ISDEI Instituto de Seguridad, Defensa y Estudios Internacionales

As the US and South Korea start their largest ever military exercises, Pyongyang warns of an "all-out offensive". North Korea has pledged a "sacred war of justice for reunification" including a nuclear strike against the United States, saying joint military exercises by Seoul and Washington were being carried out to prepare for an invasion. South Korean and United States troops began large-scale military exercises on Monday in an annual test of their defences against North Korea, which called the drills "nuclear war moves" and threatened to respond with an "all-out offensive". South Korea said the exercises would be the largest ever following North Korea's fourth nuclear test in January and a long-range rocket launch last month that triggered a United Nations Security Council resolution and tough new sanctions. Isolated North Korea has rejected criticism of is nuclear and rocket programmes, even from old ally China, and last week leader Ki...

by Rick Sterling A 30 page investigative report on the “Caesar Torture Photos” has been released and is available online here . The following is a condensed version of the report. Readers who are especially interested are advised to get the full report which includes additional details, photographs, sources and recommendations. Introduction There is a pattern of sensational but untrue reports that lead to public acceptance of US and Western military intervention in countries around the world: * In Gulf War 1, there were reports of Iraqi troops stealing incubators from Kuwait, leaving babies to die on the cold floor. Relying on the testimony of a Red Crescent doctor, Amnesty Interenational ‘verified’ the false claims. * Ten years later, there were reports of yellow cake uranium going to Iraq for development of weapons of mass destruction. * One decade later, there were reports of Libyan soldiers drugged on viagra and raping women as they advanced. * In 2012, NBC broadcaster Richard Enge...

Dr Zachery M. Heern, author of the new book 'The Emergence of Modern Shi‘ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran', has written a thought-provoking piece that helps us better grasp key developments in the Muslim Middle East. I often complain that media related to the Middle East and Islam frequently lacks context. Indeed, news reports, related to the Middle East or otherwise, often assume that events occur without precedent and are unconnected to the past. Analysis, therefore, can be wildly misleading. The antidote for this absence of context is the study of history, which is why I tell my students that historians make good journalists. Unfortunately, however, history is often only invoked by pundits when the assertion is made that the Middle East has a long history of problems - violence, inequality, injustice, sectarianism, etc. These assumptions are biased in the worst way since they wrongly assume that the current state of affairs in the Middle East is identical to its seemingl...

Twenty-four civilians have been killed in the first five days of a landmark truce in parts of Syria, a sharp drop for a war where dozens die daily, a monitor said Thursday. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights told AFP that the number, gathered from areas where the ceasefire had come into effect, included five women and six children. "Compare that number to Friday, the day before the truce came into effect: 63 civilians, including 11 children, died that day alone," said Observatory head Rami Abdel Rahman. He called it a "huge drop", adding that the daily average during the month of February was 38 civilians killed. More than 270,000 people -- among them more than 79,000 civilians -- have died in Syria since its conflict erupted in March 2011. On Saturday, a ceasefire deal brokered by the United States and Russia came into effect in areas of Syria where the Islamic State (IS) jihadist group and Al-Qaeda's affiliate Al-Nusra Front are not deployed.

(IraqiNews.com) Nineveh – Nineveh Operations Command announced on Friday the killing of 18 ISIS militants in an artillery strike by the Iraqi army forces southeast of Mosul. Nineveh Operations said in a statement received by IraqiNews.com, “The Iraqi Army’s Artillery Division shelled sites where the ISIS militants where hiding and killed 18 elements of them in the area of Sultan Abdullah southeast Mosul,” indicating that, “The operation was based on accurate intelligence information.” The statement also added, “The international coalition aviation bombed accurately more than five rocket launchers,” pointing out that “The operations to monitor ISIS movements and shelters are continuing.”

The media keeps saying that the West isn't involved in Syria. This isn't true. By Ian Sinclair “The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary”, George Orwell noted in his censored preface to his 1945 book Animal Farm. “Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban”. Orwell went onto explain that “at any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it”. The corporate media’s ‘coverage’ of Syria adds a twist to Orwell’s dictum – inconvenient reports and facts do occasionally appear in respected newspapers and on popular news programmes but they are invariably ignored, decontextualised or not followed up on. Rather than informing the historical record, public opinion and government policy these snippets of es...

Secret cable and Dutch government official confirm that Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen is partly motivated by an ambitious US-backed pipeline fantasy By Nafeez Ahmed Nearly 3,000 civilians have been slaughtered and a million displaced in Saudi Arabia’s noble aerial bombardment of Yemen, which is backed by the United States and Britain. Over 14 million Yemenis face food insecurity – a jump of 12 percent since June 2015. Out of these, three million children are malnourished. And across the country, an estimated 20 million people cannot safely access clean water. The Saudi air force has systematically bombed Yemen’s civilian infrastructure in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law. An official UN report to the Security Council leaked last month found that the Saudis have “conducted airstrikes targeting civilians and civilian objects … including camps for internally displaced persons and refugees; civilian gatherings, including weddings; civilian vehicles, including buses; civ...

After pouring billions into rebuilding the country following successive Israeli invasions and air raids, the Saudis find that they cannot prevent the Shia from expressing their fury at Riyadh By Robert Fisk If you drive from Sunni Muslim Sidon to Shia Muslim southern Lebanon, you can travel from Saudi Arabia to Iran in 10 minutes. Sidon – like Lebanon’s other great Sunni majority city, Tripoli – has always basked in the favour of the Saudi monarchy. The south, with its mass of Hezbollah fighters – armed and paid for by Tehran, its “martyr” photographs plastered across the walls of every village – has long been a lung through which Saudi Arabia’s Iranian enemies breathe. But now Saudi Arabia, blundering into the civil war in Yemen and threatening to send its overpaid but poorly trained soldiers into Syria, has turned with a vengeance on Lebanon for its unfaithfulness and lack of gratitude after decades of Saudi largesse. After repeatedly promising to spend £3.2bn on new French weapons f...