“Soft despotism is a term coined by Alexis de Tocqueville describing the state into which a country overrun by "a network of small complicated rules" might degrade. Soft despotism is different from despotism (also called 'hard despotism') in the sense that it is not obvious to the people."
Turkey has ‘serious questions’ to answer: Reactions to RT report on post-ISIS town in Syria
The stream of accusations is growing against Ankara over illegal oil trade and support of Islamic State, with politicians and experts calling for Turkey to be held accountable for its actions after a new batch of evidence gathered by RT.
Former UK ambassador to Syria, Peter Ford, has described as “very convincing” a report aired by RT which features piles of oil accounting papers left behind by Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) fighters.
“There was plenty of evidence even before these latest – very damning – revelations that Turkey was up to its neck in support for collaboration with Islamic State,” he said.
According to Ford, the “obsession” of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan with removing from power his Syrian counterpart, Bashar Assad, and preventing the strengthening of the Kurds in Syria saw Turkey become eager “to stop at nothing, including collaboration with Islamic State terrorists,” Ford stressed.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that if Turkey had sincerely tried to put an end to the activities of Islamic State it could well have gone slow and we wouldn’t perhaps even be having this latest atrocity in Brussels,” the former ambassador stressed.
On Tuesday, 31 people died in the Belgian capital in suicide bomb attacks at the airport and subway. The attacks were later claimed by IS.
Lord Peter Truscott, a life peer in the UK’s House of Lords, stressed that Ankara has “serious questions” to answer following the revelations by RT.
“RT's report highlights some alarming evidence that Turkey is buying oil from Daesh [Arabic pejorative term for IS], and is either supporting or turning a blind eye to terrorists crossing its border into Syria. If this is the case, Turkey needs to stop aiding Daesh in its murderous activities,” Lord Truscott stressed.
Matthew Gordon-Banks, a former Senior Research Fellow at the UK Defense Academy and former British MP, told RT in an emailed response that “there is no doubt that Turkey has helped ISIS gain huge revenues in the recent past from illegally selling oil.”
Gordon-Banks also praised Russia’s recent military operation in Syria, saying that it had largely cut IS supply lines, hitting them both economically as well as militarily.Bernard Monot, a French member of the European Parliament, has slammed Ankara for the double game it’s playing with Europe.
“On the one had they play along with us in order to get financial assistance from the European Union, but on the other – there is a feeling that they are in talks with IS… there is a feeling that this ‘caliphate’ is working closely with the Turkish president,” Monot told RT.
The joint ventures of Erdogan and Islamic State may include “illicit trade in oil and, of course, training camps, which may be on the Turkish territory,” the National Front Party member said.
As for plans to include Turkey into the European Union, Monot stressed that the Turkish state “currently has nothing to do in the EU.”
Turkey has been actively engaged in the Syrian war since the outset, and has repeatedly denied that it is aiding IS. The claims have come from the Russian military, the Syrian authorities, the Kurds and other sources.
An RT Documentary crew has visited towns in northern Syria recently liberated from IS militants. There, the journalists obtained invoices detailing the large-scale illegal oil trade carried out by the terrorists, as well Islamist propaganda brochures printed in Turkey.
They interviewed an IS fighter, detained by the Kurds, who said that the group is selling oil to Turkey.
The RT crew also filmed passports of the deceased or escaped jihadists, many of which contained stamps issued at Turkish border checkpoints.
In the decades since the draft ended in 1973, a strange new military has emerged in the United States. Think of it, if you will, as a post-democratic force that prides itself on its warrior ethos rather than the old-fashioned citizen-soldier ideal. As such, it’s a military increasingly divorced from the people, with a way of life ever more foreign to most Americans (adulatory as they may feel toward its troops). Abroad, it’s now regularly put to purposes foreign to any traditional idea of national defense. In Washington, it has become a force unto itself, following its own priorities, pursuing its own agendas, increasingly unaccountable to either the president or Congress.
Three areas highlight the post-democratic transformation of this military with striking clarity: the blending of military professionals with privatized mercenaries in prosecuting unending “limited” wars; the way senior military commanders are cashing in on retirement; and finally the emergence of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) as a quasi-missionary imperial force with a presence in at least 135 countries a year (and counting).
The all-volunteer military and mercenaries: an undemocratic amalgam
I’m a product of the all-volunteer military. In 1973, the Nixon administration ended the draft, which also marked the end of a citizen-soldier tradition that had served the nation for two centuries. At the time, neither the top brass nor the president wanted to face a future in which, in the style of the Vietnam era just then winding up, a force of citizen-soldiers could vote with their feet and their mouths in the kinds of protest that had only recently left the Army in significant disarray. The new military was to be all volunteers and a thoroughly professional force. (Think: no dissenters, no protesters, no antiwar sentiments; in short, no repeats of what had just happened.) And so it has remained for more than 40 years.
Most Americans were happy to see the draft abolished. (Although young men still register for selective service at age 18, there are neither popular calls for its return, nor serious plans to revive it.) Yet its end was not celebrated by all. At the time, some military men advised against it, convinced that what, in fact, did happen would happen: that an all-volunteer force would become more prone to military adventurism enabled by civilian leaders who no longer had to consider the sort of opposition draft call-ups might create for undeclared and unpopular wars.
In 1982, historian Joseph Ellis summed up such sentiments in a prophetic passage in an essay titled “Learning Military Lessons from Vietnam” (from the book Men at War):
“[V]irtually all studies of the all-volunteer army have indicated that it is likely to be less representative of and responsive to popular opinion, more expensive, more jealous of its own prerogatives, more xenophobic — in other words, more likely to repeat some of the most grievous mistakes of Vietnam … Perhaps the most worrisome feature of the all-volunteer army is that it encourages soldiers to insulate themselves from civilian society and allows them to cling tenaciously to outmoded visions of the profession of arms. It certainly puts an increased burden of responsibility on civilian officials to impose restraints on military operations, restraints which the soldiers will surely perceive as unjustified.”
Ellis wrote this more than 30 years ago — before Desert Storm, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, or the launching of the War on Terror. These wars (and other U.S. military interventions of the last decades) have provided vivid evidence that civilian officials have felt emboldened in wielding a military freed from the constraints of the old citizen army. Indeed, it says something of our twenty-first-century moment that military officers have from time to time felt the need to restrain civilian officials rather than vice versa. Consider, for instance, Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki’s warning early in 2003 that a post-invasion Iraq would need to be occupied by “several hundred thousand” troops. Shinseki clearly hoped that his (all-too-realistic) estimate would tamp down the heady optimism of top Bush administration officials that any such war would be a “cakewalk,” that the Iraqis would strew “bouquets” of flowers in the path of the invaders, and that the U.S. would be able to garrison an American-style Iraq in the fashion of South Korea until hell froze over. Prophetic Shinseki was, but not successful. His advice was dismissed out of hand, as was he.
Events since Desert Storm in 1991 suggest that the all-volunteer military has been more curse than blessing. Partially to blame: a new dynamic in modern American history, the creation of a massive military force that is not of the people, by the people, or for the people. It is, of course, a dynamic hardly new to history. Writing in the eighteenth century about the decline and fall of Rome, the historian Edward Gibbon noted that:
“In the purer ages of the commonwealth [of Rome], the use of arms was reserved for those ranks of citizens who had a country to love, a property to defend, and some share in enacting those laws, which it was their interest, as well as duty, to maintain. But in proportion as the public freedom was lost in extent of conquest, war was gradually improved into an art, and degraded into a trade.”
As the U.S. has become more authoritarian and more expansive, its military has come to serve the needs of others, among them elites driven by dreams of profit and power. Some will argue that this is nothing new. I’ve read my Smedley Butler and I’m well aware that historically the U.S. military was often used in un-democratic ways to protect and advance various business interests. In General Butler’s day, however, that military was a small quasi-professional force with a limited reach. Today’s version is enormous, garrisoning roughly 800 foreign bases across the globe, capable of sending its Hellfire missile-armed drones on killing missions into country after country across the Greater Middle East and Africa, and possessing a vision of what it likes to call “full-spectrum dominance” meant to facilitate “global reach, global power.” In sum, the U.S. military is far more powerful, far less accountable — and far more dangerous.
As a post-democratic military has arisen in this country, so have a set of “warrior corporations” — that is, private, for-profit mercenary outfits that now regularly accompany American forces in essentially equal numbers into any war zone. In the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Blackwater was the most notorious of these, but other mercenary outfits like Triple Canopy and DynCorp were also deeply involved. This rise of privatized militaries and mercenaries naturally contributes to actions that are inherently un-democratic and divorced from the will and wishes of the people. It is also inherently a less accountable form of war, since no one even bothers to count the for-profit dead, nor do their bodies come home in flag-draped coffins for solemn burial in military cemeteries; and Americans don’t approach such mercenaries to thank them for their service. All of which allows for the further development of a significantly under-the-radar form of war making.
The phrase “limited war,” applied to European conflicts from the close of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 to the French Revolution in 1789, and later to conventional wars in the nuclear age, has fresh meaning in twenty-first-century America. These days, the limits of limited war, such as they are, fall less on the warriors and more on the American people who are increasingly cut out of the process. They are, for instance, purposely never mobilized for battle, but encouraged to act as though they were living in a war-less land. American war efforts, which invariably take place in distant lands, are not supposed to interfere with business as usual in the “homeland,” which, of course, means consumerism and consumption. You will find no rationing in today’s America, nor calls for common sacrifice of any sort. If anything, wars have simply become another consumable item on the American menu. They consume fuel and resources, money, and intellect, all in staggering amounts. In a sense, they are themselves a for-profit consumable, often with tie-ins to video games, movies, and other forms of entertainment.
In the rush for money and in the name of patriotism, the horrors of wars, faced squarely by many Americans in the Vietnam War era, are now largely disregarded. One question that this election season has raised: What if our post-democratic military is driven by an autocrat who insists that it must obey his whims in the cause of “making America great again”?
Come 2017, we may find out.
------------------------
Senior military men: checking out and cashing in
There was a time when old soldiers like Douglas MacArthur talked wistfully about fading away in retirement. Not so for today’s senior military officers. Like so many politicians, they regularly go in search of the millionaires’ club on leaving public service, even as they accept six-figure pensions and other retirement benefits from the government. In the post-military years, being John Q. Public isn’t enough. One must be General Johannes Q. Publicus (ret.), a future financial wizard, powerful CEO, or educator supreme. Heck, maybe all three.
Consider General David Petraeus, America’s “surge” general in Iraq and later head of U.S. Central Command. He left the directorship of the CIA in disgrace after an adulterous affair with his biographer-mistress, with whom he illegally shared classified information. Petraeus has since found teaching gigs at the University of Southern California, the City University of New York, and Harvard’s Kennedy School while being appointed chairman of the investment firm KKR Global Institute. Another retired general who cashed in with an investment firm is Ray Odierno, the former Army chief of staff, who became a special adviser to JP Morgan Chase, the financial giant. (Indeed, the oddness of Odierno, an ex-football player known for his total dedication to the Army, being hired by a financial firm inspired this spoof at a military humor site.)
But few men have surpassed retired Air Force General John Jumper. He cashed in by joining many corporate boards, including the board of directors for Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a major defense contractor. After five years he became its CEO with a seven-figure salary. Then you have retired general officers who pull down more than $300 an hour (no $7.25 federal minimum wage for them) advising their former subordinates at the Pentagon as “senior mentors.”
No one expects generals to take vows of poverty upon retirement. Indeed, those hefty government pensions and assorted other benefits would preclude such vows. But in the post-democratic military world, duty, honor, country has become duty, honor, cash.
For today’s crop of retiree generals, no Cincinnatus need apply. Of course, there’s long been a revolving door between Pentagon offices and corporate boardrooms, but that door seems to be spinning ever faster in the twenty-first century.
The peril of all this should be obvious: the prospect of cashing-in big time upon retirement can’t help but affect the judgment of generals while they’re still wearing the uniform. When you reach high rank, it’s already one big boys’ club where everyone knows everyone else’s reputation. Get one for being an outspoken critic of a contractor’s performance, or someone who refuses to play ball or think by the usual rules of Washington, and chances are you’re not going to be hired to lucrative positions on various corporate boards in retirement.
Such an insular, even incestuous system of pay-offs naturally reinforces conventional thinking. Generals go along to get along, embracing prevailing thinking on interventionism, adventurism, and dominance. Especially troublesome is the continued push for foreign military sales (arms exports) to some of the world’s most active war zones. In this way, weaponry and wars are increasingly the business of America, a “growth” industry that is only reinforced when retired generals are hired to lead companies, to advise financial institutes, or even to teach young adults in prestigious schools.
For Petraeus is not the only retired general to lecture at such places. General Stanley McChrystal, who infamously was fired by President Obama for allowing a command climate that was disrespectful to the nation’s civilian chain of command, is now a senior fellow at the Jackson Institute at Yale University. Admiral William McRaven, former head of U.S. Special Operations Command during the era of black sites and deaths by torture, is now the chancellor of the entire University of Texas system. McRaven had no prior background in education, just as Odierno had no background in finance before being hired to a top-tier position of authority. Both of them were, however, the military version of “company men” who, on retirement, possessed a wealth of contacts, which helped make them highly marketable commodities.
If you’re wearing three or four stars in the military, you’ve already been carefully vetted as a “company man,” since the promotion process screens out mavericks. Independent thinkers tend to retire or separate from the military long before they reach eligibility for flag rank. The most persistent and often the most political officers rise to the top, not the brightest and the best.
Special operations: the American military’s jesuits
As Nick Turse has documented at TomDispatch, post-9/11 America has seen the rapid growth of U.S. Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, a secretive military within the military that now numbers almost 70,000 operatives. The scholar and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson used to refer to that Agency as the president’s private army. Now, the commander-in-chief quite literally has such an army (as, in a sense, he also now has a private robotic air force of drone assassins dispatchable more or less anywhere). The expansion of SOCOM from a modest number of elite military units (like the Green Berets or SEAL Team 6) into a force larger than significant numbers of national armies is an underreported and under-considered development of our post-democratic military moment. It has now become the regular go-to force in the war on terror from Iraq to Afghanistan, Syria to Cameroon, Libya to Somalia.
As Gregory Foster, a Vietnam veteran and professor at the National Defense University noted recently, this now-massive force “provides an almost infinite amount of potential space for meddling and ‘mission creep’ abroad and at home due, in part, to the increasingly blurred lines between military, intelligence, police, and internal security functions… [T]he very nature of [special ops] missions fosters a military culture that is particularly destructive to accountability and proper lines of responsibility… the temptation to employ forces that can circumvent oversight without objection is almost irresistible.”
Like the Jesuit order of priests who, beginning in the sixteenth century, took the fight to heretical Protestants and spread the Catholic faith from Europe and Asia in the Old World to nearly everywhere in the New World, today’s SOCOM operators crusade globally on the part of America. They slay evildoers while advancing U.S. foreign policy and business goals in at least 150 countries. Indeed, the head of SOCOM, General Joseph Votel III, West Point grad and Army Ranger, put it plainly when he said that America is witnessing “a golden age for special operations.”
A military force effectively unaccountable to the people tears at the very fabric of the Constitution, which is at pains to mandate firm and complete control over the military by Congress, acting in the people’s name. Combine such a military with a range of undeclared wars and other conflicts and a Congress for which cheerleading, not control, is the order of the day, and you have a recipe for a force unto itself.
It used to be said of Prussia that it was a military with a state attached to it. America’s post-democratic military, combined with the proliferation of intelligence outfits and the growth of the country’s second defense department, the Department of Homeland Security, could increasingly be considered something like an emerging proto-state. Call it America’s 51st state, except that instead of having two senators and a few representatives based on its size, it has all the senators and all the representatives based on its power, budget, and grip on American culture.
It is, in other words, a post-democratic leviathan to be reckoned with. And not a single Democratic or Republican candidate for commander-in-chief has spent a day in uniform. Prediction for November: another overwhelming victory at the polls for America’s 51st state.
----------------------
William Astore
William J. Astore, a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF), is a TomDispatch regular. He has taught at the Air Force Academy and the Naval Postgraduate School, and now teaches History at the Pennsylvania College of Technology. He can be reached at wastore@pct.edu.
The paroxysms of hatred and bigotry spewed by the two GOP frontrunners in the 2016 presidential campaign probably do not need any pretext, since Trump and Cruz are clearly sadistic and unfair individuals. But the Brussels airport and metro attacks gave them another excuse to blame all Muslims for the actions of a tiny fringe.
Trump accused Muslims of not reporting terrorist activity to the government, and suggested that torture would be useful, and then wanted to put all mosques under surveillance, and again called for a Muslim exclusion act regarding Muslims coming to the US. Cruz appears to think that Muslim Americans live all together so that their ‘neighborhoods’ can be patrolled. But most Muslims in the US are not segregated in that way, living in amongst all other kinds of Americans. Most terrorism in the US is anyway by white nationalists and anti-abortion nuts.
Ripping up the Bill of Rights is an odd platform for “conservative” candidates. What is it that they want to conserve if not the Constitution? Arbitrary search and seizure of personal papers and effects, which is what they mean by surveillance, was the technique used by George III, against whom the American Revolution was fought to stop such abuses. Trump and Cruz want to go back to those George III techniques.
But in any case, it turns out that the central premise of this sort of hate speech toward Muslims is simply incorrect.
Turkey, a Muslim-majority state, arrested one of the Brussels attackers (Ibrahim El Bakraoui?) in summer of 2015, in Gaziantep not far from Syria. Turkey determined that the individual had links to terrorist groups and posed a danger. It then turned him back over to Europe with a warning that he was, in Ankara’s view, a very dangerous individual.
Turkey alleges that Belgium blithely declared that there was no evidence El Bakraoui was a radical and let him go. Just a guess, but if Turkey arrests you for going to Syria to fight alongside Daesh (ISIS, ISIL), I’d say that’s material support of terrorism and should put you away.
Moreover, it has come out that the brothers were a petty thiefs, burglars and carjackers, not pious men who showed up to mosque much.
So the hateful and unconstitutional methods of Trump and Cruz wouldn’t have done anything to identify the El Bakraoui brothers. And it turns our that Trump is dead wrong that Muslims did not finger the El Bakraouis. A Muslim government and Muslim police arrested one of them, sniffed out his terrorism, turned him over to European authorities, and explicitly warned them that he had been trying to join Daesh in Syria.
El Bakraoui was clearly depressed and filled with despair about his future, fearing a lifetime in jail for his Daesh associations. But if he had just been investigated, tried and incarcerated, he could not have lashed out against innocents in this way.
So we can conclude that a few Muslims are petty criminals and attracted to Daesh, and that other Muslims can sometimes recognize the syndrome quite clearly, and it is the European authorities who had difficulty acting on the intelligence coup they were handed by Muslim Turkey.
The story underlines how only better cooperation between Muslim countries and NATO can hope to defeat Daesh. Trump & Cruz are seeking worse cooperation, which will make our world more dangerous.
The Vermont senator called himself a “friend” and “partner” of Israel but called for an end to occuption of Palestine.
After Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders decided against attending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference, he outlined his views on the Palestine-Israel conflict and the wider Middle East via video, calling himself a “partner” and “friend” of Israel but not shying away from criticizing one of the United States’ closest allies.
“To my mind, as friends – long-term friends with Israel – we are obligated to speak the truth as we see it. That is what real friendship demands, especially in difficult times,“ said Sanders.
“I am here to tell the American people that, if elected president, I will work tirelessly to advance the cause of peace as a partner and as a friend to Israel.”
Sanders then addressed the need to help Palestinians given the challenges they face. “But to be successful, we have also got to be a friend not only to Israel, but to the Palestinian people, where in Gaza unemployment today is 44 percent and we have there a poverty rate which is almost as high,” Sanders explained.
A week after Israel appropriated huge tracts of land in the occupied West Bank, Sanders joined the United Nations and the European Union in criticizing Israel’s expansion of settlements, saying it “undermines the peace process” and Israeli “security.”
“It is absurd for elements within the Netanyahu government to suggest that building more settlements in the West Bank is the appropriate response to the most recent violence. It is also not acceptable that the Netanyahu government decided to withhold hundreds of millions of Shekels in tax revenue from the Palestinians, which it is supposed to collect on their behalf,” Sanders said.
The Vermont senator also called for an end to the economic blockade of Gaza and a “sustainable and equitable distribution of precious water resources so that Israel and Palestine can both thrive as neighbors.”
“Peace has to mean security for every Israeli from violence and terrorism. But peace also means security for every Palestinian. It means achieving self-determination, civil rights and economic well-being for the Palestinian people,” said Sanders.
“Peace will mean ending what amounts to the occupation of Palestinian territory, establishing mutually agreed upon borders, and pulling back settlements in the West Bank, just as Israel did in Gaza – once considered an unthinkable move on Israel’s part,” he added.
In contrast, Hillary Clinton attended the AIPAC conference and praised the “deep emotional connection” the U.S. shares with Israel.
The Democrat front-runner made it clear she would not remain neutral in the Israel-Palestine conflict and would invite Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the U.S. as one of her first moves in the White House.
Clinton also criticized the growing Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, telling Netanyahu: “Don’t let anyone bully you, or shut down debate … especially in places of learning like college or universities.”
Sanders was the only presidential candidate to skip AIPAC this year, which hosts more than 18,000 pro-Israel advocates and lobbyists.
Brussels Zaventem airport explosion: Several dead after explosions near American Airlines desk and at Metro station
Up to 10 people are feared dead and many wounded after large explosions at Brussels Airport and at a Metro station in the Belgian capital.
Witnesses said the airport blasts happened shortly before 8am local time (7am GMT) in the departure hall near the check-in desks for American Airlines and Brussels Airlines.
Little over an hour later, another explosion was reported at the Maalbeek (Maelbeek) station, near the European Council headquarters and other EU buildings. The capital's Metro system was being shut down.
The explosion reportedly took place in the Departures lounge, beyond airport security areas.
The Belga news agency reported that shots were fired before the explosions and shouting was heard in Arabic.
A Sky News journalist who was checking in at the time said he heard two very large explosions before being moved away from the area and that speculation of a terror attack was spreading.
An American couple, Andrew and Denise Brandt, said they felt the blast “like a wave" as they shopped on the other side of security barriers, before hundreds of people started running towards them.
Photos showed passengers running from the terminal building as smoke poured through smashed windows.
The airport, which was being exacuated, has been closed to all departures and arrivals as investigations continue. Rail services have been suspended.
The cause of the reported blasts has not been confirmed and police could not immediately be reached for a comment.
A spokesperson for Brussels Airport said: "There have been two explosions at the airport. Building is being evacuated. Don’t come to the airport area.
"All airport operations have been suspended until further notice.Passengers that are still located in other area’s in the airport are asked to remain calm and wait for further information."
Video shows aftermath of Brussels airport explosions
The Belgian interior minister, Jan Jambon, said the national terror alert would be raised to its maximum level in the wake of the explosions, suggesting that authorities believe they were an attack.
Charles Michel, the Prime Minister, said the government was following the situation "minute by the minute" and that victims and bystanders at the airport were the priority.
Questions about family or friends > Call 02/753.73.00
A spokesperson for American Airlines said: “We are aware of an incident at the Brussels airport departure hall and are taking care of our customers, employees and contractors. At this time, all of our employees and contractors are accounted for with no reported injuries.
"American Airlines flight 751 (from Brussels to Philadelphia) has been cancelled for today. When operations at the airport resume, we will re-accommodate our customers.”
Brussles has been under increased security measures since November's Paris attacks and has seen several operations in recent weeks linked to the hunt for Salah Abdeslam, who was caught on Friday.
The Islamic State terror group has said a British suicide bomber killed more than two dozen Iraqi army troops in an attack on Monday, a claim swiftly rejected by the Iraqi military.
The man, whose nom de guerre was Abu Musa al-Britani, rammed his vehicle into a gathering of Iraqi army troops and vehicles near al-Asad air base in the province of Anbar, killing 30 soldiers, the group claimed on social media. The Britani suffix is used regularly for militants from the UK.
Photograph on Twitter purportedly of Abu Musa al-Britani, who is said to have carried out a suicide bombing in Anbar province. Photograph: Twitter
But the Iraqi military denied the report, saying the attacker had been the only victim of the explosion.
Al-Asad is also used by American marine forces stationed in Iraq. Abu Musa’s real name remains unknown, but an image circulated on social media appearing to show him before the operation, clad in Isis’s signature black garb, smiling and holding a rifle. The Guardian was not able to verify the image.
Iraqi forces are battling Isis troops entrenched throughout Anbar, after liberating the province’s capital Ramadi during the winter in a major setback for the militant group.
Isis controls large swathes of territory in northern Iraq, including the city of Mosul, after surging into the country in the summer of 2014 and conquering the plains of Nineveh, as well as much of Anbar. In Syria, the group controls much of the country’s eastern regions including its capital of Raqqa and most of Deir Ezzor.
A study carried out last year by the Guardian and King’s College London found that 50 Britons had died fighting for militant groups in Iraq and Syria in the previous three years. The total is since thought to have risen.
Shiraz Maher of King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) said on Twitter that Monday’s attack would take the total number of British fighters known to have been killed in Syria and Iraq to 62, “of which 10 have been suicide bombers”.
The Soufan Group, a respected security consultancy and think tank, estimated in late 2015 that between 27,000 and 31,000 foreign fighters had traveled to Syria and Iraq to fight alongside militant groups, including 760 from the UK alone – nearly double the 2014 estimate of 400 fighters.
Isis has prominently featured British foreign fighters in its propaganda, including Mohammed Emwazi, who appeared in brutal execution videos that documented the killing of several western journalists and aid workers.
Rolling waves driven by cyclone Christian appear in the Elbe estuary near the North Sea close to Brunsbuettel, northern Germany. (EPA/Christian Charisius)
This story has been updated.
If you dig deep enough into the Earth’s climate change archives, you hear about the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM. And then you get scared.
This is a time period, about 56 million years ago, when something mysterious happened — there are many ideas as to what — that suddenly caused concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to spike, far higher than they are right now. The planet proceeded to warm rapidly, at least in geologic terms, and major die-offs of some marine organisms followed due to strong acidification of the oceans.
The cause of the PETM has been widely debated. Some think it was an explosion of carbon from thawing Arctic permafrost. Some think there was a huge release of subsea methane that somehow made its way to the atmosphere — and that the series of events might have been kickstarted by major volcanic eruptions.
In any case, the result was a hothouse world from pole to pole, some 5 degrees Celsius warmer overall. But now, new research suggests, even the drama of the PETM falls short of our current period, in at least one key respect: We’re putting carbon into the atmosphere at an even faster rate than happened back then.
How greenhouse gas behaves in the atmosphere
Play Video0:43
This high-resolution animation shows carbon dioxide emitted from fires and megacities over a five day period in June 2006. The model is based on real emission data so that scientists can observe how the greenhouse gas behaves once it has been emitted. (Global Modeling and Assimilation Office, NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center)
Such is the result of a new study in Nature Geoscience, led by Richard Zeebe of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and colleagues from the University of Bristol in the UK and the University of California-Riverside.
“If you look over the entire Cenozoic, the last 66 million years, the only event that we know of at the moment, that has a massive carbon release, and happens over a relatively short period of time, is the PETM,” says Zeebe. “We actually have to go back to relatively old periods, because in the more recent past, we don’t see anything comparable to what humans are currently doing.”
That’s why this time period is so crucial to study — as a possible window on our own.
There’s no doubt that a lot of carbon — about as much as contained the fossil fuel reserves that humans have either already burned, or could still burn, combined — made its way into the atmosphere during the PETM. The result was a major warming event that lasted over 100,000 years. But precisely how rapidly the emissions occurred is another matter.
“If anthropogenic emissions rates have no analogue in Earth’s recent history, then unforeseeable future responses of the climate system are possible,” the authors write.
To examine what happened in the PETM, the researchers used a deep ocean core of sediment from off the coast of New Jersey. The goal was to determine the ratios between different isotopes, or slightly different elemental forms, of carbon and oxygen, in the sediments during the PETM.
The relationship between the two lets researchers determine how atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, as reflected in the ratio of carbon 12 to carbon 13, in turn influenced temperatures (which can be inferred based on oxygen isotopes in the ocean).
“In terms of these two systems, the first shows us when the carbon went into the system, and the second tells us when the climate responded,” says Zeebe.
It turns out that there is a lag time between massive pulses of carbon in the atmosphere and subsequent warming, because the oceans have a large thermal inertia. Therefore, a large lag would indicate a greater carbon release, whereas the lack of one actually means that carbon dioxide came out more slowly.
The geologic evidence from the new core did not show a lag, the new study reports. That means, the authors estimate, that while a gigantic volume of carbon entered the atmosphere during the PETM — between 2,000 and 4,500 billion tons — it played out over some 4,000 years. So only about 1 billion tons of carbon were emitted per year. In contrast, humans are now emitting about 10 billion tons annually — changing the planet much more rapidly.
“The anthropogenic release outpaces carbon release during the most extreme global warming event of the past 66 million years, by at least an order of magnitude,” writes Peter Stassen, an Earth and environmental scientist at KU Leuven, in Belgium, in an accompanying commentary on the new study.
The analogy between the PETM and the present, then, is less than perfect — and our own era may be worse in key ways. “The two main conclusions is that ocean acidification will be more severe, ecosystems may be hit harder because of the rate” of carbon release, says Zeebe.
And not only have we only begun to see the changes that will result from current warming, but there may be other changes that lack any ancient parallel, because of the current rate of change.
“Given that the current rate of carbon release is unprecedented throughout the Cenozoic, we have effectively entered an era of a no-analogue state, which represents a fundamental challenge to constraining future climate projections,” the study concludes.
