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

The Chinese regime has moved armaments to its man-made islands in the South China Sea, as tensions with neighboring countries and the United States intensify. The exact type of weapons deployed were not specified in an exclusive report from Australian news agency The Sydney Morning Herald. It states, however, that Australian officials are worried that China will follow up by deploying long-range radar and anti-aircraft batteries. In the Chinese Communist Party’s newly released military strategy, it shifted the air defense policy of its air force to allow for offensive actions. The Australian report states that discussions around the weapons deployments “are prompting discussions in senior military circles” that may lead Australia to begin sending its air force to the South China Sea for “freedom of navigation” missions “to demonstrate that Canberra does not accept Beijing’s hardening claims.” Missions could include fly-throughs, sail-throughs, and similar exercises alongside the

NATO is destabilizing the Ukrainian crisis by turning blind eye to Kiev’s aim for a military solution, Moscow’s envoy to NATO said, warning that alliance’s rhetoric of shifting all responsibility onto Russia is not consistent with real state of affairs. “NATO continues to position Russia as a participant in the conflict, which is far from reality and has a serious confrontational potential because, in essence, it gives Kiev carte blanche to seek a military solution to the conflict,” Russian envoy to NATO Aleksandr Grushko told Rossiya 24 TV channel. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg announced earlier on Wednesday that the alliance will create up to eight new command and control units on its eastern borders. “We are establishing six command and control units in the three Baltic countries [Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia] and in Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. And probably also [there will] be two more of those in two more countries,”Stoltenberg said. Calling the alliance’s belligerent r

More than 100 pages of previously classified Department of Defense and Department of State documents implicate the Obama administration in a cover-up to obscure the role Hillary Clinton and the State Department played in the rise of ISIS. The documents were obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Washington watchdog Judicial Watch. They confirm WND reporting over the past three years of evidence that U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens was involved in shipping weapons from Benghazi to support the al-Qaida-affiliated militias fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, effectively arming the Sunni jihadists who morphed into ISIS. The documents further confirm WND reporting that the goal of the terrorists behind the Benghazi attack that killed Stevens was to force the release of Omar Abdul Rahman, the “blind sheik” in U.S. prison serving a life sentence for his involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and to avenge death of a prominent