Recent airstrikes on areas close to the Iraqi capital as well as the killing of Islamic State fighters there have received scant attention as Iran-linked groups continue to carry out persistent attacks.
Tarmiya, roughly 50 kilometers north of the Iraqi capital, has in recent weeks been the scene of suicide bombers killed prior to reaching their target and airstrikes amid the dense groves of date palms, fields and orchards.
The PKK-linked Revolutionary Youth movement has continued its campaign of child recruitment in northeast Syria despite efforts from local authorities, and SDF chief Mazloum Kobane to stop the practice, leaving a trail of anguished parents in its wake.
Late last year, members of a youth group held a computer literacy class in the Syrian town of Amuda. This was no ordinary extracurricular activity: its purpose was to recruit children for military service, and over the course of the lessons, organizers convinced two local girls to leave home and pick up arms.
Despite the Russian Buildup, the Status Quo Still Serves Both Sides
In the days leading up to and following last week’s video summit between U.S. President Joe Biden and Russian President Vladimir Putin, there has been intense speculation that Moscow is on the verge of a new military incursion into Ukraine. The United States has estimated that Russia has already deployed close to 70,000 soldiers—media reports have claimed significantly higher numbers—to several locations along Ukraine’s eastern border and in Crimea. Apparently, the Russian government is impatient with the unfinished business of the Donbas war in eastern Ukraine, which is now in its eighth year. And Putin seems to think he can prevent Ukraine’s entry into NATO by threatening a new war in the center of Europe.
Persistent Divisions Will Preclude His Dreams of Global Power
On May 11, 1962, U.S. President John F. Kennedy hosted an extraordinary gathering of American cultural talent to welcome France’s minister of culture, André Malraux. The dinner—which included luminaries such as the novelist Saul Bellow, the painter Mark Rothko, the playwright Arthur Miller, and the violinist Isaac Stern—was a celebration of the long-standing historical ties between the United States and France. Only hours before this glamorous fete, however, Kennedy, Malraux, and the French ambassador to the United States had a sharp exchange over French President Charles de Gaulle’s increasingly strident critiques of U.S. policy and accompanying demands for strategic autonomy.
Russia had congratulated itself on its textbook intervention to quell the unrest in Kazakstan but recriminations began when Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev, arguably the main beneficiary of the intervention, appointed Askar Umarov minister of information in the new government. Umarov is accused of besmirching Russia’s Great Patriotic War (World War II) and has called the Russians living in Kazakhstan an imposed Diaspora. Yevgeny Primakov, head of Rossotrudnichestvo [Federal Agency for the CIS Affairs, Compatriots Living Abroad, and International Humanitarian Cooperation], refused to work with the Kazakh official. Primakov charges Umarov with having Russophobic views. “I would like to remind you of by now an old, automatically operative and proven rule. It states that Rossotrudnichestvo doesn’t maintain contacts, doesn’t work and doesn’t cooperate with Russophobic trash,” stressed Primakov. Back in 2017, the ‘Kazinform’ agency, headed by Umarov, published a ‘Great Kazakhstan’ map, which designated the Russian cities of Omsk and Orenburg as a part of Great Kazakhstan.[1]
The January 13 Russia-OSCE meeting in Vienna ended a week of intensive talks on “security guarantees” between Moscow and the Western powers. As January 13 marks the Russian festivity of the “Old New Year” (“Stary Novy God,” the start of the New Year by the Julian calendar), one may summarize what “the long 2021” changed in Russia’s foreign policy and reflect on the possible consequences for 2022.
President Joe Biden took office with what was, in many ways, a soft-power vision of foreign policy. But China’s Xi Jinping and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been busy reminding the United States that today’s world is one of big-power competition.
Regional experts say one key objective of Mr. Putin’s recent actions regarding Ukraine is to convince the U.S. to deal with Russia as the great power he sees it to be. At the end of a week of inconclusive diplomacy addressing Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that if nothing else, “they are taking us seriously now.”
U.S. special operators are continuing with a mission to build up an elite fighting force in Ukraine, military officials said, even as Russia threatens invasion with its thousands of troops, tanks and artillery massed along their borders.
“The bottom line is that our training mission in Ukraine is ongoing,” Lt. Col. Juan Martinez, spokesman for U.S. Special Operations Command Europe, said Tuesday.
Martinez said there are a “ton of outside factors at work,” but that the command hasn’t stepped back from Ukraine.
The same inaction by Western leaders to hold China accountable for the global pandemic that infuriates Western citizens only emboldens the Communist Party leadership, which sees inaction as a license to do more.
China will be constantly assessing the political strength of its adversaries. European political leaders have never demonstrated the stomach to confront military threats. During my tenure as U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands, I observed Europeans always believed dialogue was more important than confrontation. Bad agreements were better than no agreements and being party to agreements that did not work was better than withdrawing.
As part of its “diplomacy”, the White House first told the Iranian leaders not only that it is willing to lift nuclear-related sanctions, but also that it is considering lifting non-nuclear related sanctions.
Not only has the Biden administration’s diplomatic route lifted some of the sanctions on the Iranian regime and its Houthi proxy, the administration has also looked the other way regarding the Islamic Republic’s malign actions in the region.