ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

Summary The battle for the Syrian city of Al-Qusayr, which came under regime artillery fire May 19, is actually part of a larger battle for the highly coveted Homs governorate. As we noted in 2012 , the battle has wide-reaching ramifications for the Syrian rebels since Al-Qusayr sits along a major transit point for rebel supplies and reinforcements coming in from Lebanon . But it is equally important to loyalist forces. If the Syrian regime loses control of the Orontes River Valley and its major road junctions, Damascus will be largely cut off from Aleppo and the Alawite-dominated coast, which would limit the regime's access to supply lines from port cities. The regime's renewed offensive against Al-Qusayr was made possible by support from Iran, Russia and Hezbollah. However, geography will determine which side holds the advantage. In northern and eastern Syria, the regime remains on the defensive; in the core, the advantage clearly belongs to the loyalists. With the country sq

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS Nine years after the first U.S. drone strike in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in 2004, the U.S. refuses to officially acknowledge the CIA-run program, while Pakistan denies consenting to it. This secrecy undermines efforts to assess the program’s legality or its full impact on FATA’s population. It also diverts attention from a candid examination of the roots of militancy in the poorly governed tribal belt bordering southern and eastern Afghanistan and how best to address them. Drone strikes may disrupt FATA-based militant groups’ capacity to plan and execute cross-border attacks on NATO troops and to plot attacks against the U.S. homeland, but they cannot solve the fundamental problem. The ability of those groups to regroup, rearm and recruit will remain intact so long as they enjoy safe havens on Pakistani territory and efforts to incorporate FATA into the constitutional mainstream are stifled. Since 2004, there have been

WASHINGTON — Three months after hackers working for a cyberunit of China’s People’s Liberation Army went silent amid evidence that they had stolen data from scores of American companies and government agencies, they appear to have resumed their attacks using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials. The Obama administration had bet that “naming and shaming” the groups, first in industry reports and then in the Pentagon’s own detailed survey of Chinese military capabilities, might prompt China’s new leadership to crack down on the military’s highly organized team of hackers — or at least urge them to become more subtle. But Unit 61398, whose well-guarded 12-story white headquarters on the edges of Shanghai became the symbol of Chinese cyberpower, is back in business, according to American officials and security companies. It is not clear precisely who has been affected by the latest attacks. Mandiant , a private security company that

Chinese embassy in Pyongyang asks government to secure release of private Chinese fishing boat seized on May 5. China has called on North Korea to release a private Chinese fishing boat and its crew, after the boat's owner reported the detention 10 days ago, state media says. The owner of the boat took to a microblog this weekend to raise attention to the detention that happened on May 5. Yu Xuejun said unidentified gun-wielding North Koreans took his boat and 16 crew members in what he said were Chinese waters and that the North Koreans wanted a 600,000 yuan ($100,000) ransom. The diplomatic difficulty comes at a time of high Chinese frustrations with North Korea after it conducted a nuclear test and missile launches. Yu called the Chinese Embassy for help on May 10 after the boat was "grabbed" by North Korea, the official Xinhua News Agency said late on Sunday, citing an official at the Chinese Embassy in Pyongyang, Jiang Yaxian. The embassy promptly contacted the N

Reports say deadly assault on strategic town is aided by Hezbollah fighters despite denial by Assad of foreign help. The Syrian army has pounded the rebel-held central town of Qusayr, killing at least 51 people in an apparent preparation for a ground assault, watchdog and activists said. The attack on Sunday came a day after a rare interview with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was released, in which he said that his government was not using "fighters from outside of Syria, of other nationalities, and needs no support from any Arab or foreign state". There are now conflicting reports as to whether or not government forces have entered the town centre, with state TV reporting the army is inside the walls, but the opposition fighters telling Al Jazeera that this is not the case. Reports coming out of Qusayr, which is in Homs province, said fighters of the Lebanese Hezbollah movement assisted the military. Al Jazeera's Nisreen el-Shamayleh, reporting from Amman, said that

Ban Ki-moon warns against losing "momentum" on proposed international peace conference generated by US and Russia. An international peace conference for Syria, where government and opposition forces will be represented, should happen as soon as possible, the UN chief Ban Ki-moon said during a visit to Russia. On Friday, Ban met with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in the Black Sea resort city of Sochi. Ban's trip and a recent visit to Sochi by British Prime Minister David Cameron follow Putin's early May talks in Moscow with US Secretary of State John Kerry, during which the two sides agreed to set up a new round of Syria negotiations within a matter of weeks. At a press conference with Lavrov, Ban said: "We should not lose the momentum," generated by the US-Russian proposal to bring the Syrian government and opposition representatives to a peace conference. Ban said that the conference should be held as soon as possible, but added that no date h

At least 48 dead and scores wounded in twin blasts in Baquba in apparent retaliatory sectarian attack. Two bombs near a Sunni mosque north of Baghdad have killed 48 people and wounded 89, police and a doctor say, after two days of attacks targeting Iraqi Shia Muslims in which dozens died. One bomb exploded on Friday as worshippers were departing the Saria mosque in the city of Baquba while a second went off after people gathered at the scene of the first blast, the sources said. The violence raises the specter of tit-for-tat killings common during the height of sectarian violence in Iraq that killed tens of thousands of people, and comes at a time of festering sectarian tensions between Iraq's Sunni minority and Shia majority. The bombings are the latest in a series of attacks that have targeted both Sunni and Shia places of worship in past weeks, and follow two days of attacks targeting Iraqi Shia. On Thursday, a suicide bomber killed 12 people at the entrance of Al-Zahraa

Resource wars are possible as global warming melts polar ice - opening new areas to oil exploitation, cables indicate. It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources. "The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight." Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize. Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre