ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

(AP) — Once-secret U.S. government programs in Cuba that included a Twitter-like messaging service and an HIV-prevention workshop contained inadequate monitoring, conflicts of interest and questions of legal responsibility for those involved, according to an agency watchdog report this week. The U.S. Agency for International Development, which oversaw the now-defunct “Cuban Twitter” program and other efforts, also didn’t have a policy in place to protect sensitive work from subversion by Cuban intelligence officials, the report stated. ZunZuneo, as the text-messaging program was called, was among several of the agency’s Cuban civil-society programs designed to bring about democratic change. The USAID inspector general’s report follows a months-long investigation by The Associated Press last year into concealed U.S. government work on the island. Those disclosures revealed how one of those companies — working under USAID’s supervision — developed ZunZuneo, staged an HIV-prevention wo

By Theodoros Benakis After the jihadist attacks against civilian targets in the capitals of Mali in November 2015 and Burkina Faso in January, killing 21 and 30 people respectively, West Africa is once again a region of international concern. Even though the French military intervention in Northern Mali in 2013 had restored state control in the area, it is no secret that jihadist armed groups are still active. Not only that, but they are also growing very rich. West Africa generates profits from illicit activities, such as drugs, human and arms trafficking, cigarettes smuggling and poaching. It is also a vast area with one of the fastest growing populations in the world and struggling with chronic poverty and huge social inequality. This means West Africa is fertile ground for the recruitment of jihadist groups. The old trade routes that lead from the coasts of Western and Southwestern Africa, through Mali to the Mediterranean Sea, which is a huge stretch of land, are now controlled by

A landmark United Nations-backed ceasefire has come into effect in Syria - the first major truce in a five-year civil war that has claimed more than 270,000 lives. Fighting raged right up until the ceasefire took force at midnight (8:00am AEST), but guns then fell silent in the Damascus suburbs and the devastated northern city of Aleppo, AFP correspondents said. Russia and the United States, the sponsors of the ceasefire deal, have said applying it will be difficult in a country that has been torn apart by a conflict that broke out in March 2011. US President Barack Obama has warned Damascus and its key ally Moscow that the "world will be watching". UN envoy Staffan de Mistura said Syria peace talks which collapsed earlier this month in Geneva would resume on March 7 if the ceasefire held and more aid was delivered. Less than an hour before the ceasefire, the UN Security Council gave its unanimous backing to a resolution drafted by the US and Russia, demanding that it be uphe

By Brad Hoff  IT IS NO SECRET that Saudi Arabia, along with its Gulf and Western allies, has played a direct  role  in fueling the fires of grinding sectarian conflict that has kept Syria burning for the past five years. It is also no secret that Russian intervention has radically altered the kingdom’s “regime change” calculus in effect since at least 2011. But an internal Saudi government cable sheds new light on the kingdom’s current  threats  of military escalation in Syria. Overthrow the Regime “by all means available” A WikiLeaks  cable  released as part of  “The Saudi Cables”  in the summer of 2015, now fully translated here for the first time, reveals what the Saudis feared most in the early years of the war: Russian military intervention and Syrian retaliation. These fears were such that the kingdom directed its media “not to oppose Russian figures and to avoid insulting them” at the time. Saudi Arabia had further miscalculated that the “Russian position” of preserving t

By Patrick Cockburn The war in Syria and Iraq has produced two new de facto states in the last five years and enabled a third quasi-state greatly to expand its territory and power. The two new states, though unrecognised internationally, are stronger militarily and politically than most members of the UN. One is the Islamic State, which established its caliphate in eastern Syria and western Iraq in the summer of 2014 after capturing Mosul and defeating the Iraqi army. The second is Rojava, as the Syrian Kurds call the area they gained control of when the Syrian army largely withdrew in 2012, and which now, thanks to a series of victories over IS, stretches across northern Syria between the Tigris and Euphrates. In Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), already highly autonomous, took advantage of IS’s destruction of Baghdad’s authority in northern Iraq to expand its territory by 40 per cent, taking over areas long disputed between itself and Baghdad, including the Kirkuk oilfie

By Pepe Escobar Beijing is advancing a Chinese-led globalization that will challenge U.S. hegemony both regionally and globally. Earlier last week, the first Chinese commercial train, with 32 containers, arrived in Tehran after a less than 14-day journey from the massive warehouse of Yiwu in Zhejiang, eastern China, crossing Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. This is a 10,400 km-long trip. Crucially, it’s also no less than 30 days shorter compared to the sea route from Shanghai to Bandar Abbas. And we’re not even talking about high-speed rail yet – which in a few years will be installed all along from eastern China to Iran and onward to Turkey and, crucially, Western Europe, enabling 500-plus container trains to crisscross Eurasia in a flash. When Mohsen Pour Seyed Aghaei, president of Iran Railways, remarked that, “countries along the Silk Road are striving to revive the ancient network of trade routes,” he was barely touching the surface in what is an earth-shattering process. Chinese P

Companies from 20 countries are involved in the supply chain of components that end up in the explosives used by the Islamic State. The terror group relies on commercially available components for most of its bombs, with some parts coming from as far away as the United States and Japan, according to a report released by a London-based arms research group . Conflict Armament Research (CAR) says most components —such as chemicals and detonators — come from companies in Turkey and Iraq, which may not know the parts are being bought by the extremists. Many components are also used for civilian purposes, such as mining, making them relatively easy to get. The European Union-mandated study showed that 51 companies from countries including Turkey, Brazil, and the United States produced, sold or received the more than 700 components used by Islamic State to build improvised explosive devices (IEDs). IEDs are now being produced on a “quasi-industrial scale” by the militant group, which uses bot

Forces loyal to Tobruk government reportedly kick out militant groups from Libya's second city after two years of trying A man celebrates in Benghazi on 23 February (AFP) Libyans took to the streets of Benghazi on Tuesday to celebrate the apparent victory of Libyan forces over militant groups that had held parts of the city for years, according to reports. The AP news agency said troops loyal to the Tobruk government pushed into the area of al-Laithi, forcing a withdrawal of militant Islamist fighters. Unconfirmed reports have since emerged that Special French Commando forces recently arrived in Benghazi to support the military operations, a Libyan military source told Huffington Post Arabi. The unnamed sources said that the forces were stationed in Benina Air Base, east of Benghazi, and had set up a common operations room with the Libyan forces to coordinate the action. However, the sources did not say how many troops had been sent and the nature of the reported force remains unc