ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

By Stelios Kouloglou " Le Monde Diplomatique " - Like the traditional Greek song, in Athens “everything changes and everything stays the same”. Four months after Syriza’s victory, the parties that had governed since the overthrow of the military dictatorship — the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (Pasok) and New Democracy (rightwing) — have been completely discredited. The first radical leftist government since the “mountain government” at the time of the German occupation is very popular ( 1 ). Although the “troika”, hated because of its responsibility for the current economic disaster, is no longer mentioned, its three “institutions” — the European Commission, European Central Bank (ECB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) — continue their policies. With threats, blackmail and ultimatums, a new “troika” is imposing the same austerity on the government of Alexis Tsipras. With wealth generation down by 25% since 2010 and an unemployment rate of 27% (more than 50% for those u...

A Hatf-VI (Shaheen-II) missile (background) is displayed during the Pakistan Day parade in Islamabad March 23, 2015. (Reuters) Saudi Arabia's seemingly ever-expanding ambitions threaten now to draw the region and the world closer to the edge of a dangerous precipice as it seeks to buy out Pakistan's nuclear power. Just as Iran and the P5+1 are set to finalize a tentative nuclear deal by June's end, offering the world a much-needed respite from talks of war and aggravated political tensions, Saudi Arabia is stretching its nuclear ambitions. The most violent, reactionary and arguably most oppressive regime, in not just the region but the world, is now has ambitions to rise to a nuclear power. It is actually much worse than that - the very state which interpretation of Islam, Wahhabism, has inspired an entire generation of radical wannabe jihadists is vying for access to nuclear weapons. If Iran's alleged nuclear race was mainly the expression of western political posturin...

Remnants of an air-dropped cluster munition and unexploded BLU-97 submunitions found in the al-Nushoor and al-Maqash areas of Yemen’s northern Saada governorate on May 23, 2015. (from www.hrw.org) Download video (21.86 MB) Human Rights Watch has published new evidence alleging the Saudi Arabian-led coalition in Yemen has been using internationally-outlawed cluster bombs. The organization says innocent civilians have been targeted in the raids. The New York-based organization visited the Saada province in the north of Yemen this month in order to compile its report. Human Rights Watch says it managed to document the use of three types of cluster munitions in the country. "The Saudi-led coalition and other warring parties in Yemen need to recognize that using banned cluster munitions is very likely to harm civilians," said HRW's senior emergencies researcher Ole Solvang. "These weapons can't distinguish military targets from civilians, and their unexploded submun...

Reuters / Stringer Iraq has admitted that ISIS jihadists captured huge caches of US-made weapons, including thousands of Humvees seized from Iraqi forces retreating from Mosul last year. The spoils of war have since then been used by ISIS to gain ground in Iraq and Syria. “In the collapse of Mosul, we lost a lot of weapons,” Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi said in an interview with Iraqiya state TV. “We lost 2,300 Humvees in Mosul alone.” Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) captured Iraq’s second city of Mosul in June 2014, as government forces retreated from the country’s Sunni stronghold. The number of potential heavy and light weapons abandoned by Iraq’s army remains unknown but over the past decade the US sold thousands of the armed vehicles to the Iraqis, in addition to tanks and other military hardware. Just this month the Pentagon estimated that at least half a half dozen tanks were abandoned when Baghdad forces lost Ramadi, in addition to artillery pieces, and some 100 Humvee...