Diplomacy & Crisis News

The recent news that Venezuela will be providing Iran with 1 million hectares of arable land for farming draws further concern from the security circles concerned about the Islamic Republic’s growing influence in the Western Hemisphere.  That follows a rapidly growing energy collaboration between Caracas and Tehran following the Biden administration’s decision to lift oil sanctions on the Maduro regime. This collaboration includes the boosting of Iran’s crude supply to Venezuela for refining, which gives room for an increased export of Iranian oil for sale – and further undermines the impact of sanctions on Iran’s operations.  

There is reason to believe that the recent US government’s foreign policy in Latin America has encouraged a more assertive political and defense cooperation between leftist governments, rogue regimes such as Iran, and its terrorist proxy Hezbullah, as well as assorted criminal enterprises and gangs. 

With the election of the FARC-affiliated leftist president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, the United States is losing one of its few remaining allies in Latin America. US-Colombia cooperation on drug trafficking and counterterrorism strengthened Colombia against cartels, curtailed the Marxist-Leninist FARC rebels (despite the ill-advised peace deal), limited the spread of Hezbullah and its Venezuelan supporters, and bolstered Israel and Colombia’s security relationship. 

Colombia helped prevent the assassination of an Israeli businessman by Hezbullah, allegedly planned in retaliation for the liquidation of Qassem Soleimani. But stability in Colombia has always been contingent on US political and security support. The refugee crisis in Venezuela, which brought 3.5 million Venezuelans to Colombia, has resulted in economic concerns and risks of destabilization.  Instead of addressing this crisis, the Biden administration has announced the removing of FARC from the Foreign Terrorist Organizations (FTO) list. Colombia and the European Union withdrew the “terrorist” label from FARC when the peace agreement was first concluded in an effort to encourage integration, but FARC has factionalized into militias that engage in occasional bouts of violence.  The US administration’s signal that it no longer considers FARC a security threat could embolden the group’s worst elements. With the newly elected President Petro pursuing the policy of decriminalization of cocaine, many fear that the policy will give cover to drug cartels, and Hezbullah to enter the markets under more official covers and embed themselves further. 

The election’s context was one that experts had warned about: despite the formal end of the civil war guerrilla warfare continued. FARC’s political success brought more leftist elements into the government.  Far from renouncing violence, many fear that FARC affiliates will instead use it to further spread and entrench the ideology that caused the civil war and that has already resulted in political and economic crises in Venezuela, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. All of those countries have several things in common – strong opposition to capitalism, populist distaste for the United States, close relations with narcotraffickers, and alliances with Iran, China, and Russia.  The brazen assassination on a Colombian beach of a Paraguayan prosecutor, Marcelo Pecci, known for his tough positions on corruption, gangs, and Hezbullah, may be a harbinger of the chaos that can be expected should leftist policies so destructive to Venezuela take root in Colombia.  

That episode, however, did little to change the US government’s haphazard approach to Latin America. Over the various administrations, US role in Latin American has vacillated, with Republicans traditionally emphasizing the security-oriented approach and focusing on countering terrorism and gangs, while the Democratic administrations focusing more on human rights and humanitarian assistance. The Trump administration, for instance, has pushed for Hezbullah’s terrorist designation among both left and right-wing governments in Latin America, and has worked with El Salvador to address the border crisis and to clamp down on the MS-13 entry into the US. 

However, none of the US administrations in the past twenty years had developed a broad strategic approach in the Western Hemisphere. Specifically, there has been neither an effort to work with individual target countries to address ingrained economic conditions, political upheavals, and regional problems – such as the impact of Venezuela’s refugee crisis on its neighbors – nor a broader security framework to root out the pro-Iran elements which have grown across the continent thanks to the Cuban/Venezuelan intelligence network, and Iran’s strategic cooperation on economy and defense with Latin American countries. Both Republican and Democrat administrations overall adopted a reactionary approach to specific pet peeves, failing to develop a vision for engagement which would help advance security, prosperity, and peace in the neighboring countries past any specific governments in the US or among their counterparts. 

The relative silence after Pecci’s murder is an illustration of the US government’s overall failure to understand that the security concerns in Latin American require a long-term consistent bipartisan approach. As Joseph Humire, Center for Secure Free Society’s specialist on Transnational Threat Networks in the Western Hemisphere, told the author, Iran has been patiently pursuing a systematic ground game through As Joseph Humire, Center for Secure Free Society’s specialist on Transnational Threat Networks in the Western Hemisphere, told the author, Iran has been patiently pursuing a systematic ground game throughout the continent, slowly but surely expanding its reach, through consistent social, cultural, and economic initiatives and the expansion of alliances with the help of its regional proxies and networks, including assorted criminal elements. 

Some have compared Pecci’s murder with the analogous killing of Alberto Nisman, an Argentine prosecutor who was investigating the leftist Kirschner government’s cover-up of the Iranian orchestrated AMIA bombing by Hizballah. Since the return of leftists to power in Argentina the investigation into these events has gone cold again – and the Iranian presence has grown stronger. Under the current president, Alberto Fernandez, Argentina claims to crack down on Iranian smuggling, but recently allowed a Venezuelan-flagged flight operated by a US-sanctioned Iranian aviator with at least one senior Tehran official on board to land on its soil.  

The US reaction to these incidents has been muted. Low-key policies on leftist politicians in Latin America lie in sharp contrast to the Biden administration’s aggressively interventionist approach with the few remaining right-wing governments, which are also some of the last remaining US allies and opponents of Iran.  The White House, which initially embraced the Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei, later parted ways and even tried to impede his efforts to replace an official from the prior administration.  The attack on Nayib Bukele’s government in El Salvador has been far more extensive, public, and potentially destructive to US security interests in the Western Hemisphere.  

After Bukele replaced officials loyal to his leftist predecessors and linked to corruption, the newly inaugurated Biden administration reacted by diverting humanitarian aid to leftist self-styled human rights NGOs connected to opposition parties.  A number of these groups were reportedly receiving funding from past lawmakers, who themselves had served in sanctioned governments. The Biden administration also criticized the Bukele government for allegedly engaging in secret negotiations with notorious gangs, such as MS-13, in a scheme that would have reduced violence in exchange for votes for Bukele’s party, “The New Ideas”. The sole source for this accusation were journalists at the left-leaning Salvadoran opposition-alligned publication El Faro. 

Subsequent events raised questions. Between November 9th and 11th, El Salvador saw a strange increase in gang-related murders (46 in a 72-hours-period) before going back to zero homicides on November 12th. These numbers were provided by local authorities on Twitter on November 13th. “After 24 hours of having launched #DespliegueNacional, we can announce that we have contained the increase in violence during the past couple of days,” Bukele wrote. Later he used the phrase “old enemies and new allies with external financing” when referring to the situation.  

Giovanni Giacalone, senior analyst for the Europe Desk at ITCT, Itstime, and ITSS’ Latin America team, says that “[a]ccording to former ES anti-gang units, Bukele is referring to the right-wing and the left-wing political parties that always provided funds to the Maras [gangs].  Those would be the old enemies.” The cryptic reference to the ‘new allies with external financing’ may reference the flow of weapons into the country that ends up in the hands of these gangsters. Whether that external financing includes Venezuela, whose reach is growing across the region, the US, which has been openly meddling in El Salvador’s domestic affairs while ignoring the flow of weapons into the country, or other parties remains to be investigated. 

The Maras appeared to indiscriminately kill people – including vendors, bus passengers, and market-goers. La Prensa Grafica reported that gang members may have been instructed to leave bodies in plain sight. According to Giacalone, these brief spikes of violence usually occur when the Mara leaders want to send a message to the government. 

In January 2022, a Canada-based digital rights organization called Citizen Lab produced a report attacking the Bukele government for its alleged violations of journalists’ privacy via use of NSOGroup’s Pegasus software. In its reports, Citizen Lab relies on the Biden administration’s El Faro-based claims of Bukele’s collusion with the gangs, but produces no new evidence. It also does not reveal the technical methodology by which it arrives at its conclusion. The Bukele government rejected these claims stating it had no access to Pegasus and that several of its own officials had also been hacked. Pegasus is only sold to specific state-based actors and is reportedly untraceable. Could Citizen Lab also be one of the “new allies with external funding”? 

Curiously, despite this alleged collusion with the gangs and the subsequent cover up, the gangs soon declared open season in El Salvador, challenging the rule of law with unprecedented violence. “The ES government always denied such allegations and its strong actions against the Maras, in prison and on the streets, make it hard to believe that Bukele attempted some secret negotiations,” states Giacalone, adding: “Is it possible that those new allies that Bukele referred to are trying to discredit the government by making the public opinion believe that a deal was made and those sudden peaks are supposed to prove it? If the Mara leaders currently detained had the possibility to order a long-term war against the government, they clearly would. However, we have only seen 72-hours-long peaks of violence, mainly against civilians.” 

Bukele reacted by ordering a special operation and rounding up over 47,300 gang members since the state of emergency was approved by El Salvador’s Congress in April, and was extended for the fourth time the week of July 29th, with minimal losses on either side. The Biden administration reacted by issuing multiple statements of concern and sanctioning several officials for “undermining democratic norms” by passing a law preventing the media from sharing gang communications. Ironically, several Salvadorans added to the list are from the previous left-wing administrations, and are being added in connection to their past corruption and embezzlement. While putting political pressure on President Bukele and openly siding with his opponents, the Biden team reportedly shuttered America’s MS-13 task force and embraced open border policies, increasing the flow of fleeing MS-13 members into the country. 

The likely impact of such policies by the US is easily predictable. First, coupled with domestic reluctance to hold accused violent criminals without bail, the US government’s tolerance of MS-13 and other gangsters encourages the flow of violent crime into the United States. Second, the political pressure on the Bukele government encourages criminal elements and the groups that cover for them, and strengthens whatever links may exist between the leftist opposition and these elements. It is the opposition, and not Bukele, who stand to benefit the most from gang violence. Externally, foreign entities, such as Iran and Venezuela would also gain from the Bukele administration either falling by popular will, which is unlikely as it has a widely popular mandate and has coordinated all of its activities with its Congress, or was destabilized and made ineffectual thanks to US pressure.  

The Northern Triangle is a geographically and geopolitically advantageous area for Iran, Hezbullah, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and the new socialist Honduran administration’s Red-Green Axis. Given its strange passivity in reaction to growing Iranian and Venezuelan interventions across Latin America, and its aggressive position towards Nayib Bukele, one wonders whether a pro-Iran radically leftist Western Hemisphere is in fact the geopolitical goal of the US, or at least, a reality it is willing to tolerate while in pursuit of the Iran deal. One also wonders, why, over the course of the past decades, both Republicans and Democrats have failed to develop an effective outreach and coordination strategy to ensure that the popular will of the voters in Latin American countries and support for improved relations with the US will outlive any particular government of the day. Iran, on the other hand, has been stealthily pursuing that vision of becoming one of the central influencing powers in the Western Hemisphere. 

Irina Tsukerman is a human rights and national security lawyer, a geopolitical analyst, President of Scarab Rising, Inc., and the Editor-in-Chief of The Washington Outsider. 

Each of us in the twenty-first century recognizes the negative effects of climate change on the future of the earth and strives to mitigate them as much as possible. The global community is attempting to warn international organizations and states about the magnitude of the disasters that await us in the future by organizing various events.

However, some states, knowing the disaster that awaits the earth as a result of climate change, not only participate in the fight against it but also encourage the acceleration of this process through their actions. The Republic of Armenia’s atrocities in Nagorno-Karabakh and adjacent territories are a clear example of this.

Armenia, which has illegally and militarily occupied Azerbaijani lands for nearly 30 years, ignoring all international documents, including four UN Security Council resolutions, was forced to surrender and withdraw from the occupied territories only after the 44-day war that began on September 27, 2020.

Notwithstanding the humiliation and pain that Azerbaijanis have endured over the last 30 years, with 30,000 lives lost and 4000 people missing, the Azerbaijani government and its armed forces treated the Armenians illegitimately settled in Azerbaijani territories humanely, giving them enough time to pack and leave their temporary “homes,” and even extending the time they were given to leave when necessary. But before they left, they packed everything they owned and set fire to their homes. And they will continue to do so. They never considered the places they lived to be their homes. In recent days, Armenians fleeing Azerbaijan’s Lachin district have also begun to burn forests.

The main point to be emphasized here is that the vast majority of the perpetrators are Armenians from Syria and Lebanon, who were illegally resettled in the lands occupied by the Republic of Armenia. By doing this, Armenia also violates paragraph 6 of Article 49 of the Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in time of War of 12 August 1949.

According to a joint declaration signed by Russia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, Azerbaijan is set to retake control of Lachin, which lies on the route between the city of Khankendi in Karabakh and Armenia, by the end of this month.

Russian troops and the Armenian population will leave the areas along the “Lachin corridor,” which includes Lachin, Zabuh, and Sus, and it was temporarily placed under Russian control by a tripartite declaration signed on November 10, 2020, after 44 days of the conflict.

As part of the agreement, Azerbaijan constructed a 32-kilometer (20-mile) road around Lachin for the Armenian population in Karabakh to use on their way to and from Armenia.

According to APA, environmental non-governmental organizations in Azerbaijan held an event related to environmental terrorism committed by Armenians illegally settled in Azerbaijan’s territories in Lachin and the surrounding areas.

Many environmental organizations condemned the environmental terrorism committed by Armenians in Lachin and the surrounding areas, stating that all of this is deliberate damage to the environment by burning the forest areas around Lachin. The participants noted that this process is a clear manifestation of the Armenian government’s pathological hatred for Azerbaijan and the Azerbaijani people, as well as their hatred for nature, Azerbaijan’s natural resources, and the ecological environment.

According to the appeal, the Republic of Azerbaijan is always working to protect the ecological balance and ensure that its citizens live in a healthy environment, and non-governmental organizations play an important role in this process across the globe.

Russia and Ukraine recently made an agreement so that grain exports would be able to leave ports in Southern Ukraine and make their way to destinations dependent on Ukrainian and Russian Agro exports. This brief agreement likely have more to do with other nations in Africa and Asia entering a grain crisis as opposed to any measures to resolve the conflict in Ukraine, especially in their southern region. While countries like Canada cap oil production and increase the cost of farming and fuel in the middle of these crises, Russia benefits from a lack of displacement of Russian oil and gas. Canada had to change their own laws on sanctions so that Canadian based Turbines supplied to Russia’s oil pipeline could be sent, despite Russia claiming it will limit energy export to Germany anyways. At the same time, Russia and China plan to develop a pipeline to the East while China becomes increasingly aggressive towards US support for Taiwan. Time has become a crucial issue as winter approaches in a few months and a solidification of the battle lines in Ukraine turn into a permanent land grab by Russia.

Ukraine has moved to retake cities and town in the south of the country so that Russia cannot continue to have control of the Black Sea region nor expand their control over to Odessa and the border with Moldova. Ukraine’s push to liberate Kherson has been met with successes, but Ukraine might find itself in a losing position if it puts its tanks and troops in a position where they can be ambushed by Russian anti-Armour weapons while pushing further into the region. Russia looks to have a similar plan as they had done in Crimea in 2014 by holding referendums on whether those regions taken in Ukraine wish the become a part of Russia or become an independent region under Russian influence.

Battle lines in the East of the country seem to mirror the original objectives of Russia, to take the Donbas and Eastern regions that have been under conflict since 2014. With winter coming and the lack of clarity on the ability to supply civilians with heat and fuel in the cold, there has been actions to move innocents westward. It is likely the case that a push by Ukraine to liberate eastern regions would be difficult as long as the south of Ukraine and its ports are essential to Ukraine, Russia and world food exports.

Ukraine’s 2nd city, Kharkiv, had been defended diligently but will likely become a barometer on where the conflict is heading. If Ukraine can secure objectives in the south and Russia is militarily unable to push back in an effective manner, there will not likely be another attempt on the city using ground forces. If Ukraine depletes its forces and is unsuccessful in retaking territory in the south, or loses ground, the push by Russia in the east to take the rest of the Donbas may also include an assault on Kharkiv. With Western powers supplying Ukraine with weapons, a test on NATO equipment may take shape and look similar as when Russian T-72s and T-80s were ambushed assaulting Ukrainian positions. The key to much of the conflict is endurance, and with Western powers still refusing to displace Russian oil, gas and grain, Russia’s army will have the funds to resupply and purchase arms while creating closer financial and export ties to China and other allies.

Russia is likely pushing to solidify its gains with a referendum and cultural dominance strategy. For this reason, a push to regain territory in the south is essential for Ukraine. Immediate benefits in oil price increases and food insecurity benefits Russia in the immediate conflict and via their midterm strategy. Policies by Western countries to allow Russia to provide wealth and equipment to its oil funded war massively affects the conflict.

It was recently reported that Yadigar Shukarov, Boyshan Alizade and Gylman Huseynov were injured by anti-personnel mines while carrying out demining work in Garakhanbeyli village in Azerbaijan.   This came after Azerbaijani serviceman Vugar Isbandiyarov was injured in a landmine blast in the Kalbajar district.   This comes around the same period of time that 204 anti-personnel mines, 32 anti-tank mines, and 29 UXOs were discovered in Tartar, Aghdam, Khojavandi, Fuzuli, Shusha, Gubadli, Jabravil and Zangilan during a six day period in the beginning of August, the Azerbaijani media reported. 

Following these developments, the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy issued the following statement after the conclusion of a round table discussion at the Begin Center titled ‘Landmines in the Liberated Territories of Azerbaijan: the biggest obstacle to obtaining peace in the South Caucuses” and reads: “More than 220 Azerbaijanis have been killed or maimed by landmines since the Second Karabakh War ended.  To date, Armenia refuses to hand over all the landmine maps and out of the ones they did hand over, only 25% are usable.”

The statement continued: “The failure of the international community to take action on this issue is killing people and is a major impediment to world peace.  For this reason, the Dona Gracia Center for Diplomacy calls upon the international community to take action to remove all landmines worldwide.” 

As many people here might know, about one year ago, I went to the war-torn Karabakh region for the first time, where I was able to witness firsthand the destructive impact that landmines had on the Karabakh region. Back then, we traveled mile after mile on broken dirt roads surrounded by landmines, which prevented us from swaying to the right and to the left.  In fact, due to the terrible road conditions at that time, our bus broke down in a landmine infested area and we had to wait about a half of day to get rescued by the Azerbaijani government.   During that trip, we saw uprooted trees, polluted rivers, burnt agricultural fields, of which some of them were still burning when we were there and also the ruins of Fizouly, Shusha, Sultanya and numerous other Azerbaijani cities and towns, which were also surrounded by landmines that inhibited reconstruction.   This transformed what was known as the Black Garden into a barren wasteland.    

After that trip, I interviewed Kara and he proclaimed: “Karabakh reminds me of the Lebanon War of 1982 when I was an officer fighting against the terrorists in Lebanon.  The terrorists destroyed Lebanon and here in Karabakh, I saw that everything was also destroyed.  I felt very sad.  It is a very bad situation.”  Kara noted that both Karabakh and Lebanon have the potential to be beautiful places, yet in both instances, terrorists destroyed everything.    In fact, Kara declared that the destruction he witnessed in Karabakh was even worse than Lebanon, as the terrorists in Lebanon did not kill off all of the nature there like the Armenians did to the nature in Karabakh, ensuring that even the fish in the river and the cows in the field could not survive.   

Last May, I returned to Karabakh to cover the Shusha Food Festival together with a delegation of Israeli bloggers and journalists.  On that trip, I was pleased to see that Fizouly is on the map again and even has an airport.  I was happy that a lot of the greenery has returned to the region and there are now proper roads in Karabakh.     I was also delighted that instead of having to eat lunch on an Azerbaijani military base, I was able to dine in a nice Azerbaijani tea house, which did not exist about one year ago.    Additionally, I was impressed by the progress I saw in the restoration of Shusha, which has now built a five-star Karabakh Hotel and restored many nice historical sites in the area.    Although much of the region still has too many landmines and a lot of rebuilding is still required, I saw how hard the Azerbaijanis are working to make Karabakh great again.        

Last month, I had the privilege of once again traveling to Karabakh together with a couple of dozen other foreign experts from around the world, who spoke on a panel at the prestigious Ada University in Azerbaijan.   This time, we went to Aghdam, Karabakh’s ghost city which is otherwise known as the Hiroshima of the Caucuses.  Unfortunately, the progress is rebuilding Aghdam is much slower than it was in Shusha, largely because of the landmine issue.   There were more landmines in Aghdam to remove than there were in Shusha, which has slowed things down significantly.  This is because Armenians actually lived in Shusha, while Aghdam was a booby-trapped ghost town.  

In Aghdam, I witnessed first-hand how a city of 100,000 people, which included theaters, cafes, restaurants, vibrant Azerbaijani tea houses, homes, places of worship and even museums and historic monuments, were reduced to being nothing but rubble. I went to the Ivarant Cemetery, which contained the graves of prominent members of the Karabakh Khanate, dating back to the 18th and 19th centuries.   The graves were gone and the beautiful Turkic architecture of the royal tombs lay in ruins, completely run down from the Armenians utilizing these historic tombs as pig pens.  They treated this site like this even though it was labeled as a world heritage site.  According to a local guide, “The Armenians were taking stuff away from here and selling them to the Iranians.”

In fact, for two hundred dollars, everything inside the homes of Agdam, whether refrigerators, washing machines, family heirlooms or raw construction materials torn from the homes were sold to the Iranians, who were able to profit from the destruction of an entire city and the ethnic cleansing of the Karabakh region in the 1990’s.  After they took everything, they burnt everything down, thus leaving many of the homes without roofs, as the roofs were made of wood.  

The Imarat Cemetery was not the only historic place that they desecrated.  In Agdam, the Armenians used a historic mosque dating from 1860 as a watch tower and pig pen.  According to our local guide, “That was the only reason why this mosque was not completely desecrated.   More than 60 mosques were completely ruined in the region.”  For me, this had an uncanny resemblance to my graduate school trip to Spain, where I witnessed how the Spanish Inquisition transformed historic synagogues into pig pens and stables.  I could not help but ask myself, am I living in the twenty-first century?  How is it possible in our era to witness Christians desecrate holy places in such a manner, to conduct itself as if the Spanish Inquisition was still ongoing and never left us?

After that, I went to a local cemetery in Agdam, where I witnessed how all of the tombstones and gold teeth in the graves were gathered together and sold to the Iranians for profit, while the bones of the people who were buried there were thrown away in the trash.  Since Azerbaijan reclaimed Agdam, relatives of these unfortunate souls have tried to rebuild the destroyed memorials to their loved ones by putting up fresh plaques with pictures, but the bones are gone.  They are no longer proper graves.   What I saw there reminded me of what the Jordanians did to the Mount of Olives following the division of Jerusalem, after Israel’s War of Independence.  In that case, beautiful historic tombstones from the Mount of Olives were used by the Jordanians as construction material to build latrines and other unsavory things.   

Then, we went to the historic Bread Museum.   It used to house bread from the Second World War, an historic item documenting life during the Second World War in the Soviet Union.  However, that historic piece of bread was destroyed alongside all of the other exhibitions.  The roof was also gone and the beautiful artistic mural was heavily desecrated.  I could not ponder but ask, where was the international community when all of this happened?  Why was UNESCO silent?  What ever happened to the phrase NEVER AGAIN? 

I never stop writing and never stop speaking out for the justice of the Azerbaijani people, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”    For this reason, my organization is taking a strong stance against landmines.   Fuad Muradov, the Chairman of the State Committee on the Work with the Diaspora, noted: “Our main goal is to build peace in the region.  However, for that to happen, all landmines must be removed and removing them is an uphill struggle when the maps you have are not reliable.”

To date, Armenia has refused to hand over all of the landmine maps and this blocks peacebuilding.  And of the landmine maps that they turned over, only 25% are usable.   This means that Aghdam largely remains how it was 30 years ago, even though I did see construction trucks working there.  This is a true travesty.  The time has come for this grave trauma to end.  The time has come to remove all the landmines and to make Karabakh great again.  While I am grateful to Israel, Turkey, France and other countries who are trying to help make Azerbaijan landmine free, the international community still has much more work to do to see the black garden turn into a green colorful paradise once again.  

Al-Shabab’s Enigmatic Invasion of Ethiopia

In countries such as the U.S., there is an unwritten theory in police investigation that assumes whenever a neighborhood robbery occurs it was done by someone who not only had the motive to commit that crime, but the basic intelligence to help time it well and to get away with it. In other words it was committed by someone who lives or operates within 5-miles radius around the crime scene. If your gut feeling is ‘such mentality, regardless of how logical it may sound, will keep the law-enforcement stereotypically myopic and perpetually racist’ you are not alone. But that is a topic for another day.

Meanwhile, an elaborately sophisticated attack carried out by more than 500 al-Shabab and dozens of technical- armed trucks- against Ethiopia left many casualties and many unanswered questions.  Granted this was not a robbery.

According to the VOA’s Investigative Dossier “Officials from both sides of the (Somalia, Ethiopia) border confirmed that the attacks preoccupied Liyu police forces and distracted them as other heavily armed al-Shabab units crossed the border unopposed.” Moreover, the same program quotes an anonymous former al-Shabab militant who said the group was determined to erect its flag inside Ethiopia and then officially declare that “jihad spread to a new front.”

The offensive, according to Matt Bryden of the controversial Sahan research group “appears to be the start of a major, strategic initiative to establish an active combatant presence in Ethiopia, probably in the southeastern Bale Mountains.” How about that for a narrative express?

Surely with the failure of the Somali Federal Government’s military and intelligence campaign as well as the America’s deadly drone doctrine to decapitate and defeat al-Shabab, the terrorist group remains more dangerous than ever. That danger is made worse when governments sometimes engage in their own concocted threats to pave the way for one manipulative objective or another.

Here are some possible scenarios driving al-Shabaab’s incursion into the Somali region of Ethiopia:

Scenario One:

It is the first step of a foreign-driven plan to spook China out of Ethiopia’s oil and gas rich region. A few years ago the Ethiopian government signed a multi-billion dollar deal with Chinese company to develop petroleum and natural gas in the Somali region. Moreover, the company is to design storage, transportation, and marketing logistics as well as to build pipelines for domestic and international supply.

On April 28, 2020, the Ethiopian government signed $3.6 billion deal with a Virginia-based energy firm named GreenComm Technologies to construct an oil refinery in Ethiopia’s oil-rich Somali region. Reminiscent of the Somali facilitated British predatory capitalist Soma Oil and Gas, there is only one problem: the company has neither the expertise nor the credibility to be trusted with such contract. And though the Ethiopian government indicated the willingness to cancel, there is no official report confirming that.  

Scenario Two:

A false flag scheme to re-shuffle the cards in the Horn with derailment of the Horn Economic Integration engineered by the European Union, championed by Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Somalia, and funded by the U.A.E. Under such scheme a pretext for prolonged strategic military campaigns and political torpedoes launched from a selected federal state is established. So Ethiopia and Somalia, or President Hassan Sheikh Mohamud and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali, will spend the next four years riding a dangerous roller-coaster, as did President Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed (Farmajo) and President Uhuru Kenyatta. Meanwhile Somalia is secured membership in the East African Community (EAC) and a peace-keeping force that excludes Ethiopia.

Scenario Three:

To further hammer Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed who has already lost a loyal partner in the loss of Farmajo. Under this scenario multiple deadly fronts are opened. This scenario is based on the assumption that the United Arab Emirates or President Mohammed bin Zayed has turned his back to the European project that this author criticized before and dropped Abiy Ahmed from his previous pivotal role. Of course the natural replacement is none other than President Isaias Afwerki of Eritrea who secured UAE a military base while it was actively partaking the war in Yemen and just completed training 5000 Somali soldiers to provide military protection as UAE colonizes Socotra in partnership with Israel.  

“The saga of these Somali soldiers has been full of twists and turns,” wrote Michelle Gavin, security experts for the Council on Foreign Relations. This lucrative clandestine mercenary project was equivocated and denied by the Farmajo government until literally the last minutes before ceremonially handing over the presidential authority to the newly elected President HSM.

Scenario Four:

To reengineer a new balance of power that would end the ethnic-cleansing of the Tigrayans and boost their military capacity to ultimately takeover what is considered as a viable economic insurance- Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD). This requires stretching the Ethiopian military power so thin by opening on it many military fronts. The coalition of the willing under this scenario may include Egypt that considers the dam’s drastic impact on the flow of the Nile as an existential threat, Sudan, the U.S. And due to the rapidly changing geopolitics of the region, and Ethiopia’s steadily growing ethnic nationalism, it is likely to include U.A.E and Israel whose strategic and economical interest in the Nile water is no secret.

Scenario Five:

A combination of the listed scenarios; and this could prove the most complex one to decode and deal with.       

Relevant Context 

For more than a decade, Ethiopia has been dominating the Bay and Bakool regions of the South West federal-state of Somalia. It has been its most reliable laboratory where Ethiopia trained and mobilized some of its most notorious clandestine allies, the violent neo-Islamists such as Mukhtar Robow (still held as a political prisoner) and his militia, and tribal secularists such as Abdirashid Janan and his militias for of subversion and security dependency (AMISOM).

Intriguingly, the Shabaab militia that attacked Ethiopia is reported to have been trained in the Jubbaland federal-state (Jilib and Ras Kamboni). And their objective according to the Governor of Bakool was to raise their flag inside Ethiopia.

To accept that Shabaab would carry out such daring operation with such reported large number of its militia out of Jubbaland while ignoring the temptation to take the jewel of that federal state – Kismayo – or to takeover U.S.’ only military base in Somalia and to chase the American troops out of that region requires an extremely wild imagination that some of us do not possess.

It was recently revealed that billions of top of the line American weapons were abandoned in Afghanistan when Western forces hastily pulled out of the country in 2021. Adding to the shame of leaving many of their own citizens as well as Afghan allies and TERPS to be brutalised in Afghanistan, the billions in weapons have now been found in conflict zones bordering India and will likely infest the region with added violence for generations to come.

The former weapons boom was greatly contributed to by people like Viktor Bout, a well known arms dealer who supplied many of the world’s conflicts in the region and worldwide after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The stockpiles of weapons that were accessed from Eastern Bloc nations that were storing them for an upcoming Third World War found their way to villages in Iraq , throughout conflict zones in Africa and in every part of the globe. Viktor Bout has made it back into the news as a possible US prisoner to be exchanged to Russia. The last time he was mentioned in the media was following his arrest and regarding a Hollywood movie that was loosely based on him called Lord of War.

The after effect of leaving Afghanistan may be a contributing factor to many of the recent conflicts in the world just a few shorts months after 2021. No one would have expected Russia to move past the Eastern regions of Ukraine into Kyiv and Odesa in 2021. Despite the heavy push back in Ukraine, it seems like militants in Afghanistan are now better equipped than most NATO supplied Ukrainian soldiers. These signs of uncoordinated disinterest on the part of the US creates the perception that they would not commit to pushing back against traditional adversaries. Already within a short period of time, Taiwan has been threatened, Iran has increased their rhetoric and actions in upgrading their nuclear program, and intellectuals and innocents have been assaulted deep inside free, Western democracies.

The activity NATO allies have had in supporting weapons transfers to Ukraine has not been met on the greater strategic front. While some of the best German artillery systems have now entered the conflict zone in Ukraine, there is a looming energy crisis approaching Germany and Europe in 2022. To the point where Russia can simply turn off the gas to Europe in winter, North American oil and gas have not committed in any meaningful way to support their friends and cousins in Europe. It has come to the point where Canada was supplying repaired pipeline turbines to Russia, enraging the International Ukrainian community to the point where they issued a lawsuit in Canada on the act. The end result was that Russia claimed the turbines would not be sufficient to supply Germany with fuel in any case, and a new pipeline project was announced between Russia and China. With actions like these coming from NATO allies, the message to many regimes around the world is to take advantage of the chaos.

 

 

 

 

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