ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

The idea is to repeat the US success in 2006-07 in supporting the Sunni “Awakening Movement” which weakened, though it never destroyed, al-Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor of Isis. Now as then, many Sunnis hate the extremists for their merciless violence and enforcement of outlandish and arbitrary rules on personal behaviour that have no connection to even the strictest interpretation of sharia. The fact that so many Sunnis are alienated from or terrified by Isis should present an opportunity for Baghdad, since Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s government is meant to be more inclusive than that of his predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki. Increasingly aggressive sectarian policies pursued by Mr Maliki during his eight years in power are now blamed for turning peaceful protests by Sunnis into armed resistance and pushing the Sunni community into the arms of Isis. This is an over-simplified version of recent history, but with the new government lauded internationally for its non-sectarian stance, t

Sanaa - A dispirited Saleh al-Wesabi, 31, sits with his legs folded in his brother's house in Dar Slim, in the Yemeni capital of Sanaa, recalling when an air strike destroyed his house last weekend. "It all began at 2:30am, when we woke up shaken by the sound of the strike," he told Al Jazeera. "The entire neighbourhood was razed to the ground; young women and children were trapped under heavy boulders." Wesabi's wife and children sustained minor injuries, and the family fled soon after to their village in Ibb province,194km south of the capital. Wesabi is one of about 120,000 people who have been displaced from their homes since the Saudi-led campaign of air strikes began late last month, according to the United Nations. As the air campaign entered its second week, international organisations warned that the country was headed towards a major humanitarian crisis, affecting millions of people. With a population of just under 26 million people, Yemen is the

By Peter Koenig As usual, western media are deliberately confusing in communicating on the latest Mid-East conflict which eventually led to the recent atrocious bombing of Yemen by the US-directed Saudi alliance, including Qatar and other Gulf monarchies. They are proxies, to be sure, for their Washington masters. My heart is bleeding for Yemen, a country of warm and generous people I got to know well, working with them in the 1990s and early 2000s. Yemen is a patchwork of tribes, the result of former colonies, therefore made vulnerable for conflicts; easily ignitable conflicts. A situation left behind on purpose by the old British colonial masters, today servants to the Washington Empire. That’s the name of the game throughout the Middle East – and eventually throughout the world. Divide and rule, – by Zionist-Anglo-Saxon organized and never-ending chaos. It is certainly true, where ever the US and its NATO cronies put their heavy boots, they create lasting misery and chaos. But thes

A Forrester Research study revealed that the US National Security Agency's PRISM surveillance program could cost US-based cloud and outsourcing vendors an overall three-year loss of $47 billion in revenues. The US National Security Agency's (NSA) PRISM surveillance program could cost US-based cloud and outsourcing vendors an overall three-year loss of $47 billion in revenues, a Forrester Research study revealed. Lost revenue from spending on cloud services and platforms is expected to amount to over $500 million in the period between 2014 and 2016, according to the analysis, released by the independent technology and market research company on April 1. © FLICKR/ ERIC NORRIS This Is How NSA Spying Screws US Businesses  Twenty six percent of business and technology decision makers outside of the United States have already reduced or halted spending with US-based service providers, Forrester said. Between 2014 and 2016, the cloud revenue hit is projected to be $528 million

Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya an award-winning author and geopolitical analyst, who is also a member of the Scientific Committee of Geopolitica, spoke to Sputnik about the Saudi led coalition in Yemen. Nazemroaya said that all military experts around the world including American ones and the ones in the Middle East agreed that airstrikes are never enough to defeat any force. He also mentioned Libya saying that in that country airstrikes were not enough either. “You need operations on the ground”. “The Saudis would be very foolish to embark on the ground operations. It will be their Vietnam in the Middle East, in the Arabian Peninsula. I can categorically tell you that airstrikes are not enough to stop any military action on the ground.” He said that in fact Houthis have basically taken over Aden in the south and because of that he feels that Saudis are going to try and expand the war and bring in troops from Pakistan or mercenaries from other parts of the world. “They might come under th

By Liz Sly SANLIURFA, Turkey — When Abu Hamza, a former Syrian rebel, agreed to join the Islamic State, he did so assuming he would become a part of the group’s promised Islamist utopia, which has lured foreign jihadists from around the globe.Instead, he found himself being supervised by an Iraqi emir and receiving orders from shadowy Iraqis who moved in and out of the battlefield in Syria. When Abu Hamza disagreed with fellow commanders at an Islamic State meeting last year, he said, he was placed under arrest on the orders of a masked Iraqi man who had sat silently through the proceedings, listening and taking notes. Abu Hamza, who became the group’s ruler in a small community in Syria, never discovered the Iraqis’ real identities, which were cloaked by code names or simply not revealed. All of the men, however, were former Iraqi officers who had served under Saddam Hussein, including the masked man, who had once worked for an Iraqi intelligence agency and now belonged to the Islami