America's uneasy Gulf allies adding to arsenals

In this Monday Nov. 12, 2007 file photo, an Emarati visitor asks a U.S. military representative questions, as they stand next to an MQ-1 Predator spy plane, during the 2nd day of the 10th Dubai Airshow, at the Dubai airport, United Arab Emirates. In the past two months, the U.S. Defense Department has notified Congress of possible arms deals totaling more than $11.3 billion to Gulf states such as Qatar and Kuwait, which are seen as among the critical frontline partners in U.S. strategies to counter Iran and protect oil shipping lanes. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili-File)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — While Iran's military loudly trumpets every new project or purported advance in hopes of rattling the U.S. and its Gulf Arab allies, the U.S. is quietly answering with an array of proposed arms sales across the region as part of a wider effort to counter Tehran.

In the past two months, the Defense Department has notified Congress of possible deals totaling more than $11.3 billion to Gulf states such as Qatar and Kuwait, which are seen as some of America's critical front-line partners in containing Iran and protecting oil shipping lanes.

The proposed sales — including Patriot missile batteries and Apache attack helicopters — are still modest compared with massive Gulf purchases such as Saudi Arabia's $60 billion package last year. That deal included more than 80 new F-15SA fighter jets, missiles, radar warning systems and other equipment.

But the recent flurry of expected sales from U.S. firms, approved by the Pentagon and outlined in notifications to Congress, underscores the growing emphasis among nervous Gulf states on seeking quick upgrades to existing firepower and defensive networks.

Gulf worries about possible military action against Iran have increased with diplomatic efforts making little headway in easing the showdown over Tehran's nuclear program, which the West and others fear could eventually develop atomic weapons. Iran says it only seeks reactors for energy and medical uses.

An Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reported Sunday that National Security Adviser Tom Donilon briefed Israeli officials on possible U.S. attack plans if diplomacy and sanctions fail to pressure Tehran to scale back its nuclear enrichment program. A senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential talks, denied the Haaretz report.

The news reports reflect the uncertainties in the region with negotiations nearly stalled and Iran trying to push back against deepening sanctions on its vital oil exports.

"There was a bit of a breather in the region when (nuclear) talks resumed," said Bruno Tertrais, senior researcher at the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. "That is quickly fading."

In its place: a sense of military adjustments moving at a faster pace.

Washington plans to keep at least 13,500 troops in Kuwait — down slightly from the current 15,000 — but with an expanded mission as a potential rapid-reaction force for the region. The Pentagon also has scores of warplanes and other assets across the Gulf, including air bases in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

At sea, the U.S. Navy plans to lead maneuvers in September that include minesweeping drills — a clear response to Iran's threats to block oil tankers from passing through the Strait of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf in retaliation for the tightening Western sanctions.

The U.S. is also boosting its Gulf flotilla, directed by the Navy's 5th Fleet in Bahrain. Among the additions: a floating assault base aboard the retrofitted USS Ponce and accelerated deployment of the aircraft carrier USS John C. Stennis to ensure two carriers are in the Gulf region at all times.

"We are seeing more and more bluster from the Iranian side and the U.S. and Gulf allies showing the Iranians they are a united front," said Theodore Karasik, a regional security expert at the Dubai-based Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis. "The Gulf states are nervous. They show this nervousness by buying more weapons."

Among the proposed U.S. sales is a $4.2 billion package to Kuwait for 60 Patriot missiles and related systems to "strengthen its homeland defense and deter regional threats," the Defense Department said in a statement. Kuwait could also buy, pending congressional approval, a $49 million arsenal of 300 Hellfire II missiles, which can be launched from helicopters or drones.

For Qatar — which hosts one of the Pentagon's command hubs — the Defense Department is seeking clearance for a $6.6 billion air support upgrade that includes 24 AH-64D Apache attack helicopters, 12 Blackhawk helicopters and 22 Seahawk helicopters, with options to buy six more.

The Apaches would assist with "protection of key oil and infrastructure and platforms which are vital to U.S. and Western economic interests," the Defense Department said.

Oman, which shares control of Hormuz with Iran, is seeking an $86 million purchase that includes 55 Sidewinder missiles as part of plans to upgrade its F-16 fighter fleet.

For decades, the Gulf had looked mostly to Washington for its weapons, but European arms deals also appear on the rise.

In Berlin, German government spokesman Georg Streiter said Monday there has been an "expression of interest" by Qatar in about 200 Leopard II tanks. A similar Leopard tank deal with Saudi Arabiawas reported last year by German media.

In May, Saudi Arabia signed a $3 billion deal with Britain for air force training planes apparently linked to a 2007 agreement to buy 72 Eurofighter Typhoon fighters.

The weapons requests also reinforce the toughening stance against Iran by main rival Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf Arab states. The six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council has repeatedly warned Tehran about "meddling" in Gulf affairs. Saudi Arabia and Qatar have taken a leading role in supporting Syrian rebels trying to topple Bashar Assad's regime, which is Iran's main Mideast ally.

Last week, a commander of Iran's powerful Revolutionary Guards warned that "hated Arab" rivals could face repercussions for their efforts to bring down Assad.

Although the Gulf Arab states have no direct ties to Israel, any military strike on Iran by the Jewish state could require some degree of coordination, with Washington likely to play an intermediary role. Gulf military forces also could be quickly drawn into a wider conflict or a confrontation over the Strait of Hormuz, the passageway for one-fifth of the world's oil.

"Amid the standoff between Iran, Israel and the West, there's another side that is often overlooked," said Sami al-Faraj, director of the Kuwait Center for Strategic Studies. "It is the Gulf states. They are the ones caught in the middle."

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Associated Press writer Frank Jordans in Berlin contributed to this report.

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Capital flight Illustration: Giulio Frigieri for the Observer (click here for a larger version of this graphic)

NYPD 'consistently violated basic rights' during Occupy protests – study

Report by NYU and Fordham law schools found 'shocking level of impunity' and department that acted beyond its powers

The report accused the NYPD of deploying unnecessary force and routinely obstructing press freedoms.
Photograph: Jessica Rinaldi/Reuters

The first systematic look at the New York police department's response to Occupy Wall Street protests paints a damning picture of an out-of-control and aggressive organization that routinely acted beyond its powers.

In a report that followed an eight-month study (pdf), researchers at the law schools of NYU and Fordham accuse the NYPD of deploying unnecessarily aggressive force, obstructing press freedoms and making arbitrary and baseless arrests.

The study, published on Wednesday, found evidence that police made violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments, obstructed independent legal monitors and was opaque about its policies.

The NYPD report is the first of a series to look at how police authorities in five US cities, including Oakland and Boston, have treated the Occupy movement since it began in September 2011. The research concludes that there now is a systematic effort by authorities to suppress protests, even when these are lawful and pose no threat to the public.

Sarah Knuckey, a professor of law at NYU, said: "All the case studies we collected show the police are violating basic rights consistently, and the level of impunity is shocking".

To be launched over the coming months, the reports are being done under the Protest and Assembly Rights Project, a national consortium of law school clinics addressing America's response to Occupy Wall Street.

The NYPD appears to be the worst offender, in large part because it has made little attempt – unlike Oakland, for example – to reassess its practices or open itself up to dialogue or review. The NYPD practices documented in the report include:

• Aggressive, unnecessary and excessive police force against peaceful protesters, bystanders, legal observers, and journalists. This included the use of batons, pepper spray, metal barricades, scooters, and horses.

• Obstruction of press freedoms and independent legal monitoring, including arrests of at least 10 journalists, and multiple cases of preventing journalists from reporting on protests or barring and evicting them from specific sites.

• Pervasive surveillance of peaceful political activity.

• Violent late-night raids on peaceful encampments.

• Unjustified closure of public spaces, dispersal of peaceful assemblies, and trapping of protesters.

• Arbitrary and selective rule enforcement and baseless arrests.

• Failures to ensure transparency about government policies.

• Failures to ensure accountability for those allegedly responsible for abuses.

The report argues that the lack of transparency and accountability is especially troubling because the public does not know whether police actions are guided by specific written policies, or whether they are random or ad hoc.

The NYPD turned down multiple requests to meet the researchers, who say they were keen include the police's point of view in the report. The other four police departments examined for the project all sent representatives to meet researchers. The NYPD did not provide a comment to the Guardian by the time of publication of this article.

In New York, researchers had to obtain documents by filing freedom of information requests with the NYPD, and Knuckey said some requests have still not been answered. The researchers also requested meetings with the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, the department of parks and recreation, the public advocate, and the district attorney's office, none of whom responded.

Researchers reviewed hours of video footage, documents and press reports, as well as conducting interviews with protestors and witnesses. "Many interviewees cried while speaking about their interaction with the police – they still carried a sense of trauma," Knuckey said,.

As a legal observer during the Occupy protests, Knuckey recalled being subjected to verbal abuse, arrested and witnessed fellow police officers covering for errant colleagues. "The message all of this sends out, especially to younger officers in the force, is one of impunity," she said.

The report lists a total of 130 incidents of excessive or unwarranted force, which, it says, require investigation by authorities. To date, only one NYPD officer – deputy inspector Anthony Bologna, who pepper-sprayed several female protesters on 24 September 2011 – has faced disciplinary proceedings for using excessive force during the Occupy protests.

The report makes a host of recommendations around investigation of abuses, transparency, policy review and reformulation, and setting up external oversight. NYU and Fordham are also making the report the basis of written complaints made today to Bloomberg and the NYPD, the state department of justice as well as the United Nations.

Raising the matter with the the international body is especially important, Knuckey said, because there have been instances of authorities in Egypt, Syria and Indonesia pointing to NYPD actions to justify their own and far more severe crackdowns on non-violent protests.

"The point needs to be made that the NYPD does not exemplify international human rights law, it violates it," she said.

Activists: Renewed bombardment, clashes in Aleppo

Targeted in Syria civil war, Iraqis flee back home

In a Wednesday, July 25, 2012 photo, Iraqi refugees from Syria arrive at the border crossing near the Iraqi town of Qaim, 200 miles (320 kilometers) west of Baghdad, Iraq. Over 15,000 Iraqis have fled the Syrian civil war over the last two weeks. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

BAGHDAD (AP) — When he saw the bodies of men and women left rotting in the streets of Damascus, Hassan Hadi knew that thesectarian violence he had fled Iraq to escape years ago had now come to Syria. Despairingly, he left his belongings and fled again, back home.

Hadi is one of at least 12,680 Iraqis who streamed back to their homeland the past month to escape the Syrian civil war. Most of them are Iraqi Shiites, fleeing a reported rash of attacks against their community, apparently by Syrian rebel gunmen.

The attacks reflect the increasingly ugly sectarian nature of Syria's conflict, where an opposition largely based among the country's Sunni majority has risen up against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, which is dominated by members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam. The motives for the attacks on Iraqis are unclear. They may be revenge against any Iraqi because the Shiite-led Iraqi government is seen as siding with Assad. They may also be fueled by sectarian hatreds, with resentment of Syria's Alawite leadership flaring into anger at Shiites.

In July alone, 23 Iraqi Shiites have been killed in Syria, some of them beheaded, according to the Washington-based Shiite Rights Watch. In one gruesome case, the U.N. said an Iraqi family of seven was killed at gunpoint in their Damascus apartment.

But going back was wrenching for Hadi, given Iraq's continued violence. "There are still bombings and explosions here, and when we decided to return to Iraq, it was a hard moment — we cried a lot," he said, speaking at his mother's house in Baghdad, where his family is staying until they can find a home.

The exodus of Iraqis back home is a bitter reversal for refugees tossed back and forth by violence. According to U.N. estimates, more than 1 million Iraqis fled to Syria between 2005 and 2008, when their homeland was on the brink of civil war, torn between Shiite militias and Sunni insurgentsbutchering their rival communities. Those who fled to Syria were a sectarian mix, though the majority were Sunnis.

Over the past few years, Iraqis have been slowly leaving Syria, many returning home as violence in Iraq eased. Fewer than 200,000 Iraqis remain in Syria, according to the office of the Iraqi ambassador in Damascus.

The recent targeting of Iraqis, however, brought a spike in returns. The majority of Iraqis fleeing Syria for home over the past month are Shiites, according to Saif Sabah, a spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of Displacement and Migration.

According to U.N. and Iraqi officials, most of them fled Damascus, which in July saw its worst fighting yet of the 17-month-old Syrian conflict. For days, rebels took over whole neighborhoods of the Syrian capital, prompting a ferocious assault by government forces. Amid the fighting, it appears rebel fighters targeted Iraqis in the city.

The U.N. refugee agency said Iraqis in the mainly Shiite Damascus suburb of Sayeda Zeinab in particular were fleeing because of increasing violence in general but also "targeted threats" against them. Sayeda Zeinab saw heavy activity by rebel fighters during the Damascus battles.

Hadi and his family lived in Sayeda Zeinab. He said Sunni rebels and gangs went on a rampage in the suburb. He blamed the Free Syrian Army, the loose umbrella group of rebel fighters.

"The gangs of the Free Syrian Army started to spread in the area, killing women and some children as well as men," Hadi said last week. "The bodies were left on the street for two days because no one could evacuate the casualties. My children were hysterical."

"They are spreading sectarian violence in Syria," Hadi said.

His report and other reports of anti-Iraqi violence could not be independently confirmed since Assad's regime has tightly restricted journalists in Syria. The conflict has seen numerous tit-for-tat sectarian slayings among Syrians, including reported massacres by Alawite gunmen in Sunni areas.

A spokesman for the Free Syria Army strongly denied it has participated in or sanctioned the targeting of Shiite civilians.

"The members of the Free Syrian Army have principles and never do such things," Brig. Gen. Anwar Saad-Eddin said. "The security situation has deteriorated nationwide and that anyone holds a weapon can say he's from the Free Syrian Army. We have already arrested some of them."

Hadi and his family of five fled to Syria in 2009 from the Iraqi Shiite holy city of Karbala in 2009 after Sunni insurgents killed his older brother. He has returned to a homeland still torn by deadly attacks. On July 23, Sunni insurgents linked to al-Qaida launched attacks in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities that killed 115 people, the country's deadliest in more than two years.

At the al-Walid border crossing between Iraq and Syria crossing, Intisar Adel waited with her husband and daughter to enter Iraq. They fled to Syria in 2009. Now they were returning after gunmen — she believes they were rebels — stormed their apartment building in Damascus and ordered the landlord to evict all Iraqis, she said.

"They shot an Iraqi in the leg and they robbed some Iraqi residents in the building," she said. "We immediately left the building and left our belongings there.

"The situation is unbearable."

Most Iraqis are returning with the help of free flights and bus tickets paid for by the Iraqi government. In the last two weeks alone, Baghdad has flown at least 17 planeloads home from Syria. At least 5,000 Iraqis have driven across border crossings in their chaotic exodus from Syria.

Iraqi officials and Mideast experts say the targeting of Iraqis may be payback against the Baghdad government's ties with Iran, which is Assad's strongest ally in the region.

Though Baghdad has publicly refused to be drawn into Syria's war, skeptics believe it is at least helping Iran ship weapons and other reinforcements to Assad's regime. In March, the U.S. urged Baghdad to cut off its airspace to flights headed to Syria from Iran, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki pledged to curb arms smuggling across his borders.

"It seems that the Syrian opposition wrongly thinks that Iraq's government is taking the side of the regime. And some armed groups are targeting Iraqis because of this," said Raad al-Dahlaki, a Sunni lawmaker in Baghdad.

"The people behind attacking Iraqis want to send a message that the conflict is of a regional dimension," al-Dahlaki said, "and some governments and countries in the region should pay now for their stances."

That reflects the broader fear, that as the Syrian conflict worsens it could turn into a wider sectarian conflict. Kamran Bokhari, a Toronto-based expert on Mideast issues for the global intelligence company Statfor, predicted militant groups from across the region will flock to Syria if a peace agreement isn't settled soon.

"The entire region is descending into a regional geosectarian war," Bokhari said. "The question is, how bad is it going to get?"

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