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air strikes
Fears of 'Serious Escalation' Grow as Israel Bombs Lebanon and Gaza
Lebanon's caretaker prime minister said he "categorically rejects any military escalation" amid concerns that the fresh exchanges of rocket fire and airstrikes could spark an all-out war.
Apr 07, 2023
Fears of a wider conflict in the Middle East mounted Friday after Israel bombed Lebanon and the occupied Gaza Strip in the early hours of the morning, an assault that followed two consecutive nights of violent raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound.
The raids spurred global condemnation and retaliatory rocket fire from southern Lebanon and Gaza, prompting Israel's latest barrage of airstrikes.
While Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the rocket fire with hawkish rhetoric, vowing to "extract a heavy price from our enemies," other Israeli officials and Lebanon's caretaker prime minister Najib Mikati cautioned against further violence.
"Nobody wants an escalation right now," an Israeli army spokesman told reporters. "Quiet will be answered with quiet, at this stage I think, at least in the coming hours."
Najib Mikati, Lebanon's caretaker prime minister, similarly said his government "categorically rejects any military escalation," adding that an investigation into the rocket attacks that originated in southern Lebanon was ongoing.
The Associated Press reported Friday that "no faction in Lebanon claimed responsibility for the salvo of rockets," the largest such attack since the deadly 2006 war between Israeli and Lebanon.
"A Lebanese security official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media, said the country's security forces believed the rockets were launched by a Lebanon-based Palestinian militant group, not by Hezbollah," the outlet noted.
No injuries or deaths have been reported in the wake of the Israeli airstrikes, which damaged homes, buildings, and other infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza. One 19-year-old was lightly injured by shrapnel from the rocket fire into Israel, according to Israeli authorities.
\u201cThe Israeli military launched air strikes on the Gaza Strip on Friday, hours after rockets were fired from Lebanon into Israel on Thursday, amid repeated Israeli assaults on worshippers in Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque this week.\n\nThere were no immediate reports of casualties\u201d— Middle East Eye (@Middle East Eye) 1680825032
The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) said in a statement Friday that while Israeli and Lebanese officials have "both said they do not want a war," the "actions over the past day are dangerous and risk a serious escalation."
"We urge all parties to cease all actions across the Blue Line now," UNIFIL added.
Israeli forces' raids on the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and attacks on Palestinian worshipers this week have been vocally denounced by governments and human rights organizations. In 2021, Israeli raids of Al-Aqsa and responses from the Gaza Strip led to a devastating 11-day assault on the besieged enclave.
Heba Morayef, Amnesty International's regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement Thursday that "these orchestrated attacks demonstrate just how far Israeli authorities will go to maintain their cruel system of apartheid."
"Shocking footage from the past two days shows Israeli security forces beating men, women, and children, and dragging them out of the mosque where they had gathered to spend the night in peaceful prayer and reflection," said Morayef. "Once again, Israeli security forces have shown the world what apartheid looks like."
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Escalating US Air Strikes Kill Hundreds of Civilians in Mosul, Iraq
May 01, 2016
USA Today revealed on April 19th that U.S. air forces have been operating under looser rules of engagement in Iraq and Syria since last fall. The war commander, Lt Gen McFarland, now orders air strikes that are expected to kill up to 10 civilians without prior approval from U.S. Central Command, and U.S. officials acknowledge that air strikes are killing more civilians under the new rules.
U.S. officials previously claimed that air strikes in Iraq and Syria had killed as few as 26 civilians. A senior Pentagon official who is briefed daily on the air war told USA Today that was unrealistic, since air strikes that have destroyed 6,000 buildings with over 40,000 bombs and missiles have inevitably killed much higher numbers of civilians.
As the U.S. escalates its air strikes on Mosul, the largest city occupied by Islamic State, reports of hundreds of civilians killed by air strikes reveal some of the human costs of the U.S. air war and the new rules of engagement.
Award-winning Iraqi environmental scientist and Mosul native Souad Al-Azzawi (Ph.D. Colorado School of Mines) has compiled a partial list of air strikes that have killed civilians and destroyed civilian infrastructure from reports by Mosul Eye, Nineveh Reporters Network, Al Maalomah News Network, other Iraqi media and contacts in Mosul:
- Many government buildings have been destroyed. As U.S. officials told USA Today, attacks are often conducted at night to minimize civilian casualties, but they have killed security guards and civilians in neighboring buildings.
- Telephone exchanges have been systematically bombed and destroyed.
- Two large dairies were bombed, killing about 100 civilians and wounding 200 more.
- Multiple daytime air strikes on Mosul University on March 19th and 20th killed 92 civilians and wounded 135, mostly faculty, staff, families and students. Targets included the main administration building, classroom buildings, a women's dormitory and a faculty apartment building.
- 50 civilians were killed and 100 wounded by air strikes on 2 apartment buildings, Al Hadbaa and Al Khadraa.
- A mother and 4 children were killed in an air strike on a house in the Hay al Dhubat district of East Mosul on April 20th, next door to a house used by Islamic State that was undamaged.
- 22 civilians were killed in air strikes on houses in front of Mosul Medical College.
- 20 civilians were killed and 70 wounded by air strikes on the Sunni Waqif building and nearby houses and shops.
- U.S. air strikes on April 24th damaged the Rashidiya water treatment plant in West Mosul and the Yarmouk power station in East Mosul.
- The Central Bank of Mosul in Ghazi Street and several branches of Rafidain and Rasheed banks were bombed, with heavy civilian casualties, despite all cash reportedly being removed after the first bank was struck.
- Three workers were killed and 12 wounded in an air strike on the former Pepsi bottling plant.
- An air strike on a fuel depot in an industrial area ignited an inferno with 150 casualties on April 18th.
- Bombs have damaged a food warehouse, power stations and sub-stations in West Mosul, and flour mills, a pharmaceutical factory, auto repair shops and other workshops across Mosul.
- The Al Hurairah Bridge was destroyed by air strikes.
At the very least, U.S. air strikes have killed hundreds of civilians in Mosul and destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure that people depend on for their lives in already dire conditions. And yet by all accounts, this is only the beginning of the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to retake Mosul. One and one-half million civilians are trapped in the city, 30 times the UN's estimate of the number of civilians in Fallujah before the November 2004 assault that killed 4,000 to 6,000 people, mostly civilians. Meanwhile ISIL prevents civilians from evacuating the city, believing that their presence protects its forces from even heavier bombardment.
International humanitarian law strictly prohibits military attacks on civilians, civilian areas and civilian infrastructure. The presence of several thousand ISIL militants in a city of 1.5 million people does not justify indiscriminate bombing or attacks on civilian targets. As the United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq warned U.S. officials in a Human Rights Report in 2007, "The presence of individual combatants among a great number of civilians does not alter the civilian nature of an area." UNICEF protested the bombing of a water treatment plant in Syria last December as "a particularly alarming example" of how "the rules of war, including those meant to protect vital civilian infrastructure, continue to be broken on a daily basis."
The fundamental contradiction of the militarized "war on terror" has always been that U.S. aggression and other war crimes only reinforce the narratives of jihadis who see themselves as a bulwark against foreign aggression and neocolonialism in the Muslim world. Meanwhile U.S. wars and covert operations against secular enemies like Hussein, Gaddafi and Assad create new zones of chaos where jihadis can thrive.
President Obama has acknowledged publicly that there is therefore "no military solution" to jihadism. But successive U.S. administrations have proven unable to resist the lure of military escalation at each new stage of this crisis, unleashing wars that have killed about two million people, plunged a dozen countries into chaos and exploded Wahhabi jihadism from its original safe havens in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan and Pakistan to countries across the world.
If the U.S. and its Iraqi allies follow through with their threatened assault on Mosul, the resulting massacre will join Fallujah, Guantanamo and U.S. drone wars as a powerful catalyst for the next mutation of Wahhabi jihadism, which is likely to be more globalized and unified.
But although Al Qaeda and Islamic State have proven adept at manipulating U.S. leaders into ever-escalating cycles of violence, the jihadis cannot directly order American pilots to bomb civilians. Only our leaders can do that, making them morally and legally responsible for these crimes, just as Islamic State's leaders are responsible for theirs.
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Libya 2.0? After Sowing Chaos with 2011 Invasion, US Bombs Destabilized Nation
At least 40 reported dead following strikes on northern city of Sabratha
Feb 19, 2016
The United States on Friday conducted air strikes in Libya, a country described as having "all but collapsed" since the NATO military intervention there five years ago.
Local officials say that at least 40 people were killed from the strikes in the early morning, with others critically wounded, news agencies report. The location of the strike was a reported Islamic State training camp in the northern Libyan city of Sabratha.
The Pentagon said that it was not clear yet whether the target of the attack, Noureddine Chouchane, was among those killed.
Chouchane, a Tunisian national, has been linked to attacks in 2015 on a Tunis museum and a beach in the resort town of Sousse.
"He facilitated the movement of potential ISIL-affiliated foreign fighters from Tunisia to Libya and onward to other countries," the Associated Press reports Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook as saying.
The Guardianreports that the new
airstrike, the third by the US in Libya since June, raised questions about the US opening another front against an enemy whose strength in Libya has grown in the chaos resulting from Nato's 2011 war aiding the revolutionaries that killed dictator Muammar Gaddafi. But some officials suggested that the strike on Chouchane was a target of opportunity, rather than the inaugural shots of a long-telegraphed initiative. The two previous strikes hit an Isis base in Derna in November and an al-Qaida gathering at Ajdabiya in eastern Libya in June.
As journalist Glenn Greenwald and professor of international relations Vijay Prishad both indicated in early-morning tweets, Friday's bombing should be read as an indication of the Obama administration's failed strategy in Libya:
Last month, after speaking with his French counterpart, Gen. Pierre de Villiers, Gen. Joseph F. Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "It's fair to say we're looking to take decisive military action against ISIL [in Libya] in conjunction with a legitimate political process."
The strikes come just days after President Obama said, "With respect to Libya, I have been clear from the outset that we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way that we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared."
"We will continue to take actions where we've got a clear operation and a clear target in mind. And we are working with our other coalition partners to make sure that as we see opportunities to prevent ISIS from digging in, in Libya, we take them."
But this reflects an approach akin to "a game of whack-a-mole spanning multiple unstable foreign countries," argues Paul Pillar, professor at Georgetown University for security studies.
He explains:
Opening up a real military front against [ISIS in Libya] with Western armed forces might seem to be an appropriate going to where the action is, but it also would perpetuate a fundamentally flawed conception of counterterrorism as revolving around military offensives against whatever presence on the ground has been established by whatever radical group currently worries us the most.
[...]
The underlying problem in a place such as post-Gaddafi Libya is a lack of good governance or of any governance. Inadequate governance has multiple bad effects, including the sort of chaos that violent extremists exploit. Libya does not have a governance problem because ISIS is there; ISIS is there because Libya has a severe governance problem.
Yet another fallacy in common thinking about counterterrorism is that whacking the offending group is progress. It is not, if what is left after the whacking is just more of the inadequate governance that led to the group establishing its presence there in the first place.
Others similarly described the governance problem. From the Guardian earlier this week:
"Libya is becoming a scenario whereby you will have three governments," says Ludovico Carlino of IHS Jane's, a London defense analyst. "An intervention [without a unity government] will probably cause more anarchy and chaos."
The reporting adds this comment from Guma El-Gamaty, the rebel government's London envoy during the revolution: "We are now suffering the legacy of Gaddafi, the lack of institutions, no democracy, the lack of knowing how to come together."
Reuters reports: "A U.N.-backed government of national accord is trying to win support but is still awaiting parliamentary approval. It is opposed by factional hardliners and has yet to establish itself in the capital Tripoli."
Last month, in an article entitled "The U.S. Intervention in Libya Was Such a Smashing Success That a Sequel Is Coming," Greenwald wrote that since the 2011 NATO bombing of Libya, the country.
so predictably -- has all but completely collapsed, spending years now drowning in instability, anarchy, fractured militia rule, sectarian conflict, and violent extremism. The execution of Saddam Hussein was no vindication of that war nor a sign of improved lives for Iraqis, and the same was true for the mob killing of Qaddafi.
[...]
the much bigger question was when (not if, but when) the instability and extremism that predictably followed the NATO bombing would be used to justify a new U.S.-led war -- also exactly as happened in Iraq.
[...]
Just as there was no al Qaeda or ISIS to attack in Iraq until the U.S. bombed its government, there was no ISIS in Libya until NATO bombed it. Now the U.S. is about to seize on the effects of its own bombing campaign in Libya to justify an entirely new bombing campaign in that same country.
And in a statement Friday, Prashad said, "The U.S. Air Force should have named this current bombing run in Libya 'Operation Deja Vu.' It is the third such strike at ISIS. What is not clear is the strategy being followed by the U.S. Occasional bombing runs have not stopped ISIS from fully taking Sirte and now expanding along the edge of the Gulf of Sidra."
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