Detailed Lebanese & Lebanese Related LCCC English New Bulletin For October 07/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://data.eliasbejjaninews.com/newselias18/english.october06.18.htm

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

Analysis/How Assad Helped Create ISIS to Win in Syria and Got Away With the Crime of the Century
الكسندر كرفينك من الهآررتس: كيف ساعد الأسد على خلق داعش ليربح في سوريا وكيف تمكن من التفلت من جريمة العصر
Alexander Griffing/Haaretz/October 06/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/67934/alexander-griffing-haaretz-how-assad-helped-create-isis-to-win-in-syria-and-got-away-with-the-crime-of-the-century-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%83%D8%B3%D9%86%D8%AF%D8%B1-%D9%83%D8%B1%D9%81%D9%8A%D9%86%D9%83/
There 'won't be any Nuremberg-like trial of Assad and his associates,' says the last U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford.
While Syria remains torn between Russian, American and Turkish interests, with world leaders working to avoid a bloodbath in the remaining pocket of resistance, one thing is certain: President Bashar Assad has won Syria’s devastating seven-year civil war.
To secure his victory, experts say, Assad helped incubate the extremism that led to the rise of the Islamic State and the further spread of jihadism in Syria – the very elements he now vows to destroy in Idlib, the last rebel enclave in the country and home to millions of civilians and refugees.
Robert Ford, the ambassador to Syria under President Barack Obama and the last U.S. ambassador to the country, told Haaretz that Assad “will stay in power for as long as the eye can see,” and more importantly there “won’t be any Nuremberg-like trial of Assad and his associates.”
Furthermore, he says, not only will Assad not be held accountable for the use of chemical weapons or other wartime atrocities, but his allies Russia and Iran that helped him defeat the rebels won’t be able to bankroll the rebuilding of the war-ravaged country.
“The Syrian government lacks financial resources, and neither Russia nor Iran can provide much more than they already provide,” says Ford, now a fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington and a professor at Yale.
Assad’s downfall seemed all but guaranteed at many points during the eight years since the Arab Spring began to topple Middle Eastern dictators. Yet Assad has now outlasted fellow despots like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Gadhafi, and also Western leaders like Obama and Britain’s David Cameron who once vowed to stop his bloodletting and drew red lines warning Assad against using chemical weapons or risk regime change.
Ford, who resigned in February 2014 to protest Obama’s alleged lack of policy against Assad, had regularly met with the rebels and wrote in The New York Times in June 2014 that while “these men were not angels … they acknowledged that they would ultimately have to fight Al-Qaida and the foreign jihadis.” But in the end it was Assad who ended up convincing much of the West that he was a better choice than the rebels to help battle the Islamic State and jihadism.
A new narrative
In 2011, months after the uprising against Assad began in Daraa and quickly started to destabilize the country, his regime released thousands of jihadists from Syria’s now infamous prisons.
Using a cold and pragmatic calculus, Assad fomented chaos and terror to discredit the opposition and ensure that the West wouldn't intervene against him. Syrian war expert Christopher Phillips details how Assad tied the opposition to jihadists in his comprehensive 2016 book "The Battle for Syria: International Rivalry in the New Middle East."Phillips told Haaretz, “it is hard to tell just how successful the discrediting strategy was. Certainly the majority of Syrians who didn't flee or take up arms seemed to tacitly back Assad but was that because they didn't trust the opposition or because they feared the regime? It was probably a mixture of both.”“In 2011, the majority of the current ISIS leadership was released from jail" by Assad, Mohammed Al-Saud, a Syrian dissident with the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces, told Newsweek in 2014. “No one in the regime has ever admitted this, or explained why.”The leaders of two major Islamist groups, Hassan Aboud of Ahrar al-Sham and Zahran Alloush of Jaysh al-Islam, were also both in Assad’s prisons in early 2011. Additionally, as the Islamic State began to take root in Syria and spread into Iraq, Assad let the group grow. Phillips wrote in The Atlantic in August that this “was partly pragmatic, as ISIS was in the peripheral east while other rebels threatened the western heartlands, but it was also strategic.”
“The regime did not just open the door to the prisons and let these extremists out, it facilitated them in their work, in their creation of armed brigades,” a former member of Syria’s Military Intelligence Directorate, one of more than a dozen of Syria’s secretive intelligence agencies, told Abu Dhabi-based The National in 2014.Assad “concocted a legitimizing narrative: It portrayed the oppositionists as violent, foreign, sectarian Islamists,” Phillips wrote, “in the hope that only jihadists and his regime would be left for Syrians and the world to choose from.”
Assad’s survival and Hezbollah’s lasting presence
As the war progressed, Hezbollah, Iran and later Russia intervened militarily to help Assad, while the United States, Turkey and the Kurds fought in Syria and set up military bases to battle the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. Hezbollah was “absolutely key” to Assad’s survival, Phillips says.
Hezbollah members were the first foreign fighters, in 2012, to enter on Assad’s side and “led the way in key battles like Qusayr and in reorganizing the army and pro-Assad Syrian Democratic Forces,” Phillips told Haaretz. “Iran’s Soleimani may have been the brains, but Hezbollah were the trusted implementers,” he added, referring to the head of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds force.
Iran has long viewed its presence in Syria as key in its desire to establish a land bridge between Tehran and Beirut, a strategic asset it hopes would thwart both Saudi Arabia and Israel, its regional rivals.
Another major factor that allowed for Assad’s survival was the strength of prewar Syria’s government. Phillips wrote that in 2000, when Assad came to power, he had “inherited a coup-proofed regime” from his father, Hafez Assad.
The structure Hafez built lasts to this day, and as Ford adds, it's the reason “neither Russia nor Iran control the Syrian power elite inner circle and that circle has stayed loyal to Assad consistently through the civil war.” Most of Syria’s top security positions are packed with Alawites, the sect the Assad family belongs to, which is only about 10 percent of the predominantly Sunni population. While Assad’s army suffered mass desertions and lost well over half its soldiers in the first four years of the war, the power structure around Assad stayed loyal.
What’s next for Syria?
Assad’s survival has left Syria in ruins; the country is now “weaker, poorer and less influential in the region,” Ford says. Assad's travel is now restricted to “friendly” countries, lest he face extradition.
Russia, while reeling from its own economic woes, is working behind the scenes to secure funding to rebuild Syria. “Russia wants to show the world that the Syrian civil war is largely over, and refugees returning would be one indicator that the Assad government has won its victory,” Ford says.
Syrian government forces are preparing a phased offensive in the province of Idlib and surrounding areas Reuters
The Trump administration, however, has made clear that Washington will not help fund the rebuilding effort, and U.S. sanctions make foreign investment very difficult in the country.
The Russian government even went so far as to release a list from its "refugee coordination center" at Khmeimim air base in Syria claiming that 900,000 refugees could return to Syria soon from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Turkey is amassing troops near Idlib and fears a mass exodus from the region toward its border. But Ford says Syria’s basic infrastructure can't handle a returning population. Recent estimates to rebuild Syria range from $250 billion to $400 billion, according to AP. “Little of Homs and Aleppo cities have been rebuilt even though fighting in those cities ended years ago," Ford says. "Where would refugees live? What jobs would they have? What about clean water and electricity and heat for winter?”
As a result, Russia has been lobbying Germany and France and even Turkey to foot the bill to rebuild Syria, while Trump has been pressing his allies not to support Assad financially. Iran’s indefinite presence in Syria is also all but certain to keep U.S. funding out and continue to isolate Syria both economically and diplomatically. Assad’s ruthless victory has created one of the largest refugee crises since World War II, one that has brought out demons in many Western countries now embracing anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim politics.
The reconstruction and repatriation effort faces another problem – many refugees may not want to return. Syria’s security services are checking information on each refugee and, according to Ford, there are stories in the media of some people being detained or promptly sent into military service upon their return. Russia, Assad and Turkey have agreed for the time being not to enter Idlib and destroy the jihadists there at the expense of civilian lives, delaying the final military push that most observers still see as inevitable.
Additionally, a recent UN report estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 Islamic State fighters remain in Syria and Iraq – despite Trump’s recent declarations of victory over the group. The Islamic State, recent events indicate, remains both an international and internal threat, and Iran even declared Wednesday that it killed 40 ISIS leaders with six missile strikes in retaliation for the September 22 attack on a military parade in Iran that killed 25 people, nearly half of them members of the Revolutionary Guards.
So while Assad may soon finally defeat the rebels who sought to tear down his regime and regain his territory (except the 28 percent held by the U.S.-backed Kurds in the northeast), he'll be left with a country facing a severe humanitarian crisis, few resources to rebuild with and well-armed and trained jihadists still gunning to end his secular rule through terror.
https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/syria/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-assad-won-in-syria-helped-create-isis-and-got-away-with-it-1.6462751

The influential class in Iraq does not get the message
Adnan Hussein/Al Arabiya/October 06/18
It seems that the message sent by public protests in Iraq was not received hence the purpose was not achieved. It is as if there was no message in the first place to reach the addressed who is no other than the powerful political class in Iraq that even after five months of the parliamentary elections is struggling to form a new government. The government could have been formed within a month or even less. Now perhaps it will take another month or more to complete the task, a pattern repeated every four years and having taken place for the fourth time in a row.
Less than two months after the elections, a protest movement erupted in Iraq, the strongest in its history. These protests claimed more than 20 lives and left hundreds wounded. In recent weeks, the toll has increased, as a number of civil activists were kidnapped and some were killed, including women, especially in Basra — the city that has been the center of the protests.
Impervious to public protests
It was assumed that this movement would have been sufficient to push the powerful political class towards hastening government formation with the intention of meeting the protesters’ pressing needs. Their demands included first and foremost the basic provisions of electricity, clean water, agriculture, health care services, as well as legislative action entailed by the election process, particularly the formation of a new government. Yet the influential political class did not show necessary diligence in the matter. When the results of the elections were announced, dozens of objections and complaints were made within the context of competition and power struggle among influential parties. What hinders the formation of a government in Iraq is a collective effort of the political class to maintain the system of quotas. In order to answer and resolve these appeals and objections, the former parliament made the decision to suspend the Electoral Commission’s work and to form a new temporary commission that was entrusted with the job of manual recounting of votes in many electoral sectors and centers. This delayed the announcement of the final results for three months, which in turn postponed the legislative functions. In fact, the first day of the new parliament was deemed an “open session” due to its inability to reach an agreement on the individual to be elected as the Speaker of the House of Representatives along with his two deputies. This was a clear constitutional violation, which violated a previous decision of the Federal Court which four years ago adjudicated that the first session of the House of Representatives must not be an open one because this is contrary to provisions of the Constitution. However, as is the norm for the powerful political class, it acted in contempt of the law as what matters to them is to reach a consensus among them on the sharing of influential positions according to the system of quotas. This system is one of the reasons leading to the outbreak of protest movements in recent months, as well as similar movements going as far back as 2010.
Addiction to quotas
Four years ago, the government of Haider al-Abadi went through a similar process. It took months for it to be formed and ended up into a division between the coalition of the State of Law and the Islamic Da'wa Party due to a conflict between Abadi and the coalition and party leader Nuri al-Maliki who wanted to renew his term for a third time after serving two previous terms. Maliki’s terms ended with a major disaster for Iraq and its people as ISIS occupied a third of Iraq’s territories and established itself as an entity. The war to eliminate it lasted for three years (some of the organization’s remnants are still active in some areas).
Since then there has been no president or leader of a political organization in Iraq that has not repeatedly voiced his disdain for the quota system and vowed to work against it and avoid falling into its trap. Yet, the ongoing process of forming a new government contradicts the very principle previously extolled by these leaders. In fact, what hinders the formation of a government in Iraq is the collective effort of the political class to maintain the quota system and to share the positions of government and other higher state posts according to that very system.
The quota system will again be a decisive factor in the formation of the new government. The position of the Speaker of the House of Representatives did not go to any person that was not a Sunni. And as usual the president is Kurdish and the prime minister is Shiite. It is important to note that this system is unconstitutional as it is contrary to the provisions of the Constitution which champions the principles of equality, justice, and equal opportunity and commits the state to guaranteeing them.
Voter apathy
To sum up, the political process that has been undergoing in Iraq since 2003 is currently reproducing itself, and those in charge of it are rotating themselves for the fourth time in 12 years. Of course, the powerful political forces and their leaderships will be delighted by this result, unaware of the fact that it will, in turn, drive the Iraqi community into further hating this process and the officials in charge of it. According to official data of which the veracity is highly doubted, the elections in May were boycotted by about 60% of the electorate, exceeding the boycott witnessed by the 2014 elections. The recycling of the political process and its outcomes necessarily means a higher level of hatred for this process and the parties in charge of it. This has been expressed in the protests which took place in the city of Basra and elsewhere, where the protesters headed towards the headquarters of influential parties (often Islamic) and demanded their closure as well as the expulsion of their representatives in the provincial councils. In fact, it appears that these forces have neither grasped the content nor realized the significance of this powerful message.

Putin’s visit and the S-400 deal will test India-US relations
C. Uday Bhaskar/Al Arabiya/October 06/18
The brief no-frills visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to Delhi (October 5) for the 19th India-Russia annual summit has been substantive in the final outcome and has infused high-level political traction to a bi-lateral relationship that is important for both nations but had remained moribund in recent years. Predictably the military supplies component was the most visible and the Russian built S-400 multi-layered air defense system that India seeks to acquire had elicited considerable attention , more due to the impact this would have on the India-US relationship.
While both nations signed on the dotted line confirming that Moscow will provide the S-400 to India at a cost of US $ 5.43 billion, the announcement itself was subdued. A brief sentence was included in the joint statement, which noted that both countries “welcomed the conclusion of the contract for the supply of the S-400 long-range surface-to-air missile system to India.” Contrary to pre-summit expectations, the two sides were unable to finalize the other major military inventory items, such as stealth frigates for the Indian navy and assault rifles for the army.
Symbol of political resolve
While India and Russia signed major agreements in other fields such as space, nuclear energy, railways and anti-terrorism cooperation, the S-400 has become both the symbol of the political resolve that now animates the five decades old India-Russia relationship and a litmus test for the resilience of the relatively nascent India-US relationship.
It may be recalled that the S-400 was also acquired from Russia by China and the US invoked its 2017 CAATSA (Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act) legislation against Beijing in September for engaging in ‘significant transactions’ with Russia. This legislation was given more teeth after Mr. Donald Trump assumed office as the US President. Other ‘adversaries’ identified by the USA include Iran and North Korea and the Russia /S-400 issue apart, Delhi will also have to steer its relations with Iran through the Trump driven CAATSA mine-field in coming months.
The S-400 deal has been on the Indian radar for some years and while the credibility of air defense systems – particularly against ballistic missiles, hyper-sonic cruise missiles and rogue drones is yet to be rigorously proven, most major powers have invested in this defense system. The US has introduced and exported the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) to ward of ballistic missiles and it is claimed that limited area defense can be established effectively More often than not, national capitals that house the command and control of strategic forces are the prime choice for such air defense systems.
Will the USA invoke the CAATSA provisions against India for this S-400 ‘transgression’ as it has in relation to China or announce a waiver? In a cautious response, the local US embassy in Delhi noted that: “The waiver authority is not for a blanket waiver. It is transaction-specific. Waivers of CAATSA Section 231 will be considered on a transaction-by-transaction basis. We can't prejudge any sanctions decisions." It was further added that the US intent in relation to the CAATSA was to impose costs on Russia for what has been described as its ‘malign’ behavior by stopping the flow of significant money to Moscow and that the legislation was not intended to “impose damage to the military capabilities of our allies and partner.”
India is in an anomalous position in relation to the USA and Russia apropos its military inventory dependency. Unable to overcome the ignominy of being the world’s largest importer of arms , Delhi has in effect distributed its strategic dependency between Washington and Moscow and has acquired major military platforms from both Cold War adversaries. This could be characterized as ‘anomalous-alignment’ by Delhi, which like many other capitals, (ostensibly friendly to the USA) is grappling with a capricious Trump led US foreign policy. Canada is illustrative of the predicament of US allies and partners who have to ‘deal’ with US President Trump.
The complexity for India is the China factor – a strand that has strategic relevance for both the USA and Russia. India has deep-seated anxiety about Chinese intent in Asia and the 4,000 km long unresolved territorial cum border dispute that led to the October 1962 war festers. China’s economic-trade profile is much larger than that of India and both Asian giants are wary of the other.
Paradoxically the emergence of China as the world’s number one GDP nation within this decade has deep implications for both the US and Russia. A bruising trade war has already begun between the US and China and its long term impact on the global economy will be corrosive to the current orientation of economic and trade related globalization.
Russia remains economically vulnerable and unlike its principal interlocutors (USA, China and India) Moscow does not figure in the top 10 nations as per GDP projections for 2018-19. Despite the current cooperation between Russia and China, there is latent misgiving about the bear being enveloped in the dragon’s suffocating embrace. On current evidence, neither demography nor geography favor Russia over China’s creeping assertiveness.
Consequently India is a distinctive swing-state in the complex and imbalanced quadrilateral that links the USA, China and Russia with the lumbering elephant. Would it be strategically prudent for the Beltway to lower the CAATSA boom against Russia, China and India simultaneously? For India, the challenge will be to retain a degree of stability in its relations with Washington even as a deadline looms large in early November in relation to both Russia, Iran and CAATSA. In an unintended way, the Putin visit will test the resilience of the India-US relationship.

Indian Muslim girl tied to tree, flogged ‘for falling in love with Hindu boy’
Manoj Chaurasia/Special to Al Arabiya English/October 06/18
A Muslim girl was tied to a tree and flogged mercilessly by a group of villagers in India’s Bihar state earlier this week for eloping with a Hindu boy.
The young girl, daughter of Mohammad Farid Ansari from southern Bihar’s Nawada district, had fallen in love with Rupesh Kumar, son of Arjun Rajvanshi, while both were studying in a local government school.
Reports said when the girl’s parents came to know about these affairs, they stopped her going to school and also warned against meeting the youth from other religion but she continued meeting the boy. On September 30, she finally eloped with her boyfriend, much against the wishes of her family. After three days of extensive searches, she was recovered from a neighbouring village on Thursday although the boy fled the scene.
Subsequently, her family members brought the girl along to their Jogia-Maran village which was soon followed by a hurried-convened village court. The court found the matter too serious and ordered for thrashing the girl in public, witnesses said.
Soon the girl was tied to a tree and badly thrashed by local villagers until she fell unconscious. She remained tied for about five hours before the local police could reach the spot and rescued her.
“I love the boy and will marry him come what may. I am ready for any punishment,” she told the media. She said she is an adult and can well decide about her future. “I don’t believe in castes or religions. I am 19-year-old and can well decide whom I should marry, whom I should not,” she asserted. The police are investigating the case. “We have registered a case in this regard and raids are on to arrest the accused persons,” local sub-divisional police officer Sanjay Kumar said on Saturday.
The girl’s father said he wanted to marry his daughter to a suitable boy from their own community but she slipped out of the home with some excuses when there was no power at night and ran away.‘Love’ is still a taboo in conservative Bihar, and quite many who have defied the existing social order have paid with their lives, banished from their villages, imposed heavy fine or served other crude punishment.
In December 2017, a love pair from two different castes was ordered by a local village court to leave their village for falling in love. The couple who hailed from the same village under Bandara block in north Bihar’s Muzaffarpur district had only recently fled home and had been living together as husband and wife but the local villagers strongly objected to their act.
In October the same year, two women related to each other were killed and their bodies hanged from a tree in the same Muzaffarpur district allegedly for falling in love. In September, a woman was lynched while her boyfriend was blinded in Araria district for a similar reason. In June, a teenage boy was badly beaten up, tortured and then left in an isolated place and wrapped in coffin clothing in Bhojpur district, but luckily he survied. The reason was similar.
A horrible story also came from Bhagalpur district where a local village court ordered to shoot dead a boy for falling in love with a girl.
In another bone-chilling incident reported from Gaya district, a teenage girl and her boyfriend were badly beaten up, strangled to death and then burnt on the same funeral pyre for falling in love in 2015. An equally horrific incident took place in 2008 when a 15-year-old boy was thrashed, paraded through the streets with his head shaved and then thrown under the wheels of a running train for daring to write a love letter to a girl from a different case. The incident took place in Kaimur district.
Social scientists say these incidents are indicative of the fact that the society is not ready to change and that it still gives due preference to the old social custom of arranged marriages.
“The raw treatments of those falling in love or opting for love marriages indicate how ethnic ego still persists quite much and the people are ready to go to any extent to save their honor,” said prominent social scientist Sachindra Narayan who served as a professor at Patna’s AN Sinha Institute of Social Studies.