Iran Building Weapons Factories in Lebanon and Syria to Use on Israel

By ISABEL KERSHNER

A picture from an Israeli satellite and annotated by an Israeli satellite company showing what analysts said was a construction site for an Iranian long-range missile production facility in northwestern Syria. Credit Imagesat International NV, via Reuters

JERUSALEM — Israel is using a visit this week by the United Nations secretary general, Antonio Guterres, to highlight concerns about what it says are Iran’s efforts to produce advanced, precision weapons in Lebanon and Syria.

“Iran is busy turning Syria into a base of military entrenchment,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a news conference with Mr. Guterres on Monday, “and it wants to use Syria and Lebanon as war fronts against its declared goal to eradicate Israel.”

Mr. Netanyahu asserted that Iran “is building sites to produce precision-guided missiles toward that end in both Syria and in Lebanon.”

He added: “This is something Israel cannot accept. This is something the U.N. should not accept.”

Israel’s defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, also spoke in his meeting with Mr. Guterres about Israel’s concerns about factories for precision weapons and what he called Iran’s repeated attempts to smuggle arms into Lebanon.

“We are determined to prevent any threat to the security of the citizens of Israel,” Mr. Lieberman said, according to a transcript of his remarks from his office.

The assertions are not new, but Israel now appears to want to put them on the international agenda.

Israel’s chief of military intelligence, Maj. Gen. Herzl Halevi, told an audience at a policy conference in Herzliya, Israel, in June that Iran had been working over the past year to set up independent production facilities in Lebanon to manufacture precise weapons, which use advanced technology to guide them to specific targets.

The beneficiary, he said, would be Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite organization, with which Israel fought an inconclusive, month-long war in 2006. Adding that Iran was setting up similar facilities in Yemen, General Halevi warned, “We cannot remain indifferent to this and we don’t.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel raised concerns about Iranian weapons factories in Lebanon and Syria with United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres in Jerusalem on Monday. Credit Thomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Israeli leaders also pressed Mr. Guterres to prod the United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon, UNIFIL, into fulfilling its mandate to prevent Hezbollah’s weapons buildup.

“I will do everything in my capacity to make sure that UNIFIL fully meets its mandate,” said Mr. Guterres, visiting Israel and the Palestinian territories for the first time since taking up the top United Nations post in January. He added that “the idea or the intention or the will to destroy the state of Israel is something totally unacceptable from my perspective.”

Israel has carried out several airstrikes in Syria in recent years against convoys or stores of advanced weapons said to be destined for Hezbollah in Lebanon. Acting under the cover of the Syrian civil war, the Israeli strikes have prompted little retaliation from Hezbollah, which is fighting in Syria to prop up the government of President Bashar al-Assad, an Iranian ally.

Through Hezbollah and other proxies, Iran has been extending its influence and its reach in the region and, according to Israeli officials, is working to provide Hezbollah with more precise weapons to hit valuable targets in its next war against Israel.

But while Israel has acted with relative impunity in the chaotic environment of Syria, any pre-emptive strike on Lebanese soil could spiral into a broader conflict over Israel’s northern border.

Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported this week that in the face of the Israeli warnings, Prime Minister Saad Hariri of Lebanon has been working to stop Iran’s construction of the missile factory in his country.

More generally, Israel has been voicing concern that arrangements for cease-fires and de-escalation zones in southern Syria will help Iran and its loyalists consolidate their presence across Israel’s frontiers.

Last week Mr. Netanyahu traveled to Sochi, Russia, on the Black Sea to confer with President Vladimir Putin. “The victory over ISIS is welcome,” Mr. Netanyahu told Mr. Putin, referring to the Islamic State, which has been battling Mr. Assad’s forces. “Iran’s entry is unwelcome, endangering us, and in my opinion, endangering the region and the world,” Mr. Netanyahu said, according to his office.

Israeli officials have also raised these concerns with American officials.

Annaza (see map at top) is about 20 km northeast of Tartus

About 400 Now Dead During Muslim Crackdown in Myanmar's Rakhine State

By Sam Howard

Displaced Rohingya people arrive at a monastery in Rakhine state on Aug. 31. The Myanmar military has said about 400 people have died during a military crackdown in the state over the last week. Photo EPA-EFE/Nyunt Win

UPI -- The death toll of a violent security operation in Myanmar's Rakhine state continues to rise.

Voice of America reported that the Myanmar military says about 400 people have now died within the last week, amid a security crackdown on the Rohingya Muslim minority population, who have long been denied citizenship in the largely Buddhist nation.

The military's actions have drawn the ire of the United Nations and international advocacy group Human Rights Watch.

Of the 399 deaths over the last week, the Myanmar military said 370 were terrorists. The government has said those terrorists instigated the recent violence, specifically torching nearly 2,500 homes, but refugees claim Myanmar's military started the attack and burned down the homes, CNN reported.

Despite a government attempt to tighten the Myanmar border, the U.N. estimated 50,000 Rohingya people have fled the violence -- most of them into neighboring Bangladesh or a boundary area between the two countries.

Twenty bodies of Rohingya Muslims, including 12 children, were recovered from a river along the border on Thursday, CNN reported.

Wikipedia:

The Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan people from Rakhine State, Myanmar, which they claim to be their homeland for generations. There are an estimated 1 million Rohingyas living in Myanmar. The majority of them are Muslim and a minority are Hindu. 

Described as "one of the most persecuted minorities in the world", most of the Rohingya population are denied citizenship under the 1982 Burmese citizenship law, which restricts full citizenship to British Indian migrants who settled after 1823. The Rohingyas are also restricted from freedom of movement, state education and civil service jobs in Myanmar. 

Despite promises of equality by Myanmar's independence leader Aung San, the Rohingyas have faced military crackdowns in 1978, 1991–1992, 2012, 2015 and 2016–2017. 

UN officials have described Myanmar's persecution of the Rohingya as ethnic cleansing, while there have been warnings of an unfolding genocide. Yanghee Lee, the UN special investigator on Myanmar, believes the country wants to expel its entire Rohingya population.

Rakhine State, Myanmar

1,400+ Killed as South Asia Hit by Worst Floods in Decade

Flooding on the sub-continent makes Houston look like a day at the beach,

but not a mention today on CNN or NYTimes

47 people have been killed in Hurricane Harvey and its aftermath

1400+ have been killed on the sub-continent, 40 million affected

100s of 1000s of children may lose education

Traffic resumes on a muddy road after the water receded in Mumbai on August 30, 2017, following heavy rains that brought major flooding to the coastal city. © Punit Paranjpe / AFP

More than 1,400 people have been killed across India, Nepal and Bangladesh as the region suffers the most devastating flooding in a decade.

Hundreds of towns and villages have been submerged by the devastating floods which have now persisted for over two months, affecting an estimated 40 million people.

Tens of thousands of people have taken refuge in relief camps that are short of food and vulnerable to disease.

The head of a South Asian regional body, launched this year to boost disaster coordination, said the flooding underlined the poor planning, Reuters report.

"The floods this year have exposed the urgency for (South Asian) nations to work together to deal with natural disasters," said PK Taneja, of the India-based SAARC Disaster Management Centre.

Monsoon season causes widespread flooding every year across South Asia.

The heavy rains are being blamed for the collapse of a 117-year-old building in Mumbai on Thursday. At least 34 people were killed when the six story building caved in on itself. The building had reportedly been declared unsafe in 2011 but many people remained living there, according to The Times of India.

The devastating flooding has sparked anger across the affected areas but authorities have tried to distance themselves from culpability by highlighting the scale of this year's deluge.

“If you get a whole year's rain in one to two days, how will you handle it? No preparation and planning will work,” said Anirudh Kumar, of the disaster management department in the Indian state of Bihar.

Over 500 people have died in Bihar with a further 850,000 displaced.

Aid agencies said people are beginning to return to their homes only to find it completely destroyed. Dibya Raj Poudel, of the Nepal Red Cross Society, said: "Many survivors are traumatized... They fear the floods may hit them any time again and they have no place to stay nor any food to eat.”

Around 18,000 schools have also been destroyed or damaged and NGOs are warning that hundreds of thousands of children are at risk of permanently falling out of the education system.

“We haven’t seen flooding on this scale in years and it’s putting the long-term education of an enormous number of children at great risk,” said Rafay Hussain, from Save the Children.

Finnish Police Consider Assault Guns for Patrol Officers Amid Terrorism Concerns

The New Normal in Finland

© Wolfgang Rattay / Reuters

Finland’s police plan to arm patrol officers with submachine guns in addition to standard weapons, local media are reporting. The country’s officers are poised to carry the same arms as special ops amid mounting terrorism concerns by security forces.

Along with traditional Glock and Walther handguns, police officers will be equipped with Heckler & Koch MP5s, according to National Police Board official, Ari Alanen, as cited in the Finnish media Friday.

But, he noted, “police don’t want to send out a militaristic impression,” and would like to remain a reliable agency which could easily be approached by the public. 

Police need to be better prepared due to the terrorism threat, Alanen said.

"We must follow what's going on in our surroundings. Increasingly, we need to consider the weapons and kinds of protective equipment that are needed," he added. 

The officers will be allowed to use the submachine guns under same circumstances as their standard weaponry, but when a target is further. It’s not clear yet when the new ammunition will be handed out and officers will need to undergo special training to use the M5s. The submachine guns are currently used by the Bear group, Finland’s Police Rapid Response Unit.

The news of the envisioned upgrade comes as police released another man suspected of being connected to the knife rampage which saw two people killed and eight more injured in the city of Turku in mid-August. With seven people having been detained initially, only one person, the main suspect, still remains in custody. 

Although a 22-year-old Moroccan asylum-seeker admitted to stabbing people, he denied a terrorist motive. Police are still investigating the case as potential terrorism.

Recently, police said that “with respect to counter-terrorism, Finland’s operating environment is rapidly changing and the threat posed by terrorism has become more varied.”

In June, the Finnish security intelligence service (SUPO) said individual actors or small groups inspired by radical Islamist propaganda posed the most significant threat in the country as it raised its threat level to 'elevated' from 'low' in a four-grade scale. 

The agency said it was aware of more serious terrorism-related plans, adding there were “350 counterterrorism target individuals.” 

On Thursday, the interior ministry released a report on terrorism prevention. It stated there is another risk group of almost the same number, identified by the National Bureau of Investigation, according to the Uusi Suomi newspaper. 

The following day, the government approved additional funding for police operations in order to improve national security by stepping up counter-terrorism efforts, according to the interior ministry release. It says the budget committee decided to allocate nine million euro in additional funds for police equipment.

Similarly in 2016, Parisien police had been given Heckler&Koch assault rifles, to allow officers “to intervene as fast as possible to reinforce the first patrols, notably when we are confronted with mass killings.” 

The move followed the November attack in the French capital which left 130 people dead and hundreds injured.

Pakistani Officers Guilty in Bhutto Assassination After Decade-Long Trial

One of the few ever hopes of Pakistan ever emerging from the Dark Ages was murdered either because she was a woman, or because it was politically expedient, or because she threatened the extraordinary level of corruption in that backward country

By Sara Shayanian  

Security officers stand patrol outside the courthouse in Pakistan Thursday after verdicts were announced in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Photo by S. Shazad/EPA

UPI -- After nearly a decade-long trial, two security officers were sentenced on Thursday to 17-years in prison for failing to protect former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto from being assassinated in 2007.

An anti-terrorism court handed down the verdicts and the sentences Thursday, which convicted two police officers and acquitted five suspected militants in Bhutto's death.

Bhutto served as Pakistan's prime minister twice before being killed by a gun-and-bomb attack after a campaign rally. Authorities at the time claimed that the Taliban was behind the attack. Twenty-two people died along with Bhutto.

However, the court acquitted defendants Aitzaz Shah, Sher Zaman, Abdul Rasheed, Rafaqat Hussain and Hasnain Gul who had all been accused of being Talibani militants associated with the assassination.

According to Pakistan Today, they had initially been charged with "killing, hatching a criminal conspiracy to kill, assisting the perpetrators, using illegal explosive material and spreading terrorism".

The lawyer for the five suspects argued that Benazir strayed from U.S. policy and, therefore, the United States was to blame for Bhutto's death.

The courts on Thursday also declared Pakistan's president at the time of the assassination, Pervez Musharraf, as an "absconder".

Musharraf has been out of Pakistan since 2016 and will be arrested and brought to trial if he returns. Authorities have been ordered to seize his property.

Bhutto was killed in Rawalpindi, just weeks after she returned to Pakistan after years of self-imposed exile.

Tens of Thousands of Radical Muslims in UK, EU

Number of Islamic radicals feared to be in UK revealed by

EU counter-terrorism chief

© Reuters

The UK has the largest number of Islamist radicals in the EU, the EU counter-terrorism chief says, just as home-grown terrorists are found to pose the “predominant” threat.

According to Gilles de Kerchove, the UK has identified between 20,000 and 25,000 fanatics.

MI5 considers 3,000 of them “worrying,” and 500 are under “constant and special attention,” the chief said.

By comparison, France is thought to be home to 17,000 radicals, and Spain around 5,000.

 “I wouldn't like to put a concrete figure on it, but (in Europe) tens of thousands, more than 50,000,” de Kerchove told Spanish newspaper El Mundo.

I should hope so - there are nearly 50,000 in UK, France and Spain alone.

“We must select those who are really worrying and the most dangerous, and they should be monitored 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

This comes as security sources told Sky News that the threat posed to the UK by Islamic State jihadists returning home is not as severe as initially thought by police and intelligence services.

On the other hand, there is an unprecedented terrorist threat from home-grown terrorists who have been encouraged or instructed to carry out attacks.

“As IS comes under pressure in Raqqa, as they did in Mosul, the impetus to go and join them has started to dissipate, but their message remains potent for those willing to listen.

“Part of the problem is that propaganda has democratized the threat so that self-starters and lone actors can view material that is pumped out encouraging them to get out with knives or vehicles to launch these low-tech attacks.”

More than 800 Britons have travelled to Syria and Iraq to fight with Islamic State. But the number of people who have returned is actually significantly less than expected.

While 350 fighters have already made their way back home, up to 200 are believed to have been killed while fighting in the Middle East, while many of the others fear prosecution.

The source said: “We now think that fewer are likely to return from Syria and Iraq than had previously been feared, partly because they are likely to have been killed in the fighting as it escalates and partly because those that survive are likely to seek refuge in other countries.

“The threat from those who have never left the UK for Syria and Iraq is the predominant threat – they are still highly motivated and increasingly they are taking direction from individuals in the Middle East.”

Kenya Election Overturned, New Vote Ordered Within 60 Days

Opposition claimed electronic voting results were hacked and manipulated in favour of President Uhuru Kenyatta

The Associated Press

Kenya's Supreme Court on Friday nullified President Uhuru Kenyatta's election win last month as unconstitutional and called for new elections within 60 days, shocking a country that had been braced for further protests by opposition supporters.

Kenyatta said he "personally disagrees" with the ruling but respects it. Still, he lashed out at the judges, saying that "six people have decided they will go against the will of the people."

He also called for peace in a country where some elections have been followed by deadly violence.

No presidential election in the East African economic hub has ever been nullified. Opposition members danced in the streets, marveling at the setback for Kenyatta, the son of the country's first president Jomo Kenyatta, in the long rivalry between Kenya's leading political families.

"It's a very historic day for the people of Kenya and by extension the people of Africa," said opposition candidate Raila Odinga, who had challenged the vote.

"For the first time in the history of African democratization, a ruling has been made by a court nullifying irregular election of a president. This is a precedent-setting ruling."

The six-judge bench ruled 4-2 in favor of the petition filed by Odinga. He claimed the electronic voting results were hacked into and manipulated in favor of Kenyatta, who had won a second term with 54 per cent of the vote.

"A declaration is hereby issued that the presidential election held on Aug. 8 was not conducted in accordance to the constitution and applicable law, rendering the results invalid, null and void," Chief Justice David Maraga said.

The court did not place blame on Kenyatta or his party. It said the election commission "committed illegalities and irregularities … in the transmission of results, substance of which will be given in the detailed judgment of the court" that will be published within 21 days.

'Very political'

Odinga called for the election commission to be disbanded and said the opposition will ask that electoral officials be prosecuted.

The lead counsel for the president, Ahmednassir Abdulahi, told the court that the nullification was a "very political decision" but said they will live with the consequences.

Odinga's lawyer had asked the court to invalidate Kenyatta's win, saying a scrutiny of the forms used to tally the votes had anomalies that affected nearly five million votes.

'Thank you, Jesus! I'm telling, God is on our side.'

- Woman on Nairobi street

The electoral commission had said there was a hacking attempt but it failed. International election observers, including former U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, had said they saw no interference with the vote.

"Right or wrong, the Supreme Court has spoken. So what remains is a fresh opportunity for the people of Kenya, in exercise of their sovereign authority, to once again restate with clarity who they want as their president," electoral commission lawyer Paul Muite said.

Two dozen countries including the United States, which already had congratulated Kenyatta on his victory, issued a joint statement Friday saying the court's ruling "demonstrated Kenya's resilient democracy and commitment to the rule of law."

Odinga, a longtime opposition candidate and the son of Kenya's first vice-president, had unsuccessfully challenged the results of the 2013 vote that Kenyatta won. Odinga's supporters at first had said they would not go to court this time but filed a petition two weeks ago.

Celebrating in streets

Kenya had been braced for further protests Friday as the court prepared to rule on the opposition's challenge, with police deployed to sensitive areas of the capital, Nairobi, and streets near the court were barricaded. Human rights groups have said police killed at least 24 people in unrest that followed the Aug. 8 vote.

Instead, opposition supporters exploded in celebration.

"Thank you, Jesus!" one woman shouted. "I'm telling, God is on our side."

"This has shown all (election) observers did not do their job. We want an apology," said John Wekesa, who was dancing outside the court.

Unease around the election rose when the official who oversaw the electronic voting system was found tortured and killed days before the vote. But the unrest following the vote was far calmer than the post-election violence a decade ago that left more than 1,000 people dead.

"We are not at war with our brothers and sisters in the opposition because we are all Kenyans," Kenyatta said on national television. But he added: "Five or six people cannot change the will of 45 million people."

It is not the will of the people if the elections were rigged!