OOTDnews: 10/04/11

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Palestinians say freeze in US aid taking effect

By MOHAMMED DARAGHMEH | AP

RAMALLAH, West Bank: Palestinian officials said Monday that the US has suspended West Bank development projects worth tens of millions of dollars after Congress froze funding to dissuade the Palestinians from seeking UN recognition of an independent state.

It’s the first concrete sign of repercussions for the Palestinians’ decision to defy Washington on the issue.

Hassan Abu Libdeh, the Palestinian economics minister, said he was informed Monday by officials of USAID, the US government’s foreign aid agency, that two projects — worth $55 million and $26 million — were being put on hold for lack of funding. One supported the development of the Palestinian private sector and the other aimed to improve the investment environment, Abu Libdeh said, adding that 50 people involved were laid off last week and 200 others would follow by November. Other ministries also reported USAID projects were in jeopardy, including an $85 million five-year plan to improve Palestinian health services.

USAID officials confirmed some programs were affected by the Congressional hold, but would not give details. “Ongoing programs will continue until funds are exhausted,” said one official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the matter with the media.

Palestinian officials denounced the move as counterproductive to Mideast peace efforts and said this would not deter them from seeking full UN membership for a state of Palestine in the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem — lands Israel captured in 1967.

Two Republican-led committees in the House — Foreign Affairs and the Appropriations subcommittee on the State Department and Foreign Operations — put a hold on $200 million in economic assistance in late August, as the Palestinians were gearing up for their UN move.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last month proceeded anyway, presenting his case for recognition in a speech to the UN and formally submitting a request to the Security Council.

The Obama Administration finds itself caught in the middle — opposing both the Palestinians’ UN gambit and the Republican moves to punish them for it.

Keeping the aid flowing “is not only in the interest of the Palestinians, it’s in the US interest and it’s also in the Israeli interest, and we would like to see it go forward,” State Department Spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said Monday.

Visiting US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta argued on Monday that “this is no time to withhold those funds, at a point in time where we are urging the Palestinians and the Israelis to sit down and negotiate a peace agreement.”

The US argues that a Palestinian state can only arise through negotiations with Israel and says it will veto the Palestinian membership application in the Security Council if the measure gains enough support. The US — along with other world mediators — has called for a quick resumption of long-stalled Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, but the Palestinians say Israel must first halt all settlement building on occupied land.

“We feel very sorry about this decision by the American Congress, which we think came to sabotage our ability to establish a Palestinian state,” Abu Libdeh said. “This is a political measure that reflects a blind bias against the Palestinian interests and will not help the efforts of the US administration to resume negotiations.

... The decision (by Congress) is affecting all aspects of American support for the Palestinian people.”

Donor countries have given billions of dollars to the Palestinians over the years, in an attempt to prop up the Abbas government and an economy battered by conflict with Israel and continued Israeli restrictions on trade and movement.

The Palestinians have received about $500 million a year from the US alone in recent years, including tens of millions of dollars for training the Palestinian security services. The partial suspension of aid by Congress mainly affects development and infrastructure programs being supervised by USAID but not the support for the security services.

Israeli government officials declined comment Monday on the partial suspension of US aid. However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, while staunchly opposed to Abbas’ decision to seek UN recognition, has not rushed to retaliate.

Despite the increasingly heated rhetoric, the two sides continue to cooperate on a practical level.

Palestinian security forces work with their Israeli counterparts in keeping Islamic militants in the West Bank in check, while Israel every month transfers to the Palestinians tens of millions of dollars it collects on their behalf in taxes and other payments.

Dozens of Arrests Are Reported as Syrian Troops Retake Town

From: nytimes.com

By ANTHONY SHADID

BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Syrian government said Monday that it had arrested dozens of people in a central Syrian region that has become a flash point in fighting between defectors and security forces waging a brutal crackdown on a six-month uprising.

The military said over the weekend that it had retaken Rastan, a restive town on the corridor between the strategic locales of Homs and Hama, two of Syria’s largest cities. It reportedly deployed more forces on Monday in Talbiseh, near Homs, another town that has defied government authority for months in a revolt that has shaken the four-decade rule of the Assad family. Since the summer, residents say, both Rastan and Talbiseh have appeared virtually occupied, with tanks and soldiers guarding the towns’ entrances.

“The defectors were the main reason behind the war on Rastan,” said a resident there who gave his name as Hassan. “Only women were allowed to leave their homes. The men were detained immediately.” Though he was unable to give an estimate on the number detained, the Syrian news agency SANA said arrests numbered “in the dozens.”

The Syrian uprising, which began with largely peaceful protests in the southern, drought-stricken Houran region in March, seems to have entered a new stage. While protests remain largely peaceful, armed opponents of the government are fighting in Homs, Syria’s third-largest city. American officials estimate military defectors to number in the thousands, and while many have simply sought refuge, others have joined the uprising, especially in places like Homs, Rastan and Talbiseh.

Encouraged by the United States, Turkey and Qatar, the opposition abroad has sought to unify its ranks, most recently with a meeting in Istanbul on Sunday, hoping to fashion itself as a possible transition in the aftermath of a government collapse. But diplomats and activists concede that it remains divided over agendas and ideologies.

The state news agency said the military also confiscated weapons, ammunition and explosives in Rastan on Monday. Since the uprising’s start, the government has cast the opposition as an armed insurgency, driven by militant Islamists — by all other accounts, a vast exaggeration. But reports have grown of assassinations, and some residents have worried about growing strife between Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority and the Alawite minority. President Bashar al-Assad and his top officials are Alawite.

The authorities said that Sariya Hassoun, the son of a leading Sunni cleric allied with the government, was killed Sunday in the restive northwest province of Idlib.

After Deadly Attacks in Iraq, Iran Lays Low While U.S. Plans Withdrawal

By Jennifer Griffin & Justin Fishel

U.S. intelligence officials suspect that Iran, after deadly attacks by proxy militia in Iraq, is laying low until U.S. troops leave Iraq at the end of the year.

An Iranian militia on July 12 attempted to fire 41 Iranian-made rockets at a U.S. military post in eastern Iraq near the border with Iran. Seventeen of the 107 mm rockets were confiscated by U.S. and Iraqi forces before they could be launched, but the rest missed the U.S. base known as COS Garry Owen in Maysan province just north of Basra and instead hit the base for the Iraqi 10th Army division, killing several Iraqi women and children.

U.S. defense officials familiar with the incident tell Fox News that in response an angry Prime Minister Nouri Al Maliki issued a communiqué warning his Iranian counterparts that should such destabilizing operations continue he would be forced to ask U.S. forces to remain in Iraq past December 31, the current deadline for all U.S. forces to leave.

Since then, the number of Iranian proxy attacks by Asaib ahl al-Haq (AAH), or the League of the Righteous, against U.S. forces has dropped significantly. The reduced attacks led U.S. intelligence officials to conclude that Iran’s short term strategy may now be to wait for U.S. troops to leave at the end of the year before trying to reassert itself through the militias which have been trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps - Quds Force.

Until the misfire in July the Iranian strategy, according to U.S. military commanders, was to step up the number of attacks on U.S. forces in order to make it look as though U.S. troops were being forced to leave the region. The July incident appears to mark a shift in strategy, according to one senior defense official. The Revolutionary Guard asked the Asaib Ahl al-Haq militia to stand down while Maliki completes a difficult round of negotiations with the U.S. ambassador and State Department, determining how many, if any, U.S. troops will stay past December.

The 107 mm rockets fired at the U.S. base had writing on them that linked them to Iran and color bands on the munitions that also link them to Iraq’s next door neighbor, according to classified weapons manuals shared by Iraqi and U.S. forces.

AAH, the group that fired the rockets, is led by the notorious. Shiite cleric Qais Khazali who founded the group in 2006 after splitting from Muqtada al Sadr at the height of the Iraq civil war, according to the Institute for the Study of War. Khazali led a daring raid on U.S. forces in January 2007 in Karbala using American vehicles, uniforms and identification cards that left 5 U.S. soldiers dead. He and his brother and a Lebanese Hezbollah operative were captured by U.S. troops two months later.

AAH then carried out a coordinated attack on Iraq’s Finance ministry, kidnapping a British consultant. Khazali was released by U.S. forces in 2009 as part of a prisoner swap and attempt by the Maliki government to bring the Shiite militia into the political process.

Recently Khazali was photographed at a conference sponsored by the Iranian government in Iran celebrating the “Islamic Awakening,” Iran’s answer to the Arab Spring. He sat 4 rows behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, raising eyebrows among U.S. military officials who have faced dozens of attacks by his Shiite Iraqi militia since his release in 2009.

In June of this year, 9 U.S. soldiers were killed as a result of Iranian rockets. U.S. troops were attacked 6 times this year by militias firing Iranian rockets, twice as many times as the year before. Admiral Mike Mullen before retiring as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs last week warned, “If they [Iran] keep killing our troops that will not be something that we will sit idly by and watch.” Now it seems that Iran’s leadership has made a new calculation that it may be more beneficial to slow the attacks until the government of Iraq finalizes its request for how many U.S. troops it will ask to remain.