English LCCC Newsbulletin For Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For August 24/2020
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news

The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://data.eliasbejjaninews.com/eliasnews21/english.august24.21.htm

News Bulletin Achieves Since 2006
Click Here to enter the LCCC Arabic/English news bulletins Achieves since 2006

Bible Quotations For today
”Let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love
First Letter of John 04/07-21/:”Let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. Beloved, since God loved us so much, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God lives in us, and his love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit.And we have seen and do testify that the Father has sent his Son as the Saviour of the world. God abides in those who confess that Jesus is the Son of God, and they abide in God. So we have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them. Love has been perfected among us in this: that we may have boldness on the day of judgement, because as he is, so are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love.We love because he first loved us. Those who say, ‘I love God’, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen. The commandment we have from him is this: those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also.

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 23-24/2021
Aoun 'Hopes for Positive Developments' Regarding New Govt.
President Aoun meets Caritas Lebanon delegation
Miqati's Resignation Chances Surge as Pessimism Engulfs Formation Process
Geagea: Sayyed Hassan's Promised Ship is a Silly Little Joke
Geagea Sees No Civil War Risk despite Economic Crisis
Geagea to The National: Hezbollah showing cracks in face of unprecedented resentment
Majzoub: Public schools to open on September 27, private ones by early October
Lebanese Hospitals at Breaking Point as Everything Runs Out
French Foreign Minister in UAE to Oversee Afghan Exodus
Hezbollah chief says Iranian tanker ‘at sea’ as Lebanon fuel prices soar
Nasrallah suggests bringing Iranians to drill for oil off Lebanese coast
Cyprus sends 88 Syrian migrants intercepted at sea back to Lebanon
Lebanon’s hospitals at breaking point amid crippling shortages of fuel, supplies
Analysis: Lebanon’s financial meltdown dragging country toward mayhem
What we need?/Jean- Marie Kassab/August 23/2021
Ce dont on a besoin?/Jean- Marie Kassab/August 23/2021

Titles For The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 23-24/2021
Gunfire at Kabul Airport Kills 1; Taliban Mass Near Panjshir
No New Afghan Govt. until Last U.S. Soldier Leaves
Taliban Takeover Prompts Relief, Women's Rights Fears in Afghan Cities
Iran Calls for Restraint, 'Inclusive' Afghanistan Govt.
Turkey erects walls to block Afghan refugees fleeing Taliban
Bennett to tell Biden: Iran’s advanced enrichment makes nuclear deal worthless/Lahav Harkov/August 23/2021
Israeli weapons were used extensively in Afghanistan/Anna Ahronheim/Jerusalem Post/August 23/2021
Egypt Closing Rafah Crossing with Gaza
Differences with Hamas lead Egypt to close Rafah crossing
Iran restarts fuel exports to Afghanistan after request from Taliban, tariffs cut
Iran’s Raisi calls on Japan to release frozen billions
Iraq Seeks Role as Mediator with Regional Summit
Millions in Syria, Iraq Losing Access to Water
Qatar Opens Registration for Polls Set for October 2
Leaked footage shows grim conditions in Iran’s notorious Evin prison

Titles For The Latest The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published on August 23-24/2021
Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster/Ryan C. Crocker/The New York Times/August 23/2021
Biden’s catastrophe/Bradley Bowman/ Washington Examine/August 23/2021
Back to the Drawing Board on Iran/Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker/The Dispatch-FDD/August 23/2021
No, Mr President. Al-Qaeda Is Not ‘Gone’ From Afghanistan./ Thomas Joscelyn/The Dispatch-FDD/August 23/2021
The Dreadful Consequences of the Biden Disaster in Afghanistan/Guy Millière/Gatestone Institute/August 23, 2021
Putin chides U.S. on its actions in Afghanistan — and warns of the risk of terrorism/Robyn Dixon/The Washington Post/August v23/2021
Yet Another Coptic Christian Girl Kidnapped in Cairo/Raymond Ibrahim/Coptic Solidarity/August 23/2021

The Latest English LCCC Lebanese & Lebanese Related News & Editorials published on August 23-24/2021
Aoun 'Hopes for Positive Developments' Regarding New Govt.
Naharnet/August 23/2021
President Michel Aoun on Monday hoped the coming days “will carry positive developments regarding the formation of the government.”He added that the formation of a new cabinet “would launch a recovery workshop at the various levels.”Lebanon's bitterly divided political leaders have repeatedly failed to agree on a new line-up a year after the previous cabinet resigned in the wake of the catastrophic port blast. The country is grappling with an economic crisis branded by the World Bank as one of the planet's worse since the mid-19th century. The currency has lost 90 percent of its value on the black market, with more than three-quarters of the population now in poverty. On top of shortages of medicine, gas and bread, the country has been hard hit by severe fuel shortages leading to massive queues at pumping stations. Diesel shortages have aggravated power cuts which now last up to 22 hours a day, forcing shut businesses, government offices and even hospitals.

President Aoun meets Caritas Lebanon delegation
NNA/August 23/2021
President Michel Aoun met Monday at Baabda palace with Head of Caritas Lebanon, Father Michel Abboud, accompanied by vice president Nicolas Hajjar, over the organization's humanitarian services and the challenges it is facing. During the meeting, the President heaped praise on "the role played by the humanitarian foundations and organization in helping the Lebanese in these difficult times." He also highlighted the importance of the activities undertaken by Caritas Lebanon nationwide, especially amid the social and economic hardships in the country.Moreover, the President gave instructions to facilitate the organization's humanitarian mission.

Miqati's Resignation Chances Surge as Pessimism Engulfs Formation Process
Naharnet/August 23/2021
The optimism that engulfed the cabinet formation process in the past days has largely retreated and the possibility of PM-designate Najib Miqati’s resignation has become a “more than serious choice,” a media report published Monday said. “The formation picture is not reassuring and we are before a critical week regarding the government,” informed political sources told the al-Joumhouria newspaper. “The indications that are being leaked from the sources of President (Michel) Aoun and Miqati point to negative prospects,” the sources said. The sources attributed the negativity to “veiled domestic and foreign interventions that took place heavily over the past days and frustrated the positivities that Aoun and Miqati had spoken of prior to the end of last week.”“Prior to this setback, Aoun and Miqati were about to enter the final phase of picking the candidates ahead of declaring the cabinet line-up within a few days,” al-Joumhouria said. And as political sources linked the setback exclusively to “sudden conditions and demands by some parties as to substituting candidates, mutual vetoes and additional portfolios,” other sources attributed the negativity to Aoun’s “insistence” on obtaining “more than one third” of the cabinet’s seats.

Geagea: Sayyed Hassan's Promised Ship is a Silly Little Joke
Naharnet/August 23/2021
Lebanese Forces leader Samir Geagea on Monday ridiculed Hizbullah chief Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah’s declared plans for bringing fuel ships from Iran.
“As for Sayyed Hassan’s promised ship, it is nothing but a silly little joke amid the tragedy that we are living,” Geagea said in a statement. “Why hasn’t the Iranian oil solved Assad’s problem? It is noteworthy in this regard to mention that Syria’s fuel crisis is what amplified Lebanon’s fuel crisis due to the ongoing systematic smuggling,” the LF leader noted. “My suggestion to Sayyed Hassan is for Iran to solve Syria’s fuel problem, which would instantly resolve half of Lebanon’s problem,” Geagea went on to say. Moreover, the LF leader stressed that the only solution to Lebanon’s fuel crisis would be to “liberalize the market” and that the only solution to Lebanon’s problem would be to “liberate the state from those who are currently in power.”
Nasrallah had on Sunday promised that deliveries of Iranian fuel would arrive "in the days to come" to help solve the beleaguered country's dire shortages.
For the second time in four days, Nasrallah said in a televised address that fuel shipments would leave the Islamic republic for Lebanon. On Sunday alone, fuel prices soared by up to 70 percent after yet another subsidy cut, piling more pressure on people struggling to make ends meet. The cost of hydrocarbons in Lebanon has now roughly tripled in the two months since the central bank started cutting its support for imports. The latest cut, which is expected to cause knock-on price hikes on other key commodities, adds to the Mediterranean country's economic crisis, one of the world's worst since the 1850s. Fuel shortages have forced businesses and government offices to close, even threatening blackouts at hospitals. In his first televised address on Thursday, Nasrallah announced the departure "in the coming hours" of a shipload of fuel for Lebanon in defiance of U.S. sanctions on Iran.
On Sunday, Nasrallah said the first Iranian ship loaded with fuel was "at sea."
"A second ship will set sail in the next few days, and it will be followed by others," he said. Hizbullah, a close ally of Iran designated as a "terrorist" group by much of the West, is a major political force in Lebanon but its leaders are under U.S. sanctions.
"We will continue this process as long as Lebanon needs it," Nasrallah said.
"The aim is to help all Lebanese, (not just) Hizbullah supporters or the Shiites," he added. Questions remain over how Iranian shipments of fuel could reach their destination. Since February this year, Iran and its arch-enemy Israel have been engaged in a "shadow war" in which vessels linked to each nation have come under attack in waters around the Gulf in tit-for-tat exchanges.

Geagea Sees No Civil War Risk despite Economic Crisis
Geagea to The National: Hezbollah showing cracks in face of unprecedented resentment
NNA/August 23/2021   
Lebanese Forces' leader, Samir Geagea, told an interview with "The National" that "Hezbollah is politically dominant but is showing many cracks and vulnerabilities."
Geagea also renewed calls for early legislative elections.
"The Lebanese population is fed up. Free and fair early elections can happen and would bring back faith in Lebanon."
Commenting on the government formation process, he said: "I would assess that there is 50-50 chance for a Mikati government formation. If it forms, it is not going to be that different than [former prime minister Hassan] Diab’s Cabinet."
Following is the full interview as published by the newspaper.
Nestled in his highly secure compound in the town of Maarab, Mount Lebanon, the head of the Lebanese Forces Party, Samir Geagea, admits the country has hit rock bottom amid its economic downturn, but cautions against drawing parallels to the civil-war era.
Mr Geagea, whose party holds the second-largest Christian bloc in the Lebanese Parliament, told The National that early elections are the only way out of the crisis.
The Lebanese currency has lost more than 90 per cent of its value since October 2019 and the country is facing dire fuel, medical and electricity shortages.
"Lebanon is at the bottom now. You can see the miserable state of the economy and the daily, unbearable life struggles," said Mr Geagea, who fought during Lebanon’s civil war and spent 11 years in solitary confinement thereafter.
But to him, despite the level of anger and political paralysis, there is no threat of another civil war. "This is not a 1975 moment in Lebanon. The [economic] struggles of someone in Tripoli [north] are the same of someone in Nabatiyeh [south]."
instead, he expects more social unrest and popular upheaval in the months to come.
Though Lebanon’s new prime minister-designate, Najib Mikati, is trying to break the year-long political paralysis and form a government, Mr Geagea is not holding out much hope that a Cabinet -- if formed -- will end the crisis.
"I would assess that there is 50-50 chance for a Mikati government formation. If it forms, it is not going to be that different than [former prime minister Hassan] Diab’s Cabinet."Mr Geagea's party has made the decision to stay out of this government.
"This is not about the new prime minister-designate Mikati. It is about the Parliament’s composition and where Hezbollah and [President Michel] Aoun's blocs hold significant influence." Through former prime minister Saad Hariri, those blocs have been able to garner the slim majority needed to form a government.
Instead, Mr Geagea is strongly advocating for early parliamentary elections, now scheduled for next May.
"The Lebanese population is fed up. Free and fair early elections can happen and would bring back faith in Lebanon."
Asked about Hezbollah’s political dominance in Beirut and its rejection of holding early elections, Mr Geagea said Lebanon’s militant group is facing unprecedented challenges.
"Yes, Hezbollah is politically dominant but is showing many cracks and vulnerabilities," he said. "The events of Shwaya were unprecedented. They happened in the deep south and have exposed a serious crisis for Hezbollah."
This month, furious residents of the southern town of Shwaya seized one of Hezbollah's rocket-launching vehicles as it attempted to engage in cross-border attacks on Israel. For decades, Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel had gone unchallenged by the local population.
The Lebanese Forces leader argues that though Hezbollah’s military clout extends from Beirut to Sanaa, the party can be politically contained in the parliamentary elections.
Other tools that could be used to leverage change in Lebanon before elections are corruption-related sanctions from the US and Europe, Mr Geagea said.
"US and EU sanctions on Lebanese figures would be helpful in pressuring corrupt figures and enablers of collapse."
These measures could be announced as soon as this month if no government is formed.
Mr Geagea also advocated more US aid for the Lebanese army -- "not equipment but food and resources that help in day-to-day operations."
Regionally, Mr Geagea is wary of US negotiations with Iran over a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015.
"Returning to the old version of the nuclear deal with Iran would be a disaster. Any money that comes into Iran will show up in Lebanon, Iraq, Syria and Yemen. We need to address its regional role," he said.
Asked about Saudi Arabia’s role and its growing distance from Lebanon’s political affairs over the last two years, Mr Geagea explained Riyadh’s hesitance as being related to failures by Beirut to deliver tangibles.
"There is no ambiguity in Saudi Arabia’s role in Lebanon. They see Lebanon at minimum as being unfriendly and very corrupt on the inside. They need to see tangibles from any future government."
He describes his relationship with both Saudi Arabia and the UAE as "very good" and is hoping for a restoration of Arab confidence in Lebanon to bring back investment after the elections. As to the Abraham Accords and whether he thought Lebanon would enter into peace talks with Israel, Mr Geagea opposed that notion."The Abraham Accords are a sovereign decision of those countries that signed normalisation with Israel. We don’t want a Lebanon peace agreement before resolving the Palestinian cause."

Majzoub: Public schools to open on September 27, private ones by early October
NNA/August 23/2021 
Caretaker Minister of Education, Tarek Majzoub, on Monday announced that public schools are set to open on September 27, while private learning shall start by early October."Schools must not close. We decided to return to in-person learning in schools, high schools, institutes, and universities," Majzoub told a news conference.

Lebanese Hospitals at Breaking Point as Everything Runs Out
Associated Press/August 23/2021
Drenched in sweat, doctors check patients lying on stretchers in the reception area of Lebanon's largest public hospital. Air conditioners are turned off, except in operating rooms and storage units, to save on fuel. Medics scramble to find alternatives to saline solutions after the hospital ran out. The shortages are overwhelming, the medical staff exhausted. And with a new surge in coronavirus cases, Lebanon's hospitals are at a breaking point. The country's health sector is a casualty of the multiple crises that have plunged Lebanon into a downward spiral — a financial and economic meltdown, compounded by a complete failure of the government, runaway corruption and a pandemic that isn't going away. The collapse is all the more dramatic since only a few years ago, Lebanon was a leader in medical care in the Arab world. The region's rich and famous came to this small Mideast nation of 6 million for everything, from major hospital procedures to plastic surgeries.
THE NEW NORMAL
Ghaidaa al-Saddik, a second-year resident, had just returned from a week off after an exhausting year. Back on duty for a week, she has already intubated two critical patients in the emergency room, both in their 30s. She struggles to admit new patients, knowing how short on supplies the hospital is, scared to be blamed for mistakes and questioning if she is doing her best. Many patients are asked to bring their own medicines, such as steroids. Others are discharged too soon — often to homes where power outages last for days. "You feel like you are trapped," said al-Saddik. The 28-year-old spends more nights in the staff dorms studying because at home, she has no electricity. She moved to an apartment closer to the hospital that she shares with two other people to save on rent and transportation. With the collapse of Lebanon's currency amid the crisis, her salary has lost nearly 90% of its value.
With fewer and fewer residents, she must now do the rounds for about 30 patients, instead of 10. Her mentor, a senior virologist, has left Lebanon — one of many in a brain drain of medical professionals. "I want to help my people," she said. "But at the same time, what about me being a better doctor?"
RUNNING ON EMPTY
The Rafik Hariri University Hospital is Lebanon's largest public hospital and the country's No. 1 for the treatment of coronavirus patients. Lebanon has so far registered nearly 590,000 infections and over 8,000 deaths. The hospital, which depended on the state power company, had to start relying on generators for at least 12 hours a day. Since last Monday, the generators have been the only source of power, running non-stop. Most of the hospital's diesel, sold at the black market at five times the official price, is either donated by political parties or international aid groups.To save on fuel, some rooms run only electrical fans in the sweltering summer heat. Not all hospital elevators are working. Bed capacity has been downsized by about 15% and the ER admits only life-threatening cases. It is a perpetual crisis that has left the hospital always on the brink, says its director, Firas Abiad. There are "shortages of almost everything."
Every day, he struggles to secure more fuel — the hospital has a maximum two-day supply at any time. Shelves are thin on medicines, including for cancer patients and dialysis. A new aid shipment of blood serum will last just a few days. "We can hardly get by," said Jihad Bikai, head of the ER. He recently had to send a critical patient to another hospital because he no longer has a vascular surgeon on staff.
WHAT HAPPENED?
Lebanon's financial crisis, rooted in years of corruption and mismanagement, spilled out into the streets in late 2019, with antigovernment protests and demands for accountability. Political leaders have since failed to agree on a recovery program or even a new government — leaving the previous one in perpetual but stumped caretaker role. The World Bank has described the crisis as among the worst in over a century. In just two and a half years, the majority of the population has been plunged into poverty, the national currency is collapsing and foreign reserves have run dry. Power outages have for years forced a dependence on private generators but the crisis took on new dimensions this summer as fuel and diesel became scarce, disrupting the work of hospitals, bakeries, internet providers and many other businesses. Then last August, a massive explosion at Beirut's port — when hundreds of tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate ignited — destroyed entire neighborhoods of the city and killed 214 people. Thousands were injured, inundating hospitals, some of which lost members of their staff and were forced to shut down temporarily. On a recent afternoon at the Rafik Hariri hospital, nurse Mustafa Harqous, 39, tried to ignore the ruckus outside the coronavirus ER: patients with oxygen masks waiting for a bed to free up, families pressing to visit sick relatives, others arguing over out-of-stock drugs. He went about his work in the 25-bed room. Except for a month-old baby, the patients were mostly men in their 30s and 40s. "Some people understand the shortages are not our fault," he said. "But many don't."He worries how he will fill up his car for the drive home, an hour and a half away. The government, he said, is "leaving people in the middle of the sea with no rescue boat."
NO WAY OUT
Reports say at least 2,500 doctors and nurses have left Lebanon this year. At the Rafik Hariri hospital, at least 30% of doctors and more than 10% of nurses left, most recently five in one day. Many private hospitals, who offer 80% of Lebanon's medical services, are shutting down because of lack of resources or turning away patients who can't pay. Bikai, the 37-year-old ER chief, was offered a job in a neighboring country. His salary is barely enough to cover his son's dentist's bills. His wife, also a doctor, works by his side in the ER. "There is a moment, when you are pushing hard to get over a mountain, and you get to a place, you can't move," he said. "I worry we'll get to that."Abiad, the hospital director, struggles to remain positive for his staff."Our country is disintegrating in front of our eyes,"" he said. "The most difficult part is ... we can't seem to be able to find a way to stop this deterioration."

French Foreign Minister in UAE to Oversee Afghan Exodus
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian was due in the UAE Monday to see for himself the massive airlift underway from Afghanistan using the Gulf nation as a staging post. France is seeking to evacuate more than 1,000 Afghans who are fleeing the country following the Taliban's lightning takeover a week ago, one of a number of nations scrambling to evacuate vulnerable individuals. Le Drian and colleagues were due to visit the Al-Dhafra base -- some 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Abu Dhabi -- where the French air force has been conducting round the clock operations in support of the evacuations. Since August 15, "nearly 100 French residents, 40 residents of partner nations, and more than 1,000 (at-risk) Afghans" have been transported to France via the Emirates, Le Drian's delegation said in a statement. A flight with 250 French and Afghans aboard left for Paris on Sunday followed by another in the early hours of Monday with 150 passengers.The first emergency flight carried 41 people, mostly French, on August 17. Le Drian and Defense Minister Florence Parly will meet diplomats, military personnel, police officers, and "all the staff working under extremely difficult conditions to enable evacuation operations from Kabul", the statement said. They were also due to meet Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, de facto leader of the UAE, to "thank the Emirati authorities for their support", the communique added. France has a permanent military presence in the Emirates from where it conducted parts of its aerial campaign against the Islamic State group. France is one of several NATO and EU member states that are scrambling to rescue vulnerable foreign staff and Afghan allies from Afghanistan since the Taliban overran the capital just over a week ago. Britain said Monday it would urge the United States at a virtual G7 summit to extend an end-of-the-month deadline to complete evacuations of Western citizens and Afghan colleagues from Kabul. U.S. President Joe Biden has set an August 31 deadline for the chaotic airlift organized by thousands of temporarily deployed U.S. troops -- but has left the door open to an extension if needed. "We need time to accomplish this task, measured in days and weeks not months," Le Drian told the French Journal du Dimanche weekly. Since August 14, roughly 25,100 people have been evacuated from Afghanistan aboard aircraft flown by the U.S. and its allies, according to a White House estimate.

Hezbollah chief says Iranian tanker ‘at sea’ as Lebanon fuel prices soar
The Arab Weekly/August 23/2021
BEIRUT- The head of Hezbollah in Lebanon on Sunday promised that deliveries of Iranian fuel would arrive “in the days to come” to help solve the beleaguered country’s dire shortages. For the second time in four days, Hassan Nasrallah said in a televised address that fuel shipments would leave the Islamic republic for Lebanon. Nasrallah also dismissed as “illusions” a reported US-backed initiative to ease Lebanon’s energy crisis. On Sunday alone, fuel prices soared by up to 70 percent after yet another subsidy cut, piling more pressure on people struggling to make ends meet.
The cost of hydrocarbons in Lebanon has now roughly tripled in the two months since the central bank started cutting its support for imports. The latest cut, which is expected to cause knock-on price hikes on other key commodities, adds to the small Arab country’s economic crisis, one of the world’s worst since the 1850s. Fuel shortages have forced businesses and government offices to close, even threatening blackouts at hospitals. In his first televised address on Thursday, Nasrallah announced the departure “in the coming hours” of a shipload of fuel for Lebanon in defiance of US sanctions on Iran. On Sunday, Nasrallah said the first Iranian ship loaded with fuel was “at sea”. “A second ship will set sail in the next few days, and it will be followed by others,” he said. Hezbollah, a close ally of Iran designated as a terrorist group by much of the West, is a major political force in Lebanon but its leaders are under US sanctions. “We will continue this process as long as Lebanon needs it,” Nasrallah said. “The aim is to help all Lebanese, (not just) Hezbollah supporters or the Shiites.” Questions remain over how Iranian shipments of fuel could reach their destination. Since February this year, Iran and its arch-enemy Israel have been engaged in a “shadow war” in which vessels linked to each nation have come under attack in waters around the Gulf in tit-for-tat exchanges. The Lebanese presidency, in an apparent response to Nasrallah’s claim on Thursday, later quoted the American ambassador as saying efforts were underway with Egypt and Jordan to ease Lebanon’s energy problems. Nasrallah on Sunday said “welcome to Egyptian gas, welcome to Jordanian electricity — and welcome to any effort that means we will have electricity in Lebanon.” He dismissed US ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea’s reported involvement in the initiative as “promises, illusions”.“But if these promises materialise, not a problem. We don’t mind. On the contrary,” Nasrallah said.

Nasrallah suggests bringing Iranians to drill for oil off Lebanese coast
The Jerusalem Post/August 23/2021
Hezbollah's leader announced that an Iranian oil tanker was on its way to Lebanon and more would follow.
Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah suggested that the next Lebanese government pursue drilling for oil and gas off of Lebanon's coast, stressing that Hezbollah could bring an Iranian company to drill, if necessary, during a speech on Sunday.
The Hezbollah leader offered to help drill for oil and gas in the waters of Lebanon's coast, saying that if no companies are willing to do so due to fears of US sanctions or Israeli strikes, the terrorist group could bring an Iranian company to drill. Nasrallah added that drilling for oil and gas in Lebanon's waters would rid the country of the need to import fuel. Israel and Lebanon have been conducting US-mediated negotiations concerning their maritime border in the past year. The border dispute is about a triangular area of the Mediterranean Sea that starts at the countries’ land border, and is 5-6 km. wide on average. The area constitutes about 2% of Israel’s economic waters. The countries hope that settling the border would encourage further gas exploration in the area. Nasrallah also announced on Sunday that a first shipment of Iranian oil was on its way to Lebanon and that a second ship would set sail within the next few days. Nasrallah promised that more ships would follow. "Our goal is to break the black market and monopoly and alleviate people's suffering," said Nasrallah. The Hezbollah leader stressed that the group is "not a substitute for the state, importing companies, or stations" and does not want to compete with anyone. "What we will bring is for Lebanon and for all the Lebanese, not for Hezbollah, the Shi'ites, or one region without the other. The goal is to help all the Lebanese and all the Lebanese regions, not to help one group without another group," said Nasrallah.
On Thursday, Nasrallah had warned Israel and the US that "from the moment the Iranian ship sails, [Hezbollah] will consider it Lebanese territory." The first ship, he said, would carry diesel fuel since that is currently the top priority.
The Hezbollah leader warned against challenging his organization on the matter, saying the issue has "become linked to the pride of our people, and we refuse to humiliate this people."Nasrallah has warned on multiple occasions that Hezbollah would import Iranian oil on its own if the Lebanese government did not. Iranian oil is subsumed under international sanctions. Such a move could bring Iranian fuel tankers close to Israel’s shores. After the speech on Thursday, Hezbollah supporters shared a photo on social media showing an oil tanker with an Iranian flag with the outline of a bomb around it breaking through the word "USA."

Cyprus sends 88 Syrian migrants intercepted at sea back to Lebanon
The Associated Press/23 August ,2021
Cyprus on Monday sent 88 Syrian migrants back to Lebanon after they tried to reach the eastern Mediterranean island nation on two boats. Interior Minister Nicos Nouris told The Associated Press that rescue crews continue to search for one of five men who jumped overboard after police vessels intercepted their boat off Cyprus’ eastern coast. Nouris said police picked up four men, but the fifth, who was wearing a mask, flippers and a life preserver, managed to swim away. One pregnant woman and another man who was ill were airlifted to hospital. Coastal radar had picked up two vessels approaching the Cypriot coastline Sunday evening. Marine police vessels intercepted the boats — which carried a combined 48 men, 15 women and 25 minors —15 kilometers (9 miles) from coast. They were transferred to a chartered boat on Monday for the trip back to Lebanon under police escort. Cyprus signed an agreement with Lebanon last year to take back anyone trying to reach the island by boat. Nouris said Cyprus has a right to protect its borders from such irregular migration despite criticism by human rights groups that the deal violates international law because migrants aren’t given the chance to apply for asylum. More than 1,337 Syrians have reached Cyprus by sea since 2019. Many more migrants come from Turkey through the ethnically divided island’s unrecognized, breakaway north. Authorities say the number of migrants who have either received or have applied for protection in Cyprus now accounts for 4 percent of the population. Cyprus has asked the European Union’s border agency Frontex to stem the flow of migrant arrivals from countries including Turkey, Syria and Lebanon. Cyprus lies 170 kilometers (100 miles) west of Syria and 230 kilometers (140 miles) west of Lebanon.

Lebanon’s hospitals at breaking point amid crippling shortages of fuel, supplies
The Associated Press/23 August ,2021
Drenched in sweat, doctors check patients lying on stretchers in the reception area of Lebanon’s largest public hospital. Air conditioners are turned off, except in operating rooms and storage units, to save on fuel. Medics scramble to find alternatives to saline solutions after the hospital ran out. The shortages are overwhelming, the medical staff exhausted. And with a new surge in coronavirus cases, Lebanon’s hospitals are at a breaking point. The country’s health sector is a casualty of the multiple crises that have plunged Lebanon into a downward spiral — a financial and economic meltdown, compounded by a complete failure of the government, runaway corruption and a pandemic that isn’t going away. The collapse is all the more dramatic since only a few years ago, Lebanon was a leader in medical care in the Arab world. The region’s rich and famous came to this small Mideast nation of 6 million for everything, from major hospital procedures to plastic surgeries.
The new normal
Ghaidaa al-Saddik, a second-year resident, had just returned from a week off after an exhausting year. Back on duty for a week, she has already intubated two critical patients in the emergency room, both in their 30s. She struggles to admit new patients, knowing how short on supplies the hospital is, scared to be blamed for mistakes and questioning if she is doing her best. Many patients are asked to bring their own medicines, such as steroids. Others are discharged too soon — often to homes where power outages last for days. “You feel like you are trapped,” said al-Saddik.
The 28-year-old spends more nights in the staff dorms studying because at home, she has no electricity. She moved to an apartment closer to the hospital that she shares with two other people to save on rent and transportation. With the collapse of Lebanon’s currency amid the crisis, her salary has lost nearly 90 percent of its value.With fewer and fewer residents, she must now do the rounds for about 30 patients, instead of 10. Her mentor, a senior virologist, has left Lebanon — one of many in a brain drain of medical professionals. “I want to help my people,” she said. “But at the same time, what about me being a better doctor?”
Running on empty
The Rafik Hariri University Hospital is Lebanon’s largest public hospital and the country’s No. 1 for the treatment of coronavirus patients. Lebanon has so far registered nearly 590,000 infections and over 8,000 deaths. The hospital, which depended on the state power company, had to start relying on generators for at least 12 hours a day. Since last Monday, the generators have been the only source of power, running non-stop. Most of the hospital’s diesel, sold at the black market at five times the official price, is either donated by political parties or international aid groups. To save on fuel, some rooms run only electrical fans in the sweltering summer heat. Not all hospital elevators are working. Bed capacity has been downsized by about 15 percent and the ER admits only life-threatening cases. It is a perpetual crisis that has left the hospital always on the brink, says its director, Firas Abiad. There are “shortages of almost everything.”Every day, he struggles to secure more fuel — the hospital has a maximum two-day supply at any time. Shelves are thin on medicines, including for cancer patients and dialysis. A new aid shipment of blood serum will last just a few days.
“We can hardly get by,” said Jihad Bikai, head of the ER. He recently had to send a critical patient to another hospital because he no longer has a vascular surgeon on staff.
What happened?
Lebanon’s financial crisis, rooted in years of corruption and mismanagement, spilled out into the streets in late 2019, with antigovernment protests and demands for accountability. Political leaders have since failed to agree on a recovery program or even a new government — leaving the previous one in perpetual but stumped caretaker role. The World Bank has described the crisis as among the worst in over a century. In just two and a half years, the majority of the population has been plunged into poverty, the national currency is collapsing and foreign reserves have run dry. Power outages have for years forced a dependence on private generators but the crisis took on new dimensions this summer as fuel and diesel became scarce, disrupting the work of hospitals, bakeries, internet providers and many other businesses. Then last August, a massive explosion at Beirut’s port — when hundreds of tons of improperly stored ammonium nitrate ignited — destroyed entire neighborhoods of the city and killed 214 people. Thousands were injured, inundating hospitals, some of which lost members of their staff and were forced to shut down temporarily. On a recent afternoon at the Rafik Hariri hospital, nurse Mustafa Harqous, 39, tried to ignore the ruckus outside the coronavirus ER: patients with oxygen masks waiting for a bed to free up, families pressing to visit sick relatives, others arguing over out-of-stock drugs. He went about his work in the 25-bed room. Except for a month-old baby, the patients were mostly men in their 30s and 40s.
“Some people understand the shortages are not our fault,” he said. “But many don’t.”
He worries how he will fill up his car for the drive home, an hour and a half away. The government, he said, is “leaving people in the middle of the sea with no rescue boat.” No way out
Reports say at least 2,500 doctors and nurses have left Lebanon this year. At the Rafik Hariri hospital, at least 30 percent of doctors and more than 10 percent of nurses left, most recently five in one day. Many private hospitals, who offer 80 percent of Lebanon’s medical services, are shutting down because of lack of resources or turning away patients who can’t pay. Bikai, the 37-year-old ER chief, was offered a job in a neighboring country. His salary is barely enough to cover his son’s dentist’s bills. His wife, also a doctor, works by his side in the ER. “There is a moment, when you are pushing hard to get over a mountain, and you get to a place, you can’t move,” he said. “I worry we’ll get to that.” Abiad, the hospital director, struggles to remain positive for his staff. “Our country is disintegrating in front of our eyes,” he said. “The most difficult part is ... we can’t seem to be able to find a way to stop this deterioration.”

Analysis: Lebanon’s financial meltdown dragging country toward mayhem
Reuters/ 23 August ,2021
Lebanon’s financial meltdown is dragging the country toward mayhem at a quickening pace, forcing its feuding leaders to face a choice between finally doing something about the crisis or risking yet more chaos and insecurity. The economic collapse that has caused Lebanese mounting hardship for two years hit a crunch point this month with fuel shortages paralyzing even essential services and miles-long queues forming at gas stations with little or no petrol to sell. Scrambles for fuel have sparked anarchic scenes which the bankrupt state’s security forces have struggled to contain. Soldiers have at times encountered gunfire when trying to keep order. The country is running out of critical medicines, and the UN is warning of a looming water crisis, but meanwhile the ruling elite bickers over the seats in a new government. The Shia group Hezbollah’s recent decision to go it alone and import Iranian fuel added a new element to the crisis. Long part of Lebanon’s ruling system, the heavily armed group designated as terrorists by the United States says it only wants to ease the shortages. But critics say it aims to expand its already deep sway and draw Lebanon deeper into Iran’s orbit, complicating the path ahead for a state hoping for Western aid and dealing another blow to its diminished authority.The meltdown, stemming from decades of corruption in the state and unsustainable financing, has already pushed more than half of the population of some 6 million into poverty and reduced the value of the currency by 90 percent.
Lebanon passed a milestone on Aug. 11 when the central bank declared it could no longer finance fuel imports at subsidized exchange rates because its dollar reserves had been so badly depleted.
The caretaker administration then decided on Saturday to raise fuel prices. But even the new higher prices are still only a fraction of the real price, with new borrowing from the central bank until the end of September making up the difference.
Economists say the move is no solution, as it leaves open a huge incentive for smuggling and hoarding. An eventual rise to market prices seems inevitable as dollars run out. In the meantime, a black market has flourished where gasoline is sold in plastic bottles at hugely inflated prices. Security incidents including hijackings of fuel tanker trucks have become a daily occurrence. Last week, at least 28 people were killed in northern Lebanon when a fuel tank exploded during a scramble for its gasoline. “There are many small groups that have started to realize they can seize any tanker on the road through force,” said a security official speaking anonymously. There have been at least eight incidents a day at gas stations or targeting tankers, the official said. An international support group including France and the United States said on Friday the “fast-accelerating crisis underscores the utmost urgency of forming a government capable of taking the situation in hand.”“How much worse can it get? All we can do is pray,” said Jihad Fakher Eddine after waiting for seven hours for gas.
Government soon?
The state’s failure was encapsulated in a public row between the president and the central bank over fuel subsidies, with the bank’s governor Riad Salameh declaring that nobody was running Lebanon, where many of today’s politicians were warlords in the 1975-90 civil war. President Michel Aoun, the Maronite Christian head of state, and the Sunni Muslim Prime Minister-designate Najib Mikati have yet to clinch a deal on the government to replace the administration that quit after the Beirut port blast a year ago.The delay is over a couple of names, political sources say, more than enough to spoil the process in a system where cabinet deals are prone to being derailed by factional interests. Alain Aoun, a senior member of the political party founded by the president and his nephew, said he believed a government would be formed soon. “The price of failure - a rapid descent into more chaos - is too high,” he told Reuters.
If a government is agreed, Mikati plans to resume talks with the International Monetary Fund, which wants to see reforms including bringing public finances into order, rehabilitating the banking system and restructuring public debt.
The ruling elite believe about $860 million worth of new IMF reserves should provide some breathing space. But reforms are vital, and some doubt whether a new government can succeed where the outgoing cabinet failed. Elections are due next spring, to be followed by a whole new round of government formation negotiations. “Will there be the courage to undertake these reforms? I doubt it. The policymakers seem to be interested in tiding things over and kicking the can down the road until elections next year,” said Nasser Saidi, a former economy minister and central bank vice governor.
“You need immediate reforms. You need shock therapy to restore confidence,” he said. Meanwhile, if Hezbollah can deliver steady supplies of Iranian fuel, the situation will become even more complex. Its opponents say the move could expose Lebanon to US sanctions. “While what they are doing now is symbolic with this barge of diesel, it could be a starting point for something bigger,” said Ghassan Hasbani, a former deputy prime minister and member of the Christian Lebanese Forces party. “If it persists and they can carry on doing that at a larger scale, then we would be seeing a start of trying to fragment the country,” he told Reuters. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said on Sunday that the group was not trying to replace the state and that a second Iranian fuel shipment would be sailing in the coming days.

What we need?
Jean- Marie Kassab/August 23/2021
We need an enlightened dictator who would impose himself and by force to stop the disaster.A dictator with a unique mission: imposing the law.
Impossess the law starting with declaring war on the Iranian occupier and arresting his supporters, judging them and putting them in jail. EVERYONE.
From president to bottom of the ladder.
Impossible the law by dissolving parliament and passing judgement to deputies who of legislators have become outlaw by protecting criminals.
Imposing the law by putting to arrest all those suspected of corruption and doing everything to recover the stolen money. Other states have passed it.
Imposing the law by imprisoning all profiteers.
Imposing the law by arresting all smugglers and their protectors first and foremost. No need to put a soldier every meter of the border. Nobody does it. We attack the chiefs, we decapitate the snake and the turn is played.
Changing the electoral law and preparing for new free elections. The people will decide to come out freely and what follows.
Supervise these elections possibly with UN support because weeds are growing fast in Lebanon.
Walk away.

Ce dont on a besoin?
Jean- Marie Kassab/August 23/2021
On a besoin d'un dictateur éclairé qui s'imposerait lui-même et par la force pour stopper le désastre.
Un dictateur avec une mission unique : imposer la loi.
Imposer la loi en commençant par déclarer la guerre à l'occupant Iranien et arrêter ses suppôts , les juger et les mettre en prison . TOUS.
A partir du président jusqu'au bas de l'échelle.
Imposer la loi en dissolvant le parlement et passer en jugement les députés qui de législateurs sont devenus hors-la-loi en protègeant les criminels.
Imposer la loi en mettant aux arrêts tous ceux soupçonnés de corruption et faire de tout pour récuperer l'argent dérobé. D'autres États l'ont réussi.
Imposer la loi en emprisonnant tous les profiteurs.
Imposer la loi en arrêtant tous les contrebandiers et leur protecteurs avant tout. Pas besoin de mettre un soldat à chaque mètre de la frontière. Personne ne le fait. On s'attaque aux chefs, on décapite le serpent et le tour est joué.
Changer la loi électorale et préparer de nouvelles élections libres.Le peuple décidera de sort librement et que s' ensuive ce qui s'ensuivra.
Superviser ces élections eventuellement avec un appui onusien car les mauvaises herbes repoussent vite au Liban.
S'en aller.

The Latest English LCCC Miscellaneous Reports And News published on August 23-24/2021
Gunfire at Kabul Airport Kills 1; Taliban Mass Near Panjshir
Associated Press/August 23/2021
A firefight at one of the gates of Kabul's international airport killed at least one Afghan soldier early Monday, German officials said, the latest chaos to engulf Western efforts to evacuate those fleeing the Taliban takeover of the country.
The shooting near the military side of the airport came as the Taliban sent fighters to the north of the capital to eliminate pockets of armed resistance to their lightning takeover earlier this month. The Taliban said they retook three districts that fell the day before and had surrounded Panjshir, the last province that remains out of their control. Afghanistan's security forces collapsed in the face of the Taliban advance, despite 20 years of Western aid, training and assistance. But some armed Afghans remain at Kabul airport assisting Western evacuation efforts. The gunfire broke out near the airport's northern gate, where at least seven Afghans died a day earlier in a panicked stampede of thousands of people trying to flee the country. The circumstances of the shooting, which occurred around dawn, remained unclear. The German military tweeted that one member of the Afghan security forces was killed and three others were wounded by "unknown attackers." It later clarified that it was referring to "members of the Afghan army" involved in securing the airport. The U.S. military and NATO did not immediately acknowledge the shooting. There was no comment from the Taliban.
The tragic scenes around the airport have transfixed the world. Afghans poured onto the tarmac last week and some clung to a U.S. military transport plane as it took off, later plunging to their deaths. At least seven people died that day, in addition to the seven killed Sunday. The Taliban blame the chaotic evacuation on the U.S. military, saying there's no need for Afghans to fear them, even though their fighters shoot into the air and beat people with batons as they try to control the crowds outside the airport perimeter. The Taliban have pledged amnesty to those who worked with the U.S., NATO and the toppled Afghan government, but many Afghans still fear revenge attacks. There have been reports in recent days of the Taliban hunting down their former enemies. It's unclear if Taliban leaders are saying one thing and doing another, or if fighters are taking matters into their own hands.
As the airlift continues, the U.S. government has activated the Civil Reserve Air Fleet program, requesting 18 aircraft from U.S. carriers to assist in transporting Afghan refugees after they are evacuated to other countries. The voluntary program, born in the wake of the Berlin airlift, adds to the military's capabilities during crises. Early Monday, a Delta Air Lines flight landed in Dubai and later took off for Al-Udeid Air Base in Qatar, where evacuees are crowded into hangars. A steady stream of military transport planes continue to fly people out of Kabul to airfields across the Mideast. There also have been concerns that a local Islamic State affiliate might target the crowds outside the airport with suicide bombers or fire missiles at U.S. aircraft. Military planes have been executing corkscrew landings, and other aircraft have fired flares upon takeoff, measures used to prevent missile attacks.
Elsewhere in Afghanistan, the Taliban have faced limited armed resistance from fighters in Baghlan province, some120 kilometers (75 miles) north of Kabul. The fighters claimed to have seized three districts in the Andarab Valley on Sunday, but the Taliban said Monday that they had cleared them out overnight.
Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid said the group's forces have surrounded nearby Panjshir, the only one of Afghanistan's 34 provinces yet to fall to the militants. Several Taliban opponents have gathered there, including Amrullah Saleh, the vice president in the toppled government who claims to be the acting president under the constitution. Ahmad Massoud, son of the slain commander of the Northern Alliance militias that partnered with the U.S. to drive the Taliban from power in 2001, is also in Panjshir. In interviews with Arab media outlets over the weekend, Massoud said his fighters would resist any attempt to take the province by force but were open to dialogue with the Taliban. Mujahid, the Taliban spokesman, said there had been no fighting in Panjshir yet and that his group is seeking a "peaceful solution" to the standoff.

No New Afghan Govt. until Last U.S. Soldier Leaves
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
The Taliban will not announce the makeup of its government until the United States completes its troop withdrawal, two sources in the movement told AFP Monday. "It has been decided that the formation of the government and cabinet will not be announced as long as a single U.S. soldier is present in Afghanistan," a Taliban source said, and this was confirmed by a second insider.

Taliban Takeover Prompts Relief, Women's Rights Fears in Afghan Cities
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
After 20 years of devastating war, Afghans in cities far from the capital Kabul are feeling a mix of relief and dread about what awaits them under the Taliban. The triumph of the hardline Islamist group and the mass surrender of government forces has brought a long-desired respite from fighting, which has left tens of thousands dead and millions homeless since 2001. "The people are very happy. There will be no more corruption, and maybe no more bombings," a journalist in the southern city of Lashkar Gah, in Helmand province, told AFP. But whether women can work, get education at all levels and be able to mix with men are some of the most pressing questions. A school principal in the northeastern city of Kunduz, where the Taliban traditionally have less influence, told AFP the group was permitting education of girls of all ages, but under strict segregation. "The Taliban said if women are teaching girls, then there is no problem," he said over WhatsApp. "Women teachers can go to school but they cannot work together with men." In another diktat, the Taliban told him no music or singing was allowed. But in the markets and in health clinics, women could still be seen without male chaperones, he observed. The Taliban they spoke to did not say if the new rules had come from above or were being locally implemented. The militants have repeatedly promised a different kind of rule to their brutal regime of the 1990s that saw women confined to their homes, most entertainment banned, and punishments including stonings and public executions. They have pledged to respect progress made in women's rights, but only according to their strict interpretation of Islamic law. The Taliban rebranding is being treated with skepticism, with experts questioning whether it will be a short-term bid to seek international recognition and a continuation of vital aid.
Wearing burqa out of fear
A midwife who works for a foreign NGO in Lashkar Gah said she was told to stay home until there was more clarity from the Taliban. "I'm really not happy because I need the money," she said. The Taliban have not yet formed a government, leaving room for differences in how they are asserting their authority in newly seized territories. An employee at Lashkar Gah University, who said many of his female colleagues still attended work this week, met with Taliban officials after they asked about next semester's curriculum. "It was new to them. They are just villagers," he told AFP over WhatsApp. Some women in the city, out of fear, had resumed wearing the all-enveloping burqa -- already common in the deeply conservative south, he observed this week. But he recounted how the militants -- who once arrested men for not letting their beards grow -- did not interfere when he went to the barber for a shave this week. In Herat, a cosmopolitan city just 150 kilometers (100 miles) from the Iranian border and influenced by Persian culture, men and women previously walked together in parks at night.
Not anymore.
An employee of the local university, concerned about her professional future, says that she now has to work without men, and worries about receiving her salary. In Afghanistan's second-largest city of Kandahar -- the capital of the first Taliban regime -- the owner of a trendy café has kept his establishment open."The Taliban have so far not created any problems," he said. But the customers are no longer coming.

Iran Calls for Restraint, 'Inclusive' Afghanistan Govt.
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
Iran's foreign ministry on Monday called on "all parties" in Afghanistan to refrain from using violence and said Tehran supports the establishment of an "inclusive" government in Kabul. The Taliban took Afghanistan's capital on August 15, exploiting a vacuum caused by the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country and a collapse by the Afghan army. "All groups and political parties [in Afghanistan] must refrain from using force and proceed using negotiation and talks," ministry spokesman Saeed Khatibzadeh told reporters at a televised press conference in Tehran.
Iran "is in constant communication with all political sides in Afghanistan" and "supports the peaceful transition of power to an inclusive government," he added, stressing that "the crisis has no military solution". Khatibzadeh said Iran hoped that such a government would be able to build a "safe, blooming and stable Afghanistan" using the "opportunity" of foreign forces' withdrawal. Analysts say the Taliban's advances have put neighboring Iran on edge, but the majority Shiite Islamic republic is taking a pragmatic stance on the hardline Sunni group's resurgence. Tensions existed between Iran and the Taliban when the latter were in power in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Tehran never recognized their rule. The Taliban were toppled in an American-led invasion over their links to Al-Qaeda, which carried out the 9/11 attacks. Iran has stressed in recent months that the Taliban must be "part of a future solution" in Afghanistan. Khatibzadeh said that Pakistan's foreign minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi will visit Tehran on Thursday to discuss bilateral ties and "especially the issue of Afghanistan".

Turkey erects walls to block Afghan refugees fleeing Taliban
The Arab Weekly/August 23/2021
VAN, Turkey--Afghans who manage to make the weeks-long journey through Iran on foot to the Turkish border face a three-metre high wall, ditches or barbed wire as Turkish authorities step up efforts to block any refugee influx into the country. The beefed-up border measures in Turkey, which already hosts nearly four million Syrian refugees and is a staging post for many migrants trying to reach Europe, began as the Taliban started advancing in Afghanistan and took over Kabul last week. Authorities plan to add another 64 kilometre by the end of the year to a border wall started in 2017. Ditches, wire and security patrols around the clock will cover the rest of the 560 kilometre frontier. “We want to show the whole world that our borders are unpassable,” Mehmet Emin Bilmez, governor of the eastern border province of Van, told Reuters at the weekend. “Our biggest hope is that there is no migrant wave from Afghanistan.”Turkey is not the only country putting up barriers. Its neighbour Greece has just completed a 40 kilometre fence and surveillance system to keep out migrants who still manage to enter Turkey and try to reach the European Union. Authorities say there are 182,000 registered Afghan migrants in Turkey with up to an estimated 120,000 unregistered. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan urged European countries to take responsibility for any new influx, warning that Turkey had no intention of becoming “Europe’s migrant storage unit”. The number of irregular Afghan migrants detained in Turkey so far this year is less than a fifth of the number held in 2019 and officials say they have not yet seen signs of a major surge since last week’s Taliban victory, though the long distances mean refugees could take weeks to arrive. The Turkish side of the mountainous border with Iran is lined by bases and watchtowers. Patrol cars monitor around the clock for movement on the Iranian side, from where migrants, smugglers and Kurdish militants frequently try to cross into Turkey. Migrants who are spotted getting through at the border are returned to the Iranian side, though most return and try again, according to security forces.“No matter how many high-level measures you take, there may be those who evade them from time to time,” Bilmez said.
Fearing Taliban
Roads leading from the border are lined with checkpoints. Migrants who make it through are hidden by smugglers in houses, often dirty, ramshackle buildings underground or in deep dried riverbeds, waiting to be moved to western Turkey. On Saturday police captured 25 migrants, mostly Afghans, behind a dilapidated building in Van’s Hacibekir neighbourhood. “We thought we will have facilities here, we will earn to support our parents. There, there are Taliban to kill us,” said 20-year-old Zaynullah, one of those detained. He said he arrived in Turkey two days earlier after travelling on foot for 80 days. Those captured are taken for health and security checks at a processing centre. There Seyyed Fahim Mousavi, a 26-year-old, said he fled his home in Kabul a month ago, before the Taliban came, fearing they would kill him because he had worked as a driver for the Americans and Turks.
His 22-year-old wife, Morsal, said they took the journey through Iran mostly on foot to escape the Taliban. “They harm women. After raping them, they kill them. They behead the men,” she said, holding her two children, aged two and five. “We don’t want to go back. Just let us stay here.”
After processing, migrants are taken to a repatriation centre, where they can spend up to 12 months before being sent back to their home country. Those repatriations have been halted for Afghans now, leaving around 7,500 Afghans in limbo in various repatriation centres. Ramazan Secilmis, deputy head of the migration directorate, said his organisation was working to identify those who need protection from the Taliban to relocate them to third countries. “Those who need protection need to be separated from those who come to our country due to economic reasons. We cannot deport anyone automatically just because they have Afghan nationality,” he said.

Bennett to tell Biden: Iran’s advanced enrichment makes nuclear deal worthless
Lahav Harkov/August 23/2021
"There is no value in returning to the [nuclear deal], because it does even less than it did in 2015," said a diplomatic source.
There is no value in returning to the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in light of advances in Iran’s nuclear program, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett plans to tell US President Joe Biden in their meeting at the White House on Thursday. Bennett is set to take off for Washington on Tuesday afternoon. While there, he will meet with Biden, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. For the prime minister, the core issue in the meetings is Iran. He is going to Washington after reviewing Israel’s policy on the matter but has reached similar conclusions as his predecessor.“Bennett’s approach, after studying the topic in depth, from every angle, and conducting a policy review is that there is no value in returning to the [nuclear deal] because it does even less than it did in 2015 because the rate of Iran’s enrichment is so high,” a senior diplomatic source said, referring to Iran beginning to enrich uranium to a 60% level. The plus sides of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which is meant to limit Iran’s nuclear program, are not worth the US lifting its sanctions on the Islamic Republic, giving it even greater resources to increase its regional aggression, the source added.
The US seeks to return to the JCPOA through talks with Iran, which it conducted indirectly in Vienna in April-June of this year. Iran has refused to return to the negotiating table after electing extremist President Ebrahim Raisi, who has made repeated anti-Western statements questioning the wisdom of even talking to the US. Israel has opposed the JCPOA from its inception because its restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program end in 2030, and it does not address the Islamic Republic’s widespread regional aggression.
Echoing previous remarks by Bennett in the Knesset, the diplomatic source lamented the “difficult inheritance” the prime minister received from his predecessor Benjamin Netanyahu, who “despite all the declarations and photo ops, Iran reached the most advanced stage in its nuclear program” on his watch.
Confronted with the fact that Bennett’s current statements do not sound substantively different from Netanyahu’s, the source said that Bennett is going beyond those statements, and has a plan of action that he intends to present to Biden.
The plan has two contingencies: How to handle the Iranian threat if the JCPOA is not revived, and a scenario that seems less likely, a return to the nuclear deal. “The plan isn’t just about nuclear weapons. That was the problem with the JCPOA,” the diplomatic source explained. “It also addresses regional aggression, because Iran is in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and at sea and on UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicle]. They’re not just our problem, they’re the region’s and the world’s.”Though the US officials Bennett plans to meet are very involved in the current crisis and the US pullout from Afghanistan, the prime minister preferred not to postpone, because the timing is important in relation to Iran. The source rejected reports that Bennett plans to offer “gestures” to the Palestinians while in Washington.
“Concessions are part of diplomatic negotiations. There are no negotiations or anything close to it.... It is also wrong to say there are gestures. Our basic approach is that we are not entering negotiations, but that it is in our interest that the quality of life in Judea and Samaria improve in order to maintain stability and security,” the source said. To that end, Bennett plans to emphasize economic projects for the Palestinians, but maintains his opposition to a two-state solution to the conflict, which he believes would be disastrous for Israel’s security. His view is that if his diverse governing coalition can accept opposing views on this matter, so can Israel and its greatest ally, the US.
Another source close to Bennett said the prime minister firmly opposes the reopening of a US consulate for Palestinians in Jerusalem, on Israeli sovereign land, but hasn’t made public statements about it out of respect for the Americans.
The consulate had been closed by the Trump administration and merged with the US Embassy to Israel in Jerusalem, and the Biden administration seeks to reverse that. The Biden administration is aware that the issue has the potential to destabilize Bennett’s governing coalition, which they want to avoid, the source said. When it comes to further normalization between Israel and Arab states, Israel and the US are engaged in constant diplomatic activity, and Bennett plans to tell Biden that he seeks to continue that activity in full force, with a focus on the potential and need for security cooperation.
Bennett’s team expects US criticism of Chinese investments in the Israeli hi-tech sector and necessary infrastructure, which began under the Trump administration and has continued under Biden, to come up in the meetings. The diplomatic source said Israel “sees this as a matter of our own national security, first and foremost, and we recognize US sensitivities.” The prime minister does not plan to meet any members of Congress while in Washington, because of coronavirus restrictions, but he is expected to call some key members. Bennett will not be staying at the Blair House, which is the White House’s guest house, because it is under renovation. His wife, Gilat Bennett, will not be joining him, in adherence to the prime minister’s admonition against unnecessary travel abroad during the current wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Israeli weapons were used extensively in Afghanistan
Anna Ahronheim/Jerusalem Post/August 23/2021
From drones to missiles and armored vehicles, Israeli-made weapons systems helped coalition forces against Taliban fighters
As Western forces leave Afghanistan, Israeli weapons systems will no longer hunt Taliban fighters.
Though Israeli troops have never been on the ground in the war-torn central Asian country, numerous coalition nations used Israeli systems during the 20 years of fighting against the radical jihadist terrorist group.
While many Israeli defense companies have stayed mum on the use of their products in Afghanistan, according to multiple reports, countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada and Australia have used their products for years.
Israeli weapons systems used by foreign militaries in Afghanistan was drones. Foreign reports state that Israel is considered a leading exporter of drones and has sold such systems to numerous countries including Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, France, Germany, India, Mexico, Singapore and South Korea.
The German Air Force began operating the Heron TP, manufactured by Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), in Afghanistan in 2010. They were involved in thousands of missions, logging thousands of flight hours.
The Heron TPs are IAI’s most advanced RPAs with 40-hour endurance, a maximum take-off weight of 11,685 pounds, and a payload of 2,204 pounds. They can be used for reconnaissance, combat and support roles, and can carry air-to-ground missiles to take out hostile targets.
The German pilots were trained in Israel regarding how to operate the RPA and learn about its surveillance capabilities.
The Canadian military and the Australians also flew IAI’s Heron 1 RPA in Afghanistan.
Equipped with satellite data link and electro-optical infrared sensors, the Heron 1 is not only able to provide reconnaissance to ground forces in combat situations, assist in convoying and patrolling, create movement profiles, and carry out long-term monitoring, but it is also able to track down explosives from the air. Several of them crashed in Afghanistan. But it wasn’t only the Heron that was flying in Afghanistan’s skies. Since 2005, the Australian Army in Afghanistan has also flown the Skylark 1 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) manufactured by Elbit Systems.
The Skylark, measuring seven and a half feet, is used by troops for tactical surveillance and close-range counter-terror missions. It can be launched by one or two soldiers, and is operated on the roof of buildings or in the back of armored personnel carriers, providing live video to operators once airborne.
With a range of 10-15 km., the mini-UAV has an exceptionally quiet electric motor and outstanding observation capabilities giving troops beyond-line-of-sight intelligence, enhancing their performance in various mission scenarios.
Australia also flew the Skylark during missions in Iraq.
In addition to RPAs, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems’ Spike NLOS (Non Line Of Sight) missile was used by both the British and Canadians in Afghanistan. The missile’s precision proved useful in battles against the Taliban. Although the Brits tried to keep its use quiet, they publicly admitted to using the missile, known as Exactor, in 2014. The Spike NLOS is capable of penetrating 39 inches of armor, and can be operated in either direct attack or mid-course navigation based on target coordinates only. These modes enable the defeat of long-range hidden targets with pinpoint precision, damage assessment, and the obtaining of real-time intelligence. It has a range of 25 km. and can be used with a number of warheads such as heat, fragmentation, PBF (penetration, blast and fragmentation) and PBF/F suited for urban and high-intensity conflicts. The missile, which can be installed on a variety of platforms, provides the gunner with the ability to attack targets at stand-off range and get real-time intelligence and damage assessment following the strikes. And according to some reports, it wasn’t only Israeli weapons systems in Afghanistan.
Though Israel does not comment on foreign reports, Iranian media reported in 2019 that troops were sent to Afghanistan to collect intelligence on Iranian military movement. According to Iran’s Tasnim news agency, Israeli troops operated out of a United States Air Force base in Shindand in the western Afghanistan province of Herat some 75 km. from the Iranian border and were collecting intelligence on Iranian movement around the Persian Gulf region. Russia’s Sputnik News stated at the time that the Israelis were operating “under the flags of the United States and the United Arab Emirates.”Sputnik quoted an expert on Israel as saying that the Israeli troops were operating under the framework of American forces stationed there, and that the activity was carried out with the knowledge and approval of the Afghan government. As Western forces leave Afghanistan and the Taliban solidifies its power over the country, the jihadist group has also obtained advanced American weaponry, including some drones. But with the Canadians, Brits and Germans having ended their fight several years ago, it’s unlikely that the Taliban got their hands on the Israeli-made systems that hunted them for so long.

Egypt Closing Rafah Crossing with Gaza
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
Egypt has told Gaza authorities it will close the Rafah border crossing from Monday, a spokesman for the Palestinian enclave's Hamas government said.  "We were informed by the Egyptian authorities that the Rafah crossing will be closed tomorrow, Monday, in both directions," Iyad al-Bozom, a spokesman for the Gaza interior ministry, said in a statement Sunday evening. Security sources in Egypt confirmed the move, saying the crossing would be closed until further notice, without offering details or saying why. Egypt had ordered the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt -- the enclave's only border point not controlled by Israel -- to open in May to allow wounded Gazans to be treated in Egyptian hospitals and to deliver aid. The opening came in the aftermath of the 11-day exchange of Hamas rocket fire and devastating Israeli air strikes, which also pushed Egypt to pledge $500-million towards Gaza's reconstruction. Egypt had brokered the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas which ended the hostilities. The Egyptian decision to close Rafah comes after a weekend of violence between Israel and Palestinians on Gaza's eastern frontier.

Differences with Hamas lead Egypt to close Rafah crossing
The Arab Weekly/August 23/2021
CAIRO— Egypt closed its main border crossing point with the Gaza Strip on Monday amid tensions with the territory’s militant Hamas rulers, officials said. It was the first time the Rafah crossing was shuttered during a workday since early this year. Egyptian authorities had kept it open during the 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in May. According to the Egyptian officials, the closure was connected to Cairo’s efforts to broker a long-term cease-fire between Israel and Hamas. It was not immediately clear how long the closure would last, the officials told The Associated Press. One of the officials said the move was meant to pressure Hamas because of the “differences” between Cairo and the militant group over the lack of progress in both the Egyptian-led, indirect talks with Israel and also efforts to reconcile Palestinian factions. The closure came hours after Egypt’s state-run news agency reported that the crossing point was opened on Sunday after its weekly closure for the Muslim weekend, Friday and Saturday. Iyad al-Bozum, a spokesman for the Hamas-run interior ministry, said Hamas had been notified of the closure. He said they were in contact with Egyptian authorities to reopen Rafah. “The closure of the crossing exacerbates the humanitarian crisis inside the Gaza Strip,” he said. “We hope the crossing will return to work as soon as possible.”Violence erupted on Saturday during a protest organized by Hamas to draw attention to the Israeli-Egyptian blockade of the territory. Scores of Palestinians approached the border fence with Israel, with one of them shooting and wounding an Israeli soldier. At least 24 Palestinians were wounded by Israeli gunfire, two critically. Egypt has been a key mediator between Israel and Hamas over the years. Egypt’s intelligence chief Abbas Kamel paid a rare visit to Israel last week to discuss the cease-fire deal with Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. He invited Bennett to visit Egypt. Following the May war, Egypt has allowed aid and construction convoys into Gaza to help rebuild houses and infrastructure destroyed during the fighting.

Iran restarts fuel exports to Afghanistan after request from Taliban, tariffs cut
Reuters/23 August ,2021
Iran restarted exports of gasoline and gasoil to Afghanistan a few days ago, following a request from the Taliban, Iran’s Oil, Gas and Petrochemical Products Exporters’ Union said on Monday. The extremist group seized power in Afghanistan last week as the US and its allies withdrew troops after a 20-year war. The price of gasoline in Afghanistan reached $900 per ton last week as many panicked Afghans drove out of cities, fearing reprisals and a return to an extremist version of Sharia law the Taliban imposed when in power two decades ago. To counter the price spike, the new Taliban government asked Iran to keep the borders open for traders. “The Taliban sent messages to Iran saying, ‘you can continue the exports of petroleum products,’” Hamid Hosseini, board member and spokesperson at the Iranian union in Tehran, told Reuters, adding that some Iranian traders had been cautious due to security concerns. Iranian exports began a few days ago, after the Taliban cut tariffs on imports of fuel from Iran up to 70 percent, Hosseini added, showing an official document from Afghan Customs organization. The main Iranian exports to Afghanistan are gasoline and gasoil. Iran exported about 400,000 tons of fuel to its neighbor from May 2020 to May 2021, according to a report published by PetroView, an Iranian oil and gas research and consultancy platform.

Iran’s Raisi calls on Japan to release frozen billions
The Arab Weekly/August 23/2021
TEHRAN--Iran’s new president Ebrahim Raisi on Sunday called on Tokyo to release $3 billion of the Islamic Republic’s funds that have been frozen in Japan because of US sanctions over its nuclear programme. “Delaying the release of Iran’s assets in Japanese banks is unjustifiable,” Raisi told Japanese Foreign Minister Toshimitsu Motegi, who is on a two-day visit to Tehran. The Iranian government website also reported that Raisi insisted “The improvement of ties with Japan is of great importance for Iran. Japan and to a larger extent South Korea hold billions of dollars in Iranian assets. These funds have been frozen since the former US president Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew Washington from a landmark nuclear deal and reimposed sanctions on Tehran in 2018. Washington said in mid-July that it was allowing Iran to use the frozen funds to settle debts in South Korea and Japan, but insisted that it did not allow any to be transferred to Tehran itself. Talks between Iran and world powers aimed at reviving the 2015 accord have stalled since late June. The United States has been involved indirectly in the negotiations. Motegi arrived in Tehran early Sunday after visiting Turkey and Iraq during a regional tour and he will also go to Qatar. At a press briefing after meeting Raisi, Motegi told Japanese reporters that during his visits he had discussed the situation in Afghanistan following the capture of Kabul by the Taliban. He said he agreed with Iran, Turkey and Iraq on the need to cooperate to avoid Afghanistan becoming a “further destabilising factor”. In 2019, Iran’s Khamenei refused to reply to a message Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe had brought to Tehran from then-US President Donald Trump, as the attempted peacemaking visit was overshadowed by attacks on tankers in the Gulf of Oman. One of the tankers was Japanese. Motegi’s is the first official Japanese visit since then and came at the invitation of outgoing foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. Motegi was also due to meet other Iranian officials, including Zarif’s successor, Raisi’s nominated foreign minister, Hossein Amirabdollahian.

Iraq Seeks Role as Mediator with Regional Summit
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
After decades of conflict, Iraq will pitch itself as a regional mediator as it hosts a leaders' summit this week -- despite foreign influence on its territory and a grinding financial crisis. The meeting in Baghdad on Saturday seeks to give Iraq a "unifying role" to tackle the crises shaking the region, according to sources close to Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhemi. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and Jordan's King Abdullah II have said they plan to attend, as has French President Emmanuel Macron, the only official expected from outside the region. Leaders from Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey have also been invited. Kadhemi came to power in May last year after months of unprecedented mass protests against a ruling class seen as corrupt, inept and subordinate to Tehran. The new premier had served as the head of Iraq's National Intelligence Service for nearly four years, forming close ties to Tehran, Washington and Riyadh. His appointment prompted speculation he could serve as a rare mediator among the capitals. "In the past, under Saddam Hussein, Iraq was a state that was feared and despised in the region and everyone saw it as a threat," said Iraqi political expert Marsin Alshamary. After the 2003 US-led invasion, it became "a weak state", prone to external influences and meddling. But Saturday's summit, she said, could be "a positive thing for Iraq".
'Not just a playground'
Renad Mansour of Chatham House said the aim was to transform Iraq from "a country of messengers to a country that is leading negotiations". Organizers have been tight-lipped on the meeting's agenda. But Baghdad has already hosted closed-door encounters in recent months between Tehran and U.S. ally Riyadh. The powerful regional arch-rivals had broken off ties in 2016. If confirmed, the presence of Iranian and Saudi officials this weekend would be notable in itself. Iraq, for its part, has been caught for years in a delicate balancing act between its two main allies Iran and the United States. "The ambition is for Iraq to not just be a playground but actually have a role potentially as a mediating force," Mansour said. Iran exerts major clout in Iraq through allied armed groups within the Hashed al-Shaabi, a powerful state-sponsored paramilitary network. Since the 2019 anti-government protests, dozens of activists have been killed or abducted. Some say the killers are known to the security services and despite government promises of arrests, remain at large -- due to their ties to Iran.
Shiite factions operating under the Hashed are also accused of dozens of attacks this year against US interests in Iraq. Kadhemi is under pressure from pro-Tehran armed factions, who demand the withdrawal of 2,500 US troops still deployed in Iraq.
'Take back control'
Turkey is another regional power with an outsized presence in Iraq.
Ankara regularly targets Iraq's northwest in operations against the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which Turkey considers a terrorist organization. The Kurdish separatists, who have waged a decades-long insurgency against Ankara, have bases in the rugged mountains on the Iraqi side of the border.
The Turkish operations, have sometimes killed civilians and have irked Baghdad, but it remains reluctant to alienate a vital trading partner. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been invited to Saturday's conference, though his attendance has not yet been confirmed. By convening the summit, Kadhemi is also taking a gamble on the domestic front, less than two months before general elections. Though he is not facing re-election himself, he will have much at stake. "There will be another coalition government and the different parties will have to settle on a compromise prime minister," Alshamary said.
Iraq, long plagued by endemic corruption, poor services, dilapidated infrastructure and unemployment, is facing a deep financial crisis compounded by lower oil prices and the Covid-19 pandemic. "Iraqis are struggling," said Mansour, adding that many were facing "the brunt of corruption". "It has been the summer of hospital fires and lack of electricity, drought... and more generally a political system that neither responds to the needs of Iraqis nor represents Iraqis," Mansour said. But Saturday's conference is mainly about the country's standing in the region. "Iraq wants to take back control of its trajectory," said one foreign observer on condition of anonymity. "Above all, it no longer wants to be subjected to the effects of regional tensions on its territory."

Millions in Syria, Iraq Losing Access to Water
Associated Press/August 23/2021
Millions of people in Syria and Iraq are at risk of losing access to water, electricity and food amid rising temperatures, record low water levels due to lack of rainfall and drought, international aid groups warned Monday. The two neighboring countries, both battered by years of conflict and mismanagement, are in need of rapid action to combat severe water shortages, the groups said. The drought is also disrupting electricity supplies as low water levels impact dams, which in turn impact essential infrastructure, including health facilities. More than 12 million people in both countries are affected, including 5 million in Syria who are directly dependent on the Euphrates River. In Iraq, the loss of access to water from the Euphrates and Tigris River, and drought, threaten at least 7 million people. Some 400 square kilometers (154 square miles) of agricultural land faces drought, the groups said, adding that two dams in northern Syria, supplying power to 3 million people, face imminent closure. Carsten Hansen, regional director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, one of the aid groups behind the warning, said that for hundreds of thousands of Iraqis still displaced and many more still fleeing for their lives in Syria, the unfolding water crisis "will soon become an unprecedented catastrophe pushing more into displacement." Other aid groups included Mercy Corps, the Danish Refugee Council, CARE international, ACTED and Action Against Hunger.
They warned that several Syrian provinces — including Hassakah, Aleppo and Raqqa in the north and Deir el-Zour in the east — have witnessed a rise in water-borne diseases. The areas include displacement settlements housing tens of thousands of people displaced in Syria's 10-year conflict. CARE's regional chief for Mideast and North Africa, Nirvana Shawky, urged authorities and donor governments to act swiftly to save lives. The latest crisis comes on top of war, COVID-19 and severe economic decline, she said. "There is no time to waste," said Gerry Garvey of the Danish Refugee Council, adding that the water crisis is likely to increase conflict in an already destabilized region. Severe water shortages have also hit Lebanon, which is mired in the worst economic and financial crisis in its modern history, where more than 4 million people — mainly vulnerable children and families — face critical water shortages in the coming days, the U.N.'s children agency warned last week. In Lebanon, severe fuel shortages have also halted the work of thousands of private generators long relied on for electricity in the corruption-plagued country. UNICEF called for urgent restoration of the power supply to keep water services running. Lebanon's rivers are also heavily polluted. Activists have long warned about pollution levels caused by sewage and waste in the Litani River, the country's longest and a major source for water supply, irrigation and hydroelectricity.

Qatar Opens Registration for Polls Set for October 2
Agence France Presse/August 23/2021
Qatar opened candidate registration for its first legislative elections Sunday, AFP correspondents saw, announcing the much-delayed polls would be held on October 2 in a test of the autocratic nation's democratic credentials. Elections to the 45-seat shura council, as proposed under a 2004 constitution, have been postponed repeatedly and its members have instead been directly named by the emir, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani. Only descendants of Qataris who were citizens in 1930 will be eligible to vote and stand, disqualifying members of families naturalized since that year. Some members of the sizable al-Murra tribe are among those who face being excluded from the electoral process, sparking a fierce debate online. Experts have suggested that representatives of those groups excluded could be among those directly appointed by the emir. It will take a super-majority vote of the new, elected shura council to amend the eligibility law and extend the franchise to include more recently arrived Qatari families. "(A) decree stipulated that Saturday October 2, 2021 would be set as the date for electing members of the Shura Council," the emir's office said in a statement. At Qatar University on the outskirts of Doha, mostly male would-be politicians filed into a hall to register their intention to stand in the election. They will face scrutiny from the powerful interior ministry against a number of criteria including criminal and character checks, as well as verification of their claim to Qatari citizenship. "I have been waiting for the elections for years," law graduate and election hopeful Lina Nasser al-Dafa told AFP. "Nothing is difficult for women -- we are an active element in Qatar." The registration process will run until Thursday, and campaigning is due to begin next month. "Holding elections in Qatar gives me an opportunity to contribute to the service of this country, which has spent on my education up to Master's degree," said Lahdan bin Issa Hassan al-Muhannadi who is seeking to contest the northern Al-Khor and Al-Dhakhira constituency. "This is one of the main landmarks in the history of Qatar." The election has sparked a torrent of fake news on social media with the Arabic hashtag #BoycottQatarElections trending on Twitter, despite initially being posted by only one account, indicating manipulation. Prime Minister Sheikh Khalid bin Khalifa bin Abdulaziz Al-Thani said that the polls, "the first in Qatar's history... must preserve national unity", according to the official Qatar News Agency. Bureaucrats fear the vote could be exploited by Qatar's neighbors Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which they say have objected to Doha breaking ranks and holding elections.

Leaked footage shows grim conditions in Iran’s notorious Evin prison
The Associated Press/23 August ,2021
The guard in a control room at Iran’s notorious Evin prison springs to attention as one by one, monitors in front of him suddenly blink off and display something very different from the surveillance footage he had been watching. “Cyberattack,” the monitors flash. Other guards gather around, holding up their mobile phones and filming, or making urgent calls. “General protest until the freedom of political prisoners” reads another line on the screens. An online account, purportedly by an entity describing itself as a group of hackers, shared footage of the incident, as well as parts of other surveillance video it seized, with The Associated Press. The alleged hackers said the release of the footage was an effort to show the grim conditions at the prison, known for holding political prisoners and those with ties abroad who are often used as bargaining chips in negotiations with the West. In one part of the footage, a man smashes a bathroom mirror to try to cut open his arm. Prisoners — and even guards — beat each other in scenes captured by surveillance cameras. Inmates sleeping in single rooms with bunk beds stacked three high against the walls, wrapping themselves in blankets to stay warm.
“We want the world to hear our voice for freedom of all political prisoners,” read a message from the online account to the AP in Dubai. Iran, which has faced criticism from the United Nations special rapporteur over its prison conditions, did not immediately respond to a request for comment sent to its UN mission in New York. Iranian state media in the country have not acknowledged the incident at Evin. However, several embarrassing hacking incidents have struck Iran amid ongoing tensions over its accelerated nuclear program and as talks with the West over reviving the atomic accord between Tehran and world powers remain on hold.Four former prisoners at Evin, as well as an Iranian human rights activist abroad, have told the AP that the videos resemble areas from the facility in northern Tehran. Some of the scenes also matched photographs of the facility previously taken by journalists, as well as images of the prison as seen in satellite photos accessed by the AP.
The footage also shows rows of sewing machines that prisoners use, a solitary confinement cell with a squat toilet and exterior areas of the prison. There are images of the prison’s open-air exercise yard, prisoners’ bathrooms and offices within the facility.
Much of the footage bears timestamps from 2020 and this year. Several videos without the stamp show guards wearing facemasks, signaling they came amid the coronavirus pandemic. Though there is no sound in the videos, they speak to the grim world faced by prisoners at the facility. One sequence shows what appears to be an emaciated man dumped from a car in the parking lot, then dragged through the prison. Another shows a cleric walking down the stairs and passing by the man, without stopping. Guards in another video are seen beating a man in a prisoner’s uniform. One guard sucker-punches a prisoner in a holding cell. Guards also fight among themselves, as do the prisoners. Many are crammed into single-room cells. No one wears a facemask. The account that shared the videos with the AP calls itself “The Justice of Ali,” a reference to the Prophet Muhammad’s son-in-law who is revered by Shia. It also mocks Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. It claimed to have “hundreds” of gigabytes of data from what it described as a hack conducted several months ago. It did not answer questions about who was involved in the leak. The account linked the timing of its leak to the recent election of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-line acolyte of Khamenei involved in the execution of thousands in 1988 at the end of the Iran-Iraq War.
“The Evin prison is a stain on Raisi’s black turban and white beard,” the message on the screens in the prison control room also read. Iran, long sanctioned by the West, faces difficulties in getting up-to-date hardware and software, often relying on Chinese-manufactured electronics or older systems. The control room system seen in the video, for instance, appeared to be running Windows 7, for which Microsoft no longer provides patches. That would make it easier for a potential hacker to target. Pirated versions of Windows and other software are common across Iran.
In recent months, Iran’s railroad system was targeted by an apparent cyberattack. Other self-described hacker groups have published details about Iranians alleging hacking on behalf of the theocracy. Meanwhile the most-famous cyberattack — the Stuxnet virus that destroyed Iranian centrifuges at the height of Western fears over Tehran’s program — is widely suspected to have been an American and Israeli creation. Evin prison was built in 1971 under Iran’s Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It housed political prisoners then and later, after the 1979 Islamic Revolution swept the shah from power.
While in theory under the control of Iran’s prison system, Evin also has specialized units for political prisoners and those with Western ties, run by the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, which answers only to Khamenei. The facility is the target of both US and European Union sanctions.
After Iran cracked down on protesters following the disputed 2009 re-election of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, many of the arrested protesters ended up in Evin. Lawmakers later pushed for reforms at Evin, following reports of abuses at the prison — which led to the installation of the closed-circuit cameras.Problems continued, however. Reports by UN Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman repeatedly named Evin prison as a site of abuses of prisoners. Rehman warned in January that Iran’s entire prison system faced “long-standing overcrowding and hygiene deficiencies” and “insurmountable obstacles for responding to COVID-19.”“Prisoners of conscience and political prisoners have contracted COVID-19 or experienced symptoms, with many denied testing or treatment or suffering unnecessary delays in receiving test results and treatment,” he wrote.

The Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials published on August 23-24/2021
Why Biden’s Lack of Strategic Patience Led to Disaster
Ryan C. Crocker/The New York Times/August 23/2021
As Americans, we have many strengths, but strategic patience is not among them. We have been able to summon it at critical times such as the Revolutionary War and World War II, where, for example, Congress did not threaten to defund the war effort if it wasn’t wrapped up by 1944. In Korea, nearly seven decades after an inconclusive truce, we still have about 28,000 troops. But our patience is not the norm. And it certainly has not been on display in Afghanistan as the world watched the Taliban storm into Kabul.
As the enormity of the events in Afghanistan this past week sinks in, the questions start. How did this happen? How could we not have foreseen it? Why didn’t Afghan security forces put up a fight? Why didn’t we do something about corruption? The list goes on. There is one overarching answer: our lack of strategic patience at critical moments, including from President Biden. It has damaged our alliances, emboldened our adversaries and increased the risk to our own security. It has also flouted 20 years of work and sacrifice.
The United States’ objective in Afghanistan has always been clear: to ensure that Afghan soil is never again used to plan attacks against the American homeland. It was not about nation building as an end in itself, or building a new democracy, or even regime change. The message from the Bush administration to the Taliban after 9/11 made this clear: If you hand over Al Qaeda leadership, we will leave you alone. The Taliban chose to fight instead. Once the Taliban were defeated, our fundamental mission of ensuring that Afghanistan was never again the base for an attack on the United States did not change. But the means to that end became much more complex. And the development of those means would require patience.
When I arrived at Bagram Air Base in January 2002 to take charge of our reopened embassy, Afghanistan had nothing: essentially no government, no institutions, no army, no police — just a yawning vacuum, and vacuums in the greater Middle East tend to be filled by actors who do not wish us well. Hamid Karzai had arrived in Kabul just a few days before me as chairman of the Afghanistan Interim Authority. He and I spent a lot of time together in those initial weeks. He never seemed discouraged by the enormity of the task in front of him. He did not hesitate to make decisions, many good, some not so much. He had a vision of a stable and secure Afghanistan that threatened no one. It would be a long process, but he said he had the patience for it.
So did we, at least initially. Helping Afghans create a stable, open society could also be the best way to further our own national security objectives. This concept had strong bipartisan support on the Hill, as a wave of congressional visitors to Kabul would attest. The first of that wave was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joe Biden. We visited a girls’ school that had just opened thanks to U.S.A.I.D. Chairman Biden was a strong supporter. He understood the importance of societal change, and he understood that it takes time and requires patience. While statistics in Afghanistan have never been reliable, U.S.A.I.D. estimates that when the Taliban were defeated, there were some 900,000 children in school, all of them boys. When I left as ambassador in 2012, a decade after that first school visit, the number of students was nearly 8 million, about 37 percent girls. It is important to note that this progress was not by any means exclusively the result of U.S. or other international efforts. Afghans on their own launched private initiatives in education, especially for girls.
Clearly, there were also problems, chief among them corruption. Karzai, and later President Ashraf Ghani, presided over governments where corruption was rampant. When vast resources are poured into a country without established institutions and rule of law, corruption is likely to be a significant byproduct. This is not to excuse corrupt officials. It is to recognize the ubiquity of the problem and our role in it. A look at our own history is instructive. Corruption was endemic in New York, Boston and Chicago through much of the 19th and into the 20th centuries. It took us time to grow the institutions and legal structures that would eventually make corruption the exception rather than the norm.
And that returns me again to the central theme: time and patience. As our own history attests, societal change is a slow process. Witness the 11 years our new country spent moving from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution. Even then, issues like slavery were papered over, only to erupt in a civil war 74 years later. Yet we seem unable to appreciate that other societies will find the challenge just as difficult and even more so if the engine of change is a foreign army.
I recall the comment attributed to a captured Taliban fighter from a number of years ago: You Americans have the watches, but we have the time. Sadly that view proved accurate — the Taliban outlasted us and our impatience. After the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan at the hands of U.S.-trained and armed mujahedeen in 1989, training that was facilitated by Pakistan, we decided we were done. We could see the Afghan civil war coming — the only thing holding the disparate Afghan groups together was a common enemy. But that was not our problem — we were leaving. On the way out, we stopped helping Pakistan in a key way: We ended security and economic assistance because of its nuclear weapons program, something we’d exempted before. So Pakistan, in its own narrative, went from being the most allied of allies to the most sanctioned of adversaries. That is why Pakistan threw its support to the Taliban when they started gaining ground in the 1990s: It could end a dangerous conflict along Pakistan’s own unstable borders.
And that is why a decade later after 9/11, Pakistan welcomed the return of the United States — and U.S. assistance. It would work with us against Al Qaeda. But we soon learned that the Taliban were a sticky matter. I was ambassador to Pakistan from 2004 to 2007. I pushed Pakistani officials repeatedly on the need to deny the Taliban safe havens. The answer I got back over time went like this: “We know you. We know you don’t have patience for the long fight. We know the day will come when you just get tired and go home — it’s what you do. But we aren’t going anywhere — this is where we live. So if you think we are going to turn the Taliban into a mortal enemy, you are completely crazy.”
We have again validated their skepticism.
The Washington Post notes that “as the Taliban swept across neighboring Afghanistan, some Pakistanis saw it as a reason to celebrate.” Yet I doubt there are many high fives being exchanged in Islamabad today. The American disaster in Afghanistan that Mr. Biden’s impatience brought about is not a disaster just for us. It has also been a huge boost for the Taliban, whose narrative now is that the believers, clad in the armor of the one true faith, have vanquished the infidels. That is resonating around the world, and certainly next door in Pakistan where the T.T.P. — the Pakistani Taliban, which seeks the overthrow of their government — has certainly been emboldened, as have Kashmiri militant groups created by Pakistan but that threaten Pakistan itself as well as India. Mr. Biden’s strategic impatience has given a huge boost to militant Islam everywhere.
We need to be engaged with Pakistan on ways to assess and deal with this enhanced threat. The prospect of violent destabilization of a country with about 210 million people and nuclear weapons is not a pretty one. The same is true in Iran. It’s always good to see the Great Satan take a kick in the face, and it’s worth a little gloating, but the Islamic Republic and the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate almost went to war in 1998. A region is worried, and it is right to be so.
It was not only the current president showing impatience. President Donald Trump announced that peace talks would convene in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban. But those took place without the Afghan government. We had caved on a longstanding Taliban condition. We therefore delegitimized the government we had pledged to support. The Taliban did eventually allow government representatives into the room, but the talks went nowhere. As that painful process unfolded, we added injury to insult, forcing the Kabul government to release 5,000 Taliban prisoners.
That didn’t matter to Mr. Trump. He was done with patience and just wanted out, whatever the consequences. He reached an agreement with the Taliban for that complete withdrawal, but left office before he could execute it.
Enter Mr. Biden. To my shock, he embraced Mr. Trump’s Afghanistan policy. We have betrayed our promises to interpreters, women and children, and others who are now trapped in an Afghanistan controlled by the Taliban. I fear many will lose their lives because of Mr. Biden’s impatience. We had their backs. Until Mr. Biden decided we didn’t. They will pay for it.
It did not have to be this way. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, we had about 85,000 troops in the country. The Taliban controlled none of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals. When President Barack Obama left office there were fewer than 10,000 U.S. troops. And when Mr. Trump departed there were fewer than 5,000. The Taliban still did not hold any major urban area. Now, they hold the entire country. What changed so swiftly and completely? We did. Mr. Biden’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces destroyed an affordable status quo that could have lasted indefinitely at a minimum cost in blood and treasure. Even with a full withdrawal, we might have managed steps that would have protected our interests. The ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, Michael McCaul, and I suggested how in these pages a few months ago.
Now, the Taliban hold all the cards. They will determine whether evacuations through the Kabul airport can proceed. And whatever happens next, the image of this American capitulation is already etched indelibly in the world’s imagination. It is that U.S. Air Force C-17 taxiing for takeoff from Kabul surrounded by a desperate Afghan mob. Seconds later, at least one man falls to his death from the plane’s wheel well. It is eerily reminiscent of the people who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11 rather than face death by fire. What a tragic and painful circle it closes two decades later.
*Ryan C. Crocker was a United States ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon, serving both Republican and Democratic administrations.
* Mr. Crocker served as ambassador to Afghanistan under President Barack Obama.

Biden’s catastrophe
Bradley Bowman/ Washington Examine/August 23/2021
Responding to the disastrous fallout of his Afghanistan withdrawal, President Joe Biden declared that the “buck stops with me” — and then spent the rest of his first public address on the crisis shifting blame and proffering the same flawed arguments that led us to this tragic point. We must scrutinize those arguments if we are to learn the lessons of these failures and avoid them in the future.
Indeed, Biden’s obviously incorrect statement that the Afghanistan withdrawal could not have been handled better suggests we have a lot of work to do.
To be sure, the U.S. government’s most important task at this point is completing the urgent evacuation of thousands of Americans stranded in Afghanistan by the incompetent implementation of the administration’s poor decisions. Any remaining time should be used to evacuate Afghans who worked with the U.S. government and who are confronting Taliban retribution.
Once those vital tasks are complete, we must resist the temptation to move on without self-reflection. There are many reasons for the catastrophe we are witnessing in Afghanistan, and we should seek to understand all of them.
That effort should start with Biden’s decision to withdraw from Afghanistan based on self-delusions regarding the nature of our enemies there and the need for a continued military presence. To be clear, the failure has been a bipartisan one.
President Donald Trump embraced many of the same misconceptions, including the all-too-prevalent belief that forward-deployed U.S. military forces in the Middle East are often or almost always unnecessary or even the primary source of problems. That false premise leads naturally to the idea that U.S. military withdrawals are almost always the solution.
This “ending endless wars” narrative, long espoused by too many politicians of both parties, ignores the prudent admonition of former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta. We should absolutely scrutinize military interventions and how those interventions are conducted, but “we must also apply the same scrutiny to withdrawals,” Panetta wrote in December. “In doing so, Americans will find that some withdrawals can be equally deleterious to our national security, especially when the withdrawals are conducted precipitously and without clear preconditions.”
One simply needs to look to the 2011 Obama administration withdrawal from Iraq for an example. President Barack Obama, motivated in part by the sincere and misinformed advocacy of then-Vice President Joe Biden, pursued withdrawal based on a timeline and not conditions in the country — against the advice of his military commanders.
Sound familiar?
And what was the result of that 2011 withdrawal from Iraq? That decision catalyzed the rise of the Islamic State and culminated in a costly U.S. military return in 2014.
A decade after the 2011 withdrawal from Iraq, Biden drew from the same playbook, and we are all witnessing the horrible results. In a bizarre twist of logic, Biden is arguing that the catastrophe his policy catalyzed in Afghanistan is evidence of the wisdom of that policy. The idea is that chaos was inevitable and that inevitability argued against keeping troops there.
This is absurd. When I taught at West Point, I might have flunked a cadet if he or she had attempted that logical maneuver in a term paper. The Afghan security forces, despite their many shortcomings, fought hard for nearly 20 years, with an estimated 66,000 paying the ultimate price to defend their country and fight our common enemy.
Some trend lines were troubling, but the rapid unraveling came after Biden’s April 14 announcement of the impending withdrawal. The psychological impact on Afghan security forces of the American abandonment (which started under Trump) and the denial of air support (by Biden) cannot be overestimated.
When Biden assumed office in January, we had no more than 8,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria combined. Compare that to a peak of 170,000 troops in Iraq in 2007 and approximately 100,000 troops in Afghanistan in 2011. Or compare it to 26,000 troops on Capitol Hill after Jan. 6.
The 8,000 U.S. troops in those three countries largely play (or played in the case of Afghanistan) supporting roles for admittedly imperfect partners bearing the brunt of the burden in confronting our common enemies. In Afghanistan, not a single American soldier had been killed in combat in a year and a half. The Taliban certainly would have increased their efforts to target U.S. forces if we had stayed, but that would have been difficult for the Taliban because most U.S. forces were operating in supporting roles for front-line Afghan forces.
And what strategic benefits were we accruing from that modest troop presence? We were preventing the resurgence of the ISIS caliphate in Iraq and Syria, while ensuring that Afghanistan would not be used again to launch terrorist attacks against us. In other words, with relatively modest levels of investment, we were helping brave partners keep pressure on terrorists there so they could not kill us again here at home. It was a disaster avoidance strategy.
It is interesting that the Biden administration now finds that argument, as least for the time being, persuasive when it comes to our military presence in Iraq and Syria but not in Afghanistan.
What explains that? Well, Biden essentially told us in his Aug. 16 address, and his words reveal the flawed premise on which he has built his disastrous policy.
Biden argued that we should “focus on the threats we face today, in 2021, not yesterday’s threats.” I completely agree. But then, he said the “terrorist threat has metastasized well beyond Afghanistan.”
That is interesting wording. If the president is saying that the terrorist threat has evolved over the past 20 years and spread far beyond the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, that is certainly true. If he is saying there is little to no remaining international terror threat remaining in that region, such an assertion is dangerously false.
The absence of another 9/11 attack launched from Afghanistan is not an indication of the absence of a terror threat but rather that our 20-year strategy in Afghanistan, despite its significant shortcomings, was successful in accomplishing our core objective.
Biden was right to express concern about “al Shabab in Somalia, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, al Nusra in Syria, [and] ISIS attempting to create a caliphate in Syria and Iraq and establishing affiliates in multiple countries in Africa and Asia.” But the cascading consequences of the catastrophe in Afghanistan will make all of those problems more difficult. Terrorists in each of those areas will be more emboldened based on the defeat of the United States and our partners in Afghanistan. As we saw with the ISIS caliphate, success on the battlefield stokes terrorist radicalization, recruitment, and activity around the world. We should expect the same now.
Biden might respond, as he said in his speech, that “we conduct effective counterterrorism missions against terrorist groups in multiple countries where we don’t have permanent military presence. If necessary, we’ll do the same in Afghanistan.” Setting aside the fact that we do have troops in Syria, that argument neglects the unique geographic challenges associated with Afghanistan, the value of having bases in the country, and the fact that the Afghanistan-Pakistan region remains an epicenter for terrorism. As a result of the withdrawal, we will know less about terrorist activity and be less agile and effective in our response.
Anyone who suggests otherwise has watched too many Hollywood movies and is not listening to the experts. “When the time comes for the U.S. military to withdraw, the U.S. government’s ability to collect and act on threats will diminish,” CIA Director William Burns said in April. “That’s simply a fact.”
Even before the events of the last month, more than 20 U.S.-designated jihadist terrorist organizations still operated in the Afghanistan-Pakistan region, and many of them still seek to kill Americans and our allies. Those groups now feel triumphant and can spend more time planning and launching attacks. Indeed, the U.S. intelligence community assessed in April that al Qaeda leaders will “continue calls for attacks against the United States and other international targets, and seek to advance plotting around the world.”
What does that broader argument regarding al Qaeda have to do with Afghanistan? Everything.
Americans should remember that the Taliban provided Osama bin Laden the hospitality he needed to plan and launch the 9/11 terror attacks that murdered nearly 3,000 innocent people. As rigorously documented by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’s Long War Journal, the Taliban and al Qaeda have remained attached at the hip for more than 20 years.
The relationship between the two was so problematic that the Trump administration demanded in the 2020 agreement that the Taliban break with al Qaeda. Anyone who’s studied the two groups could have told the Trump team the chances of that happening were near zero. And sure enough, the Taliban refused, never complying with the agreement that Biden has used as a fig leaf for the withdrawal he wanted to conduct anyway. In the recent offensive, the Taliban coordinated with Tajik and Uzbek members of al Qaeda to seize control of districts and provinces in the north.
Accordingly, all the Trump negotiation with the Taliban accomplished was sidelining the Afghan government, enabling the Taliban to achieve the release of 5,000 prisoners (many of whom returned to the battlefield, of course), and giving the Taliban more than a year to tell provincial and district governors that they better support the Taliban because the Americans were explicitly committed to a date-certain departure. That fact partially explains the rapid fall of provinces that we witnessed this month.
Anyone doubting this relationship between the Taliban and al Qaeda should review a June report issued by the United Nations, an organization not exactly known for its hawkish policy stands. “The Taliban and Al Qaeda remain closely aligned and show no indication of breaking ties,” the report found.
So, where does that leave us?
The Taliban-al Qaeda terrorist syndicate that brought us the 9/11 terror attacks once again enjoys a largely uncontested safe haven in Afghanistan — just as it did on Sept. 11, 2001. Except now, its fighters’ spirits are emboldened by the defeat of the United States, ranks are replenished with former prisoners, and arsenals are overflowing with new (largely American) weapons.
The United States confronts a dizzying and growing array of threats abroad that can strike Americans at home. As Panetta wrote in December, however, “withdrawing into a defensive and insular crouch here at home risks leaving Americans more isolated and more vulnerable to threats.”
In an interview, ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos asked Biden whether he would keep American troops in Afghanistan past the self-imposed Aug. 31 deadline if that was necessary to evacuate all Americans to safety — essentially whether the commander in chief would abandon Americans in Afghanistan. Disturbingly, Biden struggled to answer that simple question.
If Americans don’t demand better from our leaders, we should expect more disasters in the future.
*Bradley Bowman is the senior director of the Center on Military and Political Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Follow him on Twitter @Brad_L_Bowman. FDD is a Washington, DC-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.

Back to the Drawing Board on Iran
Behnam Ben Taleblu and Andrea Stricker/The Dispatch-FDD/August 23/2021
Shifting course to a better policy is more critical than ever in the wake of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal.
It’s always hard to admit when you’re wrong—this is true for the Biden administration’s disastrous exit from Afghanistan as well as its flawed approach to the Islamic Republic of Iran. Starting in April, Washington participated in six rounds of indirect negotiations to restore the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, to no avail. The election of ultra-hardliner Ebrahim Raisi in Tehran means either that the clerical regime is focused on exploiting Washington’s propensity for appeasement, or that it is utterly disinterested in diplomacy and welcomes confrontation. “This process cannot go on indefinitely,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in July, a view apparently shared by America’s European allies. The secretary, at least on this point, is correct.
As Iran prods for more concessions and hard limits against its overreach, the Biden administration should signal that there are costs for continuing a path of intransigence and escalation. Doing so will require a renewed U.S. pressure track against Tehran: robust economic penalties backed by a credible military deterrent.
Shifting course to a better Iran policy is more critical than ever in the wake of Biden’s botched Afghanistan withdrawal, as Tehran and other adversaries will exploit the U.S. power vacuum. This will be bitter medicine for a president and administration that have routinely denigrated the Trump administration’s Iran sanctions campaign. On August 13, however, the administration employed enhanced U.S. counterterrorism powers to designate an oil smuggling scheme benefiting the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Quds Force, Iran’s elite foreign operations unit. According to the Treasury Department, the network helped Tehran sell oil illicitly, including to “buyers in East Asia”—mainly code for China.
As a one-off, such measures are too little, too late. Politically, however, they have the potential to serve as the birth pangs of a new pressure policy and replace Biden’s current “concede first” approach.
The administration has already made numerous direct and indirect concessions to Iran. These include dealing separately with Iran’s nuclear and regional threats, removing Yemeni rebels that Iran materially supports from the U.S. Foreign Terrorist Organizations list, delisting Iranian oil executives, failing to promptly respond to Iran-backed escalation in Iraq, not enforcing oil penalties as China imports record-high volumes of Iranian crude, not holding Iran accountable at the United Nations nuclear watchdog for safeguards infractions, and issuing waivers to permit Iran to pay debts to Japanese and South Korean companies using Tehran’s frozen funds. Iran has pocketed each and every concession without a hint of reciprocity or moderation.
This summer, the regime stepped up provocations, attempting to hijack a vessel in the Persian Gulf and attacking an Israeli-owned tanker with drones, which killed two Europeans. The U.S., U.K., and G7 issued statements, but have yet to deliver a promised “collective response” to the strike.
To stem such behavior and drive a better bargain, Washington must course-correct.
First, U.S. officials must disabuse themselves of the notion that they need to regain Iran’s “trust.” As former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear accord in 2017, “the deal is based on lack of trust, no part of this deal is built on confidence.” Mistrust of America and the West are deep-seated in Iran’s supreme leader, who also never saw the nuclear deal as transformational. The outsized factor getting Tehran to negotiate in the past was the prospect of sanctions relief, not faith in America.
Moreover, history has shown that the Islamic Republic does respond to pressure, albeit belatedly and begrudgingly. Managing Iran’s new ultra-hardline elites, who will offer less in exchange for more—if they decide to negotiate at all—will require coercion.
Second, the United States should amend the “go-it-alone approach” of the Trump administration and multilateralize the pressure campaign it inherited. Despite being unable to curtail the reach of restored American sanctions on Iran after Trump’s exit from the JCPOA in 2018, Europe’s commitment to the nuclear deal meant that, in practice, allies like France, Germany, and the U.K. were politically on the side of adversaries like Iran, Russia, and China, waiting out the Trump presidency and policies.
To get Europe involved, Washington must inform France, Germany, and the U.K. it is jettisoning the notion of reviving the expiring JCPOA. Sustained U.S. diplomacy should instead unite the allies behind a coordinated campaign to counter Iran’s escalatory measures: acts of maritime harassment, cyberattacks, human rights abuses, the nuclear and missile programs, support for terrorism, and fomenting of regional instability.
On the nuclear front, Biden must rebuild the transatlantic consensus on stopping Iran’s atomic program that existed before the JCPOA, which resulted in several rounds of U.N. Security Council sanctions resolutions. In so doing, the administration can build on past attempts to create supplementary terms for an improved accord as a baseline from which to draft the contours of a better deal. Resurrecting these terms and adjusting them to take into account Iran’s new nuclear advances would put Washington and Europe on the same page about replacing the JCPOA with something stronger.
Not all pressure need be economic. The immediate venue to present a united diplomatic front is the September Board of Governors meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which is investigating Tehran’s safeguards breaches and attempting to restore lapsed monitoring over Iran’s expanding nuclear program. As of May, Iran had amassed enough enriched uranium to produce three nuclear weapons, deployed thousands of advanced centrifuges, and reduced the time required to make weapon-grade uranium to around two months. In April 2021, for the first time, Iran also began producing 60 percent enriched uranium, a short step from 90 percent, the ideal purity for nuclear weapons. In February, Tehran also began making uranium metal, a material used in the core of nuclear weapons, and significantly reduced IAEA monitoring.
Washington and its partners should spearhead a new resolution censuring Iran at the upcoming IAEA meeting. If this approach does not bear fruit, America and Europe must elevate Iran’s nuclear file back to the U.N. Security Council. Even if Russia and China refuse to censure Iran, the U.S. and its allies can invoke the U.N. snapback mechanism to restore all prior sanctions resolutions against the Islamic Republic, effectively bypassing the Russian and Chinese veto. Contrary to UNSC Resolution 2231, which underpins the JCPOA, the previous resolutions identify Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to international peace and security, insist on Tehran’s suspension of uranium enrichment, and contain no lapsing provisions against Iranian arms transfers or ballistic missile tests. They would also deliver a fait accompli to Moscow and Beijing: multilateral penalties against the Islamic Republic which Russia and China previously agreed to.
Third, the Biden administration must prevent the Islamic Republic from overrunning the Middle East, where it is poised to capitalize on American indifference. Nearly four months have passed since leaked audio files came to light in which Zarif admitted that Iran routinely “sacrificed diplomacy for the battlefield.” If Washington is going to get serious about countering Iran, it needs to have a regional policy that understands Tehran’s center of gravity is its web of partners and proxies, which the regime terms the “Axis of Resistance.” Rolling back the gains of this network through sanctions, interdictions, denying terrain, adding political pressure, and even engaging in military strikes will be key to winning on the battlefields that Tehran has invested in so heavily.
This is particularly true in the heartland of the region, Iraq, where Washington has absorbed at least 27 rocket and drone strikes since January. The strikes emanate from Iran-backed militias, with a meager response ratio from Washington that indicates a preference to strike in Syria. America treats Syria as a free-fire zone, versus Iraq, where a response would have manifestly greater impact, but comes with greater risks.
The U.S. should also coordinate closely with Israel and the Arab states in the Persian Gulf on stemming and responding to Iranian attacks. Israeli and American intelligence officials have reportedly been in touch on developing contingencies and offsets should diplomacy fail. Washington should hold similar meetings with Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, home to American bases and countries which serve on the frontlines of any potential conflict with Iran.
There are countless other areas that require greater American attention, such as the regime’s hostage diplomacy, assassination of dissidents, and foreign kidnapping plots. America must also not miss the opportunity to better align its ideals and interests and support the Iranian population when it takes to the streets.
Despite more than six months of Washington turning the other cheek, Tehran remains defiant, in violation of its nuclear obligations, and continues to arm and equip terror and proxy groups who strike American and allied targets. Former Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ oft-cited quote, “The enemy gets a vote,” remains instructive. Tehran is unlikely to ditch its penchant for escalation and extortion so long as it yields results. In a sense, the Islamic Republic of Iran has voted. It’s time the administration admits that its Iran policy is not working, but it can still be salvaged.
*Behnam Ben Taleblu is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), where Andrea Stricker is a research fellow. They contribute to FDD’s Iran program and have jointly written on Iran’s nuclear program and nonproliferation issues in the Middle East. Follow Andrea on Twitter @StrickerNonpro. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

No, Mr President. Al-Qaeda Is Not ‘Gone’ From Afghanistan.
 Thomas Joscelyn/The Dispatch-FDD/August 23/2021
Today, President Biden delivered his fourth speech on Afghanistan since April. As the fiasco surrounding his administration’s incompetent withdrawal from the country continues to unfold, the president conceded he could not “guarantee the outcome.” He added that there is a “risk of loss” in the days to come. And he praised the American military for carrying out an “incredibly dangerous and difficult mission.”
That mission was made only more difficult by his administration’s poor decision-making. It’s clear that Biden’s team did not foresee the collapse of Afghan forces over the past several months. If the president and his advisers had, the evacuation of American citizens would have happened sooner and in a more orderly fashion.
President Biden cited the threat posed by ISIS as his chief concern. And it’s true that ISIS has a lingering presence, which could strike Americans on the way. ISIS has claimed a string of attacks in Kabul in recent years.
But the president expressed no concern about al-Qaeda. “​​What interest do we have in Afghanistan at this point, with al-Qaeda gone?” he asked in response to a question. “We went and did the mission. You’ve known my position for a long, long time.” But he’s wrong: Al-Qaeda is not gone.
In fact, in recent days I’ve spoken with several U.S. officials who think “at least hundreds” of al-Qaeda’s men were released during the Taliban’s jailbreaks this year. Some of these terrorists are al-Qaeda bigwigs. Others are lower-level fighters and midlevel operatives.
Most alarming: Multiple “external operatives”—that is, al-Qaeda terrorists responsible for plotting against the West—have been freed.
The al-Qaeda men released by the Taliban will supplement the ranks of those who are already there.
Based on operational claims and other evidence, my FDD colleague Bill Roggio and I have tracked the presence of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups in at least 18 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces from November 2020 to April 2021.
This evidence is bolstered by official analyses published by the U.S. government and U.N. Security Council.
In June, the U.N. Security Council reported that “[l]arge numbers of al-Qaeda fighters and other foreign extremist elements aligned with the Taliban are located in various parts of Afghanistan.” In addition, a “significant part of the leadership of” al-Qaeda “resides in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region.” Some of those senior leaders have been killed inside Afghanistan during the past year.
In the spring, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), reported that the Taliban has “maintained close ties with al Qaeda.”
In January, the U.S. Treasury Department reported that al-Qaeda is “gaining strength in Afghanistan while continuing to operate with the Taliban under the Taliban’s protection.” Al-Qaeda “capitalizes on its relationship with the Taliban through its network of mentors and advisers who are embedded with the Taliban, providing advice, guidance, and financial support.”
There’s more.
Al-Qaeda is likely in Kabul right now, according to two U.S. counterterrorism officials. They point to the large footprint of the Haqqani Network, an integral part of the Taliban, inside the Afghan capital.
As I’ve stressed for years, the Haqqanis are so close to al-Qaeda that they are often indistinguishable. The Haqqanis incubated and groomed the first generation of al-Qaeda’s men for jihad in the late 1980s. Jalaluddin Haqqani, the group’s founder, was one of Osama bin Laden’s first benefactors. Jalaluddin’s son, Sirajuddin, is currently the deputy emir of the Taliban. Sirajuddin has worked with al-Qaeda for decades and the U.N. Security Council’s experts recently said there is even evidence that he is part of the “wider al-Qaeda leadership.”
Sirajuddin is, at a minimum, one of al-Qaeda’s closest allies. But if he is an al-Qaeda leader, then who won the war in Afghanistan? Sirajuddin has overseen the Taliban’s fighting forces for years.
The Haqqanis have thousands of fighters of their own within the Taliban’s army, and it is often difficult to tell them apart from al-Qaeda.
In recent hours, images from Kabul show Khalil Haqqani—another member of the notorious clan—attending prayers at mosque, meeting with bigwigs, and mixing with the public.
Khalil is wanted by the U.S. with a bounty of $5 million on head. You can probably guess who Khalil Haqqani has worked with for much of his career. When the U.S. Treasury Department designated Khalil as a terrorist in 2011 it noted that he has “also acted on behalf of al-Qaeda and has been linked to al-Qaeda military operations.” In 2002, Treasury continued, Khalil “was deploying men to reinforce al-Qaeda elements in Paktia Province, Afghanistan.”As the U.N. has reported, the Haqqanis “remain close” with al-Qaeda, “based on ideological alignment, relationships forged through common struggle and intermarriage.”The Haqqanis and al-Qaeda now share their victory in the Afghan War as well. President Biden may not know it, but the defeat of the U.S.-backed government wasn’t just a win for the Taliban.
It was a win for al-Qaeda.
Thomas Joscelyn is a Senior Fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Senior Editor for FDD’s Long War Journal. Follow Tom on Twitter @thomasjoscelyn. FDD is a nonpartisan think tank focused on foreign policy and national security issues.

The Dreadful Consequences of the Biden Disaster in Afghanistan
Guy Millière/Gatestone Institute/August 23, 2021
Most of the Afghan army, after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, might understandably have decided not even to try to fight. The "trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces" with "advanced weaponry" has led to that US-provided "advanced weaponry" falling into the hands of terrorists it was meant to fight -- a donation from US taxpayers to what is now the world's best-armed terrorist state.
[T]he US has had troops in Germany and South Korea for about 70 years – a relatively modest "insurance policy" that never seemed "forever." Ironically, by handing over Afghanistan to the same Taliban that hosted Al Qaeda, which murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, the US is not only making a mockery of these victims; it will soon find itself having to fight at an even greater cost in life and treasure as countries trying to eliminate America can now do it without American troops nearby, and with America's military equipment.
The French, British, Germans, Australians and Czechs have been venturing behind enemy lines to rescue their stranded citizens hiding there; Americans have not. The Pentagon and the State Department have admitted that they do not even know how many Americans are in the country; how could they know where they are?
Trump reportedly expected to leave a residual troop force in place, and apparently had a plan for an orderly military withdrawal -- based strictly on conditions on the ground. These presumably included not departing in the middle of the Taliban's summer fighting season, but in winter, when they shelter in Pakistan; not neglecting to consult with America's European allies, and not surrendering the main US air base, Bagram, before evacuating Americans and their allies, whom they had promised to rescue should plans not work out.
Trump seems to have understood what the Biden administration ignores: that terrorists are probably not all that susceptible to diplomacy, but to strength -- as Osama bin Laden put it... to "the strong horse".
After days of silence, Biden read a 19-minute speech saying that he stood behind his decision to leave Afghanistan, and even accused he Afghan security forces, which had sacrificed an estimated 66,000 men. Biden left the press conference without answering questions and returned to Camp David where he resumed his vacation". Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi praised his "strong leadership".
Pakistan is more deeply linked to the Taliban's victory than the United States might care to admit.
"Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include.... soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support..., arranging training for Taliban fighters..., planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support." — Human Rights Watch.
China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and the Taliban have different worldviews, but do possess three things in common: they are enemies of the United States and the Western world, they want to see the United States humiliated and defeated, and they want to eliminate the United States from the region. The United States has been humiliated, defeated and eliminated from the region. Its enemies have won.
Those who love the United States, however, believe that without its strength and power, American liberty and freedom would quickly vanish from creation. Seeing what the Biden administration has done in just seven months to weaken America and strengthen its enemies has been nothing short of shattering. One can only hope for a change of course, a return to real leadership, before more damage is done.
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a debacle for the United States; the consequences will take shape fast. The Biden administration and President Joe Biden himself have an overwhelming responsibility for what is taking place and what will follow. Pictured: Biden speaks about the evacuations of US citizens and vulnerable Afghans, in the White House on August 20, 2021.
The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a debacle for the United States; the consequences will take shape fast. The Biden administration and President Joe Biden himself have an overwhelming responsibility for what is taking place and what will follow; they have shown a degree of incompetence unseen in the United States since the calamitous Carter years.
On July 8, President Biden said, "the Afghan troops have 300,000 well equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban". A Taliban takeover of the country, he added, was "not inevitable". He was wrong. Most of the Afghan army, probably after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, understandably decided not even to try to fight.
The "trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces" with "advanced weaponry" has led to that US-provided "advanced weaponry" falling into the hands of terrorists it was meant to fight -- a donation from US taxpayers to what is now the world's best-armed terrorist state.
Contrary to the latest fabrication endlessly repeated in an apparent effort to make it true -- that "after 20 years, everyone wanted the US out of Afghanistan" -- the US has had troops in Germany and South Korea for about 70 years – a relatively modest "insurance policy" that never seemed "forever." Ironically, by handing over Afghanistan to the same Taliban that hosted Al Qaeda, which murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, the US is not only making a mockery of these victims; it will soon find itself having to fight at an even greater cost in life and treasure as countries trying to eliminate America can now do it without American troops nearby, and with America's military equipment.
On August 15, on CNN's "State of the Union," host Jake Tapper asked Secretary of State Antony Blinken if the Biden administration was in a "Saigon moment" -- the hasty 1975 evacuation by helicopter of the American Embassy in Saigon, when the city fell to communist North Vietnamese troops. "This is not Saigon", Blinken replied. It was worse. The only difference was that the embassy was in Kabul, not Saigon, and those who took the city were Islamists, not communists. At Kabul airport, for days, thousands of Afghans have been trying to board American planes leaving the country. Some who clung to them while taking off fell to their death. "We've succeeded in achieving our objectives", Blinken said.
Available intelligence indicates that al-Qaeda has, in fact, never left Afghan territory; now that the country is held by their jihadist allies, its members are already reorganizing.
President Biden and Secretary Blinken claimed that the US Intelligence community did not inform them that the Taliban could gain power in a few weeks and that the Afghan government would quickly collapse. Six months ago, however, on February 3, a report from a Congressionally-commissioned report stated that the Biden administration would have to change its plans: "withdrawing U.S. troops irresponsibly would likely lead to a new civil war in Afghanistan, inviting the reconstitution of anti-U.S. terrorist groups that could threaten our homeland, and providing them with a narrative of victory". More warnings followed. The Biden administration went ahead anyhow.
Even though Kabul's downfall was foreseeable long before August 15, the US Embassy in Kabul seemed caught off guard. After the Taliban arrived at the gates of the city, embassy personnel began destroying documents and were transported to the airport at the last minute. The embassy is now in the hands of the Taliban.
Afghans trying to flee the Taliban overran the runway, Kabul airport was plunged into chaos, and American soldiers took control of the airport. 7,000 US troops were sent back into Afghanistan in an environment more dangerous than the one the US had abandoned, one entirely controlled by the Taliban. Up to 40,000 Americans remained stranded in Afghanistan. Those requesting the embassy's help first received a message telling them to proceed to Kabul airport, but with a warning: "THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT CANNOT ENSURE SAFE PASSAGE TO THE HAMID KARZAI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT", followed by a warning not to go the airport, at least before receiving instructions.
Meanwhile, the Taliban, despite claims by President Biden, have been blocking access to it. Americans trying to reach it have been beaten by the Taliban and their passports taken. There are reports of the Taliban "with lists" going door-to-door, killing people who had worked with the US.
Americans left to their fate in Kabul run the risk of being taken hostage by the Taliban or other Islamist groups; they have every reason to feel abandoned by their government and terrified for their lives. The French, British, Germans, Australians and Czechs have been venturing behind enemy lines to rescue their stranded citizens hiding there; Americans have not. The Pentagon and the State Department have admitted that they do not even know how many Americans are in the country; how could they know where they are?
Women in Afghanistan are being raped, beaten to death, murdered for not wearing a burka, and had their eyes gouged out . "Hit lists" are being drawn up for women and children to be hunted as sex slaves or for forced marriages to "fighters".
President Biden and Secretary Blinken, as usual, blamed what is happening on former President Donald J. Trump, who had wanted the United States to leave Afghanistan, but not this way. Trump reportedly expected to leave a residual troop force in place, and apparently had a plan for an orderly military withdrawal -- based strictly on conditions on the ground. These presumably included not departing in the middle of the Taliban's summer fighting season, but in winter, when they shelter in Pakistan; not neglecting to consult with America's European allies, and not surrendering the main US air base, Bagram, before evacuating Americans and their allies, whom they had promised to rescue should plans not work out.
Trump seems to have understood what the Biden administration has ignored: that terrorists may not be all that susceptible to diplomacy, but to strength -- as Osama bin Laden put it, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse." Trump recently recounted what he had said on the phone -- in front of witnesses -- to Hibatullah Akhundzada, Supreme Commander of the Taliban, to help him understand what would happen if the Taliban did not honor their agreements:
"We're going to come back and hit you harder than any country has ever been hit. And your village, where I know you are and where you have everybody, that's going to be the point at which the first bomb is dropped".
Shortly after Trump hung up, the Taliban attacked Afghan forces; US jets immediately responded with an air strike, and Taliban spokesman Suhail Shaheen posted a Twitter message saying that the group "plans to implement all parts of the agreement one after another to prevent conflict escalation".
After Biden's inauguration, everything was different. Lieutenant General Gregory Guillot, commander of the Ninth Air Force (Air Forces Central), Southwest Asia, said that from the moment the Biden administration took control, there had been a steep decline in airstrikes. Trump maintained fighter jets and armed drones at Bagram airbase; Biden, on July 5, and without notifying the Afghan military, ordered the base evacuated. Immediately after the Americans departed, the Taliban not only looted the base and recovered US military equipment that had been abandoned, they also freed thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda members that the US military had imprisoned there.
When members of the Biden administration saw that the president's disappearance was drawing horrified reactions even from the previously slavish mainstream press, they announced on the morning of August 16 that Biden would hold a press conference in the afternoon. So, on August 16, after days of silence, Biden read a 19-minute speech saying that he stood behind his decision to leave Afghanistan, and even accused he Afghan security forces, which had sacrificed an estimated 66,000 men. Biden left the press conference without answering questions and returned to Camp David where he resumed his vacation". Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi praised his "strong leadership".
On August 11, when it became clear that the Taliban would take power, White House spokesperson Jen Psaki said, "The Taliban also has to make an assessment about what they want their role to be in the international community".
The reply arrived on August 15, the day of the capture of Kabul. Taliban commander, Muhammed Arif Mustafa told a journalist:
"One day mujahedeen will have victory and Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day."
What caused the administration of George W. Bush to destroy the rear bases of al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban regime was the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US. They had been organized on Afghan soil by the leaders of al-Qaeda when the Taliban were in power. Twenty years later, there seems no reason why the Taliban would drive out the members of al-Qaeda and ISIS present in the country. Rather, Afghanistan seems poised to become a safe haven for Islamist terrorist groups, already rejoicing to see the weakness of the United States and doubtless perceiving it as encouragement to escalate. The risk of Islamic terrorist attacks across the globe has increased sharply.
Other consequences are taking shape.
Iran, two decades ago, had bad relations with the Taliban, who were hostile to Shiites and Shiism. In 1998, when the Taliban murdered nine Iranians at its consulate in Mazar-e Sharif, Iran nearly declared war on the Taliban. That has changed. In November 2019, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a senior leader of the Taliban, met with Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif in Tehran to "help Afghan peace and security" and again met in January 2021. Now that the Taliban have regained power in Kabul, Iran is likely ready to cooperate with them. Iran, which supports Sunni Islamist organizations if they serve its aims, has been a home to al Qaeda leaders for years, and has apparently understood for at least ten years that funding and arming the Taliban might not only allow closer relations, but also drive the United States out of Afghanistan. "We always wanted to establish relations with Iran," Taliban spokesman Zabihulah Mujahid said on July 31, "because Iran has an Islamic system, and we want an Islamic system. We asked them to recognize us officially". Afghans might seek refuge in Iran; many are already present there. Iran may try to limit the amount.
Russia, for its part, probably intends to make sure that the Taliban will not try to destabilize Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan (Russia recently completed joint military exercises with troops from Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), but seems satisfied to see an American defeat (adviser to Vladimir Putin Fyodor Lukyanov said: "You can't blame Russia for feeling a little smug about what is happening in Kabul") and may well want to forge economic and strategic links with an enemy of the United States. "I have long since decided that the Taliban is much more able to reach agreements than the puppet government in Kabul", Russia's presidential envoy to Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, said.
Russia happens to be an ally of both Iran and China, which signed a 25-year economic and military agreement with Iran in March 2021. China's communist regime has already announced that it is looking forward to "friendship and cooperation with the Taliban". "Afghanistan's Taliban," China's Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying added, "has expressed many times a desire for good relations with China.... with an expectation that China will take part in Afghanistan's rebuilding and development process." Afghanistan has abundant natural resources, including a rare earth metals estimated to be worth more than $3 trillion, but has no mining infrastructure.
China doubtless stands ready to make Afghanistan into a Chinese economic colony, so long as the Taliban do not attack China and its allies, or create trouble with the Muslim Uyghur people whom China has been brutally suppressing in Xinjiang province. The Taliban already seem to have shown their "goodwill" towards China by giving it the means to identify Uyghurs present in Afghanistan and by helping to deport them back to China.
The Taliban victory is also a victory for China, which in the near future will most likely the dominant country in Afghanistan as it continues to move towards the global hegemony it wants.
The Taliban victory is also a victory for Pakistan, Russia and Iran, which no doubt intend to take advantage of the recent turn of events.
According to the Washington Post, Pakistan is more deeply linked to the Taliban's victory than the United States might care to admit. Pakistan's border with Afghanistan is "notoriously porous;" also, according to Human Rights Watch:
"Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support as the Taliban's virtual emissaries abroad, arranging training for Taliban fighters, recruiting skilled and unskilled manpower to serve in Taliban armies, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support."
Pakistan has not only historically helped the Taliban militarily and strategically, it also has increasing economic, military and strategic ties with China. China, which has done nothing to curb Pakistan's support for the Taliban, can only benefit from this support.
China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and the Taliban have different worldviews, but do possess three things in common: they are enemies of the United States and the Western world, they want to see the United States humiliated and defeated, and they want to eliminate the United States from the region. The United States has been humiliated, defeated and eliminated from the region. Its enemies have won.
For months, Western European leaders did not criticize the Biden administration: they appeared to enjoy seeing a weak, incompetent and destructive administration at the head of the United States. Now, though, they are worried about an additional influx of migrants sweeping into Europe and the consequent heightened terrorist risks.
The people of Taiwan have every reason to be anxious. An article on August 16 in the Communist Chinese Global Times, an organ of the Chinese Communist Party (CPP), said:
"The DPP authorities [the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) on the island of Taiwan] need to keep a sober head, and the secessionist forces should reserve the ability to wake up from their dreams. From what happened in Afghanistan, they should perceive that once a war breaks out in the Straits, the island's defense will collapse in hours and the US military won't come to help."
Israelis also have every reason to be concerned. Commenting on Afghanistan, journalist Yoav Limor wrote:
"The implications for Israel's security will be immediate. The terrorist organizations on its borders -- especially those operating under an Iranian umbrella -- can be expected to become more daring."
President Trump appears to have seen that trying to transform a tribal country -- ruled for centuries by warlords and mired in strict Islam -- into Western democracy was most likely a doomed undertaking, and that hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent to the great benefit of freedom and opportunity for women, but that much of the of the US investment might have been in vain.
The enemies of the United States and the West doubtless see the defeat of the United States as an entirely self-inflicted one, resulting from inept decisions by American leaders unable to lead and who seem deliberately to choose incompetence.
Those who love the United States, however, believe that without its strength and power, American liberty and freedom would quickly vanish from creation. Seeing what the Biden administration has done in just seven months to weaken America and strengthen its enemies has been nothing short of shattering. One can only hope for a change of course, a return to real leadership, before more damage is done.
*Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.
© 2021 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of Gatestone Institute.

Putin chides U.S. on its actions in Afghanistan — and warns of the risk of terrorism
Robyn Dixon/The Washington Post/August v23/2021
MOSCOW — Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday that the nearly 20-year U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan had failed, and warned Western countries to stop the irresponsible "experiments" of trying to impose Western values and democracy on other countries.
He also expressed concern about the risk of terrorists from Afghanistan infiltrating neighboring countries — including those passing themselves off as refugees.
Putin called on the international community to ensure that the situation in the country stabilized and to establish neighborly relations with Afghanistan.
The Russian president, making his first public comments about Afghanistan since the Taliban took control of Kabul on Sunday, spoke at a joint news conference in Moscow with German Chancellor Angela Merkel after talks in their final meeting before she leaves office. Putin said Russia “knows Afghanistan well” and understood that it was counterproductive to try to impose external forms of governance.
“Any such sociopolitical experiments have never been crowned with success and only lead to the destruction of states, and the degradation of their political and social systems,” Putin said.
Taliban hunting for ‘collaborators’ in major cities, threat assessment prepared for United Nations warns
“It is necessary to stop the irresponsible policy of imposing other people’s values from outside, the desire to build democracy in other countries, not taking into account either historical, national or religious characteristics, and completely ignoring the traditions by which people live,” Putin chided.
He said many Western politicians were finally waking up to the fact that “you cannot impose your standards of political behavior or social organization on others, because others have their own religious and cultural specificities.”
Russia, as the successor to the Soviet Union, is still haunted by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late 1979, the ensuing eight-year occupation and the ­humiliating withdrawal in early 1989. In recent years, Russia has fostered contacts with the Taliban, some of whose members cut their teeth as mujahideen in the fight against the Soviets. Today, the Taliban is designated a terrorist group by Russia.
Moscow has also reached out to other key political forces in Afghanistan, including main leaders of ethnic groups, anticipating a possible Taliban takeover and positioning itself to exert influence after the departure of U.S. forces.
Putin warned that it was crucial to prevent terrorists “of all stripes” from spilling across the region. Russia is engaged in month-long military exercises with Tajikistan’s forces, near the border of Afghanistan, and recently conducted other exercises with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
Putin said the key priority for the international community was to prevent Afghanistan’s collapse.
“The Taliban movement currently controls virtually the entire territory of the country, including its capital. These are realities, and we should act based on these very realities, not allowing the Afghan state's breakup,” Putin said.
Nearly 20 years of war, 10 days to fall: Afghanistan, by the numbers
Putin said the Taliban had ended the war and begun to establish public order. He said the U.N. Security Council should closely monitor the Taliban’s delivery on its promises to guarantee the safety of Afghans and foreign diplomats.
The Russian president has had numerous phone calls in recent days with the leaders of countries bordering Afghanistan, including Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Iran, as well as with French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi.
Russia has been pushing for international pressure on the Taliban to establish an inclusive transitional government, involving all major political and ethnic forces, fearing that if the Taliban steamrolls other groups, the country could slide into a new conflict. It has also been signaling the Taliban that if it wants global acceptance and support, it must earn the trust of the international community by avoiding human rights abuses.
The treacherous journey into Kabul airport to escape Taliban-controlled Afghanistan
But disturbing reports have emerged in recent days of Taliban fighters hunting down and executing political opponents and opening fire on peaceful protesters.
Merkel said the mission in Afghanistan had some positive outcomes in the fight against terrorism after Sept. 11, 2001, but ultimately failed in the broader objective of improving the future for Afghans.
She said the international community now had to face the threat of a possible resurgence of terrorism in Afghanistan.

ريموند إبراهيم: مجدداً، اختطاف فتاة قبطية في القاهرة
Yet Another Coptic Christian Girl Kidnapped in Cairo
Raymond Ibrahim/Coptic Solidarity/August 23/2021
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/101634/raymond-ibrahim-coptic-solidarity-yet-another-coptic-christian-girl-kidnapped-in-cairo%d8%b1%d9%8a%d9%85%d9%88%d9%86%d8%af-%d8%a5%d8%a8%d8%b1%d8%a7%d9%87%d9%8a%d9%85-%d9%85%d8%ac%d8%af%d8%af%d8%a7/
Randa Fathallah Faleh — latest Christian girl to go “missing” in Muslim Egypt
Earlier this month, a 15-year-old Coptic Christian girl disappeared off the streets of Cairo, Egypt; her mobile phone was turned off at the same time. Randa Fathallah Faleh was returning home alone, after helping another female member of her family move. Her family instantly reported her disappearance to police and even urged the Minister of the Interior to investigate.
A few days later, around August 10, online Arabic websites reported that the underage girl had happily been returned family—which turned out to be false. In fact, Randa’s father and uncle were at and pestering the police station the same day this false rumor began. A family friend responded by posting on social media the following message: “People, Randa has not been returned. Please stop promoting false rumors. Randa must be returned! Please copy and paste.”
Randa likely now joins countless Coptic Christian girls that have over the years been abducted, sexually abused, and forced to convert to Islam and marry their kidnappers. If she were to be “found” and returned to her family, no legal action will, per precedent, ever be taken against the abductors, even though Egyptian law is extremely harsh in such matters (up to 25 years imprisonment for abducting a minor female). But such is the reality of Egypt’s justice system when it comes to Copts.
This phenomenon is well discussed in a September 10, 2020 report by Coptic Solidary (CS). Fifteen-pages long and titled “‘Jihad of the Womb’: Trafficking of Coptic Women & Girls in Egypt,” it documents “the widespread practice of abduction and trafficking” and estimates that there have been “about 500 cases within the last decade, where elements of coercion were used that amount to trafficking,” according to the UN’s own definitions, particularly per its “Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons Especially Women and Children.”
According to the CS report:
The capture and disappearance of Coptic women and minor girls is a bane of the Coptic community in Egypt, yet little has been done to address this scourge by the Egyptian or foreign governments, NGOs, or international bodies. According to a priest in the Minya Governorate, at least 15 girls go missing every year in his area alone. His own daughter was nearly kidnapped had he not been able to intervene in time.
The report offers 13 separate case studies. Victims range from teenage girls, to newly-wed and pregnant young women, to married women with children. Most of the 500 disappeared in one of two ways: either they were publicly kidnapped, often by being forced into a car while traveling to school, church, or work; or—and this is especially true for teenage girls—they were lured into relationships with young Muslim men who promised them the world, until, that is, it was too late.
Why so many officials help in the abduction and forced conversion of Christian girls and women—or at the very least look the other way—“can be traced back to the second article of the Egyptian Constitution.” Its states that “Islam is the religion of the State and Arabic is its official language. The principles of Islamic Sharia are the main source of legislation.”
Although the entire CS report is worth reading to understand the totality of this phenomenon—which is plagues several other Muslim nations, most notoriously Pakistan—perhaps its most salient paragraph follows:
The rampant trafficking of Coptic women and girls is a direct violation of their most basic rights to safety, freedom of movement, and freedom of conscience and belief. The crimes committed against these women must be urgently addressed by the Egyptian government, ending impunity for kidnappers, their accomplices, and police who refuse to perform their duties. Women who disappear and are never recovered must live an unimaginable nightmare. The large majority of these women are never reunited with their families or friends because police response in Egypt is dismissive and corrupt. There are countless families who report that police have either been complicit in the kidnapping or at the very least bribed into silence. If there is any hope for Coptic women in Egypt to have a merely ‘primitive’ level of equality, these incidents of trafficking must cease, and the perpetrators must be held accountable by the judiciary.