ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

US soliders on patrol in Afghanistan. (File, AFP) Kabul - The US operation to remove military hardware and vehicles from Afghanistan as troops withdraw after 12 years of war, will cost $5- to $6bn, officials said on Sunday. Among statistics released by the military about the process known as a "retrograde" was that 25 000 vehicles have been shipped out of Afghanistan in the last year and another 25 000 remain in the country. About 100 000 containers are also still in Afghanistan, and will be used to remove mountains of equipment ranging from fighting gear to fitness machines, furniture and computers. "The retrograde from Afghanistan is one of the most challenging military transportation operations in history in terms of scale and complexity," Brigadier General Steven Shapiro said in an email. "Our number of vehicles in Afghanistan has dropped by nearly half in the past year." Shapiro said decisions were being made on what equi...

Baghdad - Iraqi officials said seven people were killed in attacks in the capital and in the western city of Fallujah on Sunday, including a mosque preacher who was gunned down outside a sweets shop. A police officer said assailants shot dead the preacher, Sheik Talib Zuwayid of the al-Baraa mosque in Fallujah, along with his nephew and another man. A health official confirmed the deaths and said another man was injured. Residents said Zuwayid was one of the organisers of weekly Sunni demonstrations against the Shi'ite-led government that have been taking place for the past three months. The police officer however said it was unclear if the killings were related to the protests. Immediately after he was killed, residents hung up posters announcing the man's death on Fallujah's main road. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release information. In the Iraqi capital, two separate explosions killed four people and woun...

Al Arabiya - Syrian rebels, who defeated President Bashar al-Assad’s regime forces in the northern city of Raqqa early March, vowed not to “mistreat” captured Assad loyalists. Al Arabiya’s correspondent Jomaa Akkash met with the prisoners, who were once loyal to Assad forces. The prisoners said they were not “ill-treated” by opposition fighters. “We were policemen at [Raqqa] governor’s palace, we were armed but we didn’t fight. When they [opposition fighters] asked us to surrender we did, and we gave up our arms as well. The fighters allowed us to contact our families and we didn’t face any ill-treatment,” said a prisoner, former policeman. The prison has 50 detainees and is separated into three different cells. Some of the captives were part of the Raqqa Police force while others received orders from the ruling Al-Baath party to carry out specific assignments. While opposition fighters say the prisoners will appear in front of a religious court, negotiations are still underway with th...

By Jay Janson March 31, 2013 "Information Clearing House" - While staring at the New York Times front page photo of the bat-winged nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth Bombers up in the blue sky on their first non-stop long-range mission from the US on their way to a practice sortie to end in a mock bombing drop of inert munitions on a range off South Korea’s coast, I ponder. The thought that ‘enough is enough’ will apparently never arise in the mind-set of those commanding the first planet-encompassing space-age military, blown up now to an uncontrollable magnitude and fueled by an uninterrupted flow of trillions of dollars by ledger line pre-occupied elite of the speculative investment banking community; a community possibly still being led by multi-war promoting confidants of ninety-eight year old David Rockefeller.1 Former president of Korea, Lee Myung-bak dutifully bought loads of new US weapons of mass destruction. Does he ever remember watching his two tiny siblings begin to sl...