Green snapped merrily away.

            The reception hall is a repository of impressive art works.  Perhaps the most striking is the painted ceiling by artist Naftali Bezem – 63 squares of acrylic tracing the story of his journey from persecution in Europe to freedom in Israel.  One wall is enhanced by a 6-meter high stained glass triptych by Reuven Rubin illustrating biblical themes.  At the far end of the hall, facing visitors as they enter, is the Jerusalem Wall of Fame, a loose representation of the Western Wall.

            The current Beit Hanassi is the third Presidential Residence in Israel’s short history. Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, used his private home as the first.  During the term of Israel’s second president, Yitzhak Ben Zvi, the Residence was located in Jerusalem’s Rehavia neighborhood. The current building was conceived, designed and constructed during the 10-year term of President Zalman Shazar, Israel’s third president.

Once the idea of a purpose-built official residence had been approved, Shazar asked that it be built in a residential neighborhood of Jerusalem, in accordance with the biblical verse “Among my own people I dwell”.  Some ten dunams (approximately 2.5 acres) of land was selected on a hill in the Talbiyeh district.

In 1964 the State of Israel announced a competition, open to Israeli architects only, to design the new President’s Residence.  Anything palatial or overblown was ruled out.  The guidelines specified that the building should be unassuming but designed to enable all the functions of the President to be fulfilled. Forty-seven bids were submitted to the committee, which was headed by Teddy Kollek who later became Jerusalem’s longest-serving mayor. The committee chose the design by Abba Elhanani, then one of Israel’s most prominent architects.

Divided into three wings – ceremonial, offices and residential – the Residence is constructed of local materials such as granite from Eilat and Jerusalem stone. The roof, which is rectangular in shape, consists of flat white domes reminiscent of the domes in the Old City of Jerusalem. It was completed in 1971. Splendid yet understated as it is, there is a view that the ceremonial wing might need expanding to take account of Israel’s growing status on the world stage, and the requirement to host larger and more frequent official functions.

For example the guest list for the state dinner on 22 January 2020, hosted by then-President Reuven Rivlin to inaugurate the Fifth World Holocaust Forum, had to be severely restricted for lack of room. No spouses were invited, while large marquees were erected in the front of the building to serve as a reception venue and to accommodate security personnel.and officials accompanying key dignitaries.

As for the IBCA visit, a high point for many of the guests was the guided tour of the gardens.  The grounds are adorned at every turn with sculptures, busts, pieces of ancient architecture and works of art.  

One striking feature is a row of the busts of Israel’s 10 past presidents to date.  Behind each is a large placard bearing an account in Hebrew, English and Arabic, of the main achievements of their presidencies. 

All around the garden are trees planted by distinguished guests to the Residence. A Pope, US Presidents, British royalty – each has left in the grounds of Beit Hanassi a lasting memorial of the fact that they have visited Israel and been hosted by its President. The IBCA members who participated in their own private visit, will have their group photograph as a lasting record of a special and privileged occasion.

          But new opportunities are opening up all the time and suddenly, in the early months of 2022, the chance to enjoy the experience of visiting Beit Hanassi is open to everyone. 

“You are invited to the home of the Israeli President for an unforgettable educational experience,” runs the opening sentence of a new website run by Makom, a branch of the Jewish Agency.  Very recently Makom has started offering English-language tours of the President’s Residence online via Zoom. 

         Makom was established in 2006 as a partnership between the Jewish Agency for Israel and twelve Jewish Community Federations in North America. The organization now also works across the world including in the UK, South Africa, France and Israel, designing and running educational programs aimed at optimizing the possibilities that modern Jewish life affords.

          Their initiative is linked to “Israeli Hope” workshops, a project of former President of Israel, Reuven Rivlin. In their behind-the-scenes tour at the heart of Beit Hanassi, participants hear about the history and role of the Israeli presidency, learn of the impact and influence of former presidents, and explore the relationships between the presidents, Israeli society, and the Jewish world.

          No-one who undertakes a tour of the splendid Beit Hanassi can fail to be impressed by the beauty, artistry and living history embodied in the residence and equally in its garden and grounds.  It has been described as “Israel’s symbolic home” – a view that many visitors, distinguished and otherwise, will surely carry away with them.


Published in the Jerusalem Report and Jerusalem Post on-line, 14 April 2022https://www.jpost.com/jerusalem-report/article-704164