President Donald Trump’s decision to strike Syrian facilities in response to Syrian President Bashar Assad’s reported use of chemical weapons against civilians fulfills Trump’s promise of being tougher than President Barack Obama.
But it’s unlikely to have much impact beyond that ― and will likely be historically judged as a failure on Trump’s own terms.
Trump’s military response alongside France and the U.K. is ostensibly an attempt to deter Assad’s murderous behavior and demonstrate American toughness to Assad’s patrons, Iran and Russia. It won’t serve either of those goals.
The investigator in Syria had made the drive perhaps a hundred times, always in the same battered truck, never with any cargo. It was forty miles to the border, through eleven rebel checkpoints, where the soldiers had come to think of him as a local, a lawyer whose wartime misfortunes included a commute on their section of the road. Sometimes he brought them snacks or water, and he made sure to thank them for protecting civilians like himself. Now, on a summer afternoon, he loaded the truck with more than a hundred thousand captured Syrian government documents, which had been buried in pits and hidden in caves and abandoned homes.
He set out at sunset. To the fighters manning the checkpoints, it was as if he were invisible. Three reconnaissance vehicles had driven ahead, and one confirmed by radio what the investigator hoped to hear: no new checkpoints. Typically, the border was sealed, but soldiers from the neighboring country waved him through. He drove until he reached a Western embassy, where he dropped off the cargo for secure transfer to Chris Engels, an American lawyer. Engels expected the papers to include evidence linking high-level Syrian officials to mass atrocities. After a decade spent training international criminal-justice practitioners in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, Engels now leads the regime-crimes unit of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, an independent investigative body founded in 2012, in response to the Syrian war.
In the past four years, people working for the organization have smuggled more than six hundred thousand government documents out of Syria, many of them from top-secret intelligence facilities. The documents are brought to the group’s headquarters, in a nondescript office building in Western Europe, sometimes under diplomatic cover. There, each page is scanned, assigned a bar code and a number, and stored underground. A dehumidifier hums inside the evidence room; just outside, a small box dispenses rat poison.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
Hundreds of thousands of civilians could be cut off from food if Syrian government forces encircle rebel-held parts of Aleppo, the United Nations said on Tuesday, warning of a massive new flight of refugees from a Russian-backed assault.
Syrian government forces, backed by Russian air strikes and Iranian and Lebanese Hezbollah fighters, have launched a major offensive in the countryside around Aleppo, which has been divided between government and rebel control for years.
The assault to surround Aleppo, once Syria’s biggest city with 2 million people, amounts to one of the most important shifts of momentum in the five year civil war that has killed 250,000 people and already driven 11 million from their homes.
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Ibrahim Ebu Leys/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
The United Nations said Tuesday that up to 300,000 of civilians could be cut off from food and aid if Syrian government forces surround rebel-held parts of Aleppo.
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The refugee crisis in Europe and the ongoing devastation in Syria gained worldwide attention in September when photos emerged showing a drowned Syrian boy, Alan Kurdi, lying facedown on the shores of Bodrum, Turkey. Alan’s father is now asking the world to do what it can to help his fellow refugees.
“I’d like the whole world to open its doors to Syrians,” Abdullah Kurdi told the U.K.’s Channel 4 News in a statement broadcasted on Christmas.
Kurdi was a barber in Kobani, Syria, before he and his family fled to Turkey to escape “barrel bombs, explosions and also Daesh” — another name for the militant group that calls itself the Islamic State.
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Anadolu Agency via Getty Images A Turkish gendarmerie soldier moves Alan Kurdi’s body, which washed ashore on a beach after a boat carrying 12 migrants sank off the coast of Mugla’s Bodrum district on Sept. 2, 2015.
Bashar Assad’s presidency looks likely to outlast Barack Obama’s.
As the United States has turned its attention to defeating the Islamic State group, it has softened its stance on the Syrian leader. More than four years ago, Obama demanded that Assad leave power. Administration officials later said Assad did not have to step down on “Day One” of a political transition. Now, they are going further.
A peace plan agreed to last weekend by 17 nations meeting in Vienna says nothing about Assad’s future, but states that “free and fair elections would be held pursuant to the new constitution within 18 months.” To clarify the timeline, the State Department said this past week that the clock starts once Assad’s representatives and opposition figures begin talks on a constitution. The vote would determine a new parliament, though not necessarily a new president.
Police officers hunting suspects involved in the Paris terror attacks exchanged gunfire during an apartment raid in the suburb of Saint-Denis early Wednesday. Before the seven-hour operation ended, two suspects were dead and seven others had been taken into custody.
The suspects who died were not identified, but French President François Hollande confirmed their link to the attacks that swept Paris Friday night, killing at least 129 people. One of the suspects was a woman who perished after detonating a bomb at the scene, the French prosecutors’ office said.
Police said multiple suspects related to the Paris attacks were believed to be holed up in the apartment, including Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the alleged mastermind, Agence France-Presse reports. Salah Abdeslam, whom authorities have been hunting for since Saturday, was also believed to be inside.
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Greece’s prime minister angrily condemned Europe’s response to the refugee crisis Friday, accusing leaders of “crocodile tears” after 22 people drowned in two shipwrecks.
Alex Tsipras expressed “endless grief” at the latest tragedies, saying they had left Europe shamed.
He was speaking as the migrant death toll in the Aegean Sea reached nearly 50 over the past three days.
The Merchant Marine Ministry said 19 people were killed and 138 were rescued near the eastern Aegean Sea island of Kalymnos, in one of the worst accidents in Greek waters since the mass migrant flows started fleeing the war in Syria.
Believing that Islamic State captives held on a compound in northern Iraq faced “imminent mass execution,” dozens of U.S. special operations troops and Iraqi forces raided the site Thursday, freeing approximately 70 Iraqi prisoners in an operation that saw the first American killed in combat in the country since the U.S. war against IS began in 2014, officials said.
The raiders killed and captured a number of militants and recovered what the Pentagon called a trove of valuable intelligence about the terrorist organization.
The U.S. service member who died was not publicly identified pending notification of relatives. Officials said this was the first American combat death in Iraq since the U.S. began its counter-IS military campaign in August 2014.
U.S. President Barack Obama and Russian President Vladimir Putin sharply disagreed Monday over the chaos in Syria, with Obama urging a political transition to replace the Syrian president but Putin warning it would be a mistake to abandon the current government.
After dueling speeches at the United Nations General Assembly, Obama and Putin also met privately for 90 minutes — their first face-to-face encounter in nearly a year.
At the heart of their dispute over Syria is the fate of embattled Syrian leader Bashar Assad, a Russian ally. The U.S. has long called for Assad to leave power, while Russia has cast the Syrian government as the only viable option for confronting the Islamic State, a militant group that has taken advantage of the vacuum created by the civil war.
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Image: Breaking News and Opinion on The Huffington Post
In Calgary, between the soccer practices and the hours at her accounting job and the potlucks with the neighbors, Christianne Boudreau spent every spare minute watching Islamic State videos, her nose pressed up against the computer screen.
She sat in the basement of her middle-class home in her middle-class suburb, a bare room that once belonged to her eldest son, Damian, and watched men posturing with big guns like teenagers. She watched firefights. She watched executions. But Boudreau barely registered any of the bloodshed. She was focused on the faces behind the balaclavas, trying to spot her son’s eyes.
In Copenhagen, Karolina Dam was wild with fear. Her son Lukas had been in Syria for seven months. Three days earlier, she received word that he had been injured outside Aleppo, but she was convinced that he was dead. Sitting alone that evening, nervously puffing on a vaporizer, she couldn’t stop herself from sending a Viber message into the ether. “Lukas,” she wrote, “I love you so much my beloved son. I miss you and want to hug and smell you. Hold your soft hands in mine and smile at you.”
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Nearly 50 Drown in 3 Days as Refugee Boats Sink
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James' World 2 