Robin Wright's Blog, page 6

The New Yorker

Terror Strikes TehranBy Robin Wright Terrorists attacked two of the most important symbols of Iran’s Islamic government—its well-guarded parliament building and the lavish shrine where the revolutionary leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini is buried. The basic facts on Wednesday, as reported by Iranian media, followed a familiar pattern: mid-morning, four gunmen penetrated security in the parliament’s Hall of Visitors and opened fire, sparking a dramatic standoff with security forces, which spanned four hours. Government snipers took up positions around the imposing Majlis building and helicopters hovered overhead as people inside tried to drop out of windows to safety. At least one attacker detonated a suicide vest. At Khomeini’s tomb, two people—one a woman—opened fire on pilgrims and then detonated a bomb at the entrance. In the twin attacks, the deadliest in Iran in at least a decade, thirteen people were killed, plus six assailants, and forty-three were injured.
Accounts then quickly diverged over just who was responsible for the terrorist rampage. The Islamic State claimed credit for its first-ever attack in Iran. Soon after the attacks, ISIS released a twenty-four-second video through its Amaq news agency, which showed a rifle-toting gunman in parliament, standing over a bloodied body. The attacker invoked terms used in ISIS propaganda about the group’s ability to survive in the Middle East even as it loses its caliphate in neighboring Iraq and Syria. Amid gunshots, the gunman said, “Oh God, thank you. Do you think we will leave? No! We will remain, God willing.” A member of Iran’s parliament later confirmed that the shooting took place in his office and that the dead man was a member of his staff.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps had a different version, however. It charged that Saudi Arabia and the United States were ultimately to blame, even as it acknowledged the claim by isis. The I.R.G.C. said, in a statement, “Public opinion in the world, especially in Iran, recognizes this terrorist attack—which took place a week after a joint meeting of the U.S. President and the head of one of the region’s backward governments, which constantly supports fundamentalist terrorists—as very significant.” It charged that the ISISclaim of responsibility “reveals (Saudi Arabia’s) hand in this barbaric action.” Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/terror-strikes-tehran

The New Yorker

How Different--and Dangerous--Is Terrorism Today?
By Robin Wright
On Sunday, just hours after the assault on London Bridge, British Prime Minister Theresa May stepped in front of 10 Downing Street and told the world, “We believe we are experiencing a new trend in the threat we face.” In many ways, the attack in the British capital, as well as others over the past two years in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Paris, and Manchester, actually weren’t all that unique in terms of tactics, targets, or even motive. A century ago, a battered horse-drawn wagon loaded with a hundred pounds of dynamite—attached to five hundred pounds of cast-iron weights—rolled onto Wall Street during lunch hour. The wagon stopped at the busiest corner in front of J. P. Morgan’s bank. At 12:01 p.m., it exploded, splaying lethal shrapnel and bits of horse as high as the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building on Broadway. A streetcar was derailed a block away. Thirty-eight people were killed; many were messengers, stenographers, clerks, and brokers simply on the street at the wrong time—what are today known as “soft targets.” Another hundred and forty-three people were injured.
The attack on September 16, 1920, was, at the time, the deadliest act of terrorism in American history. Few surpassed it for the next seventy-five years, until the Oklahoma City bombing, in 1995, and then the September 11th attacks, in 2001. The Wall Street case was never solved, although the investigation strongly pointed to followers of a charismatic Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani. Like isis and its extremist cohorts today, they advocated violence and insurrection against Western democracies and justified innocent deaths to achieve it.
Europe has also faced periods of more frequent terrorism than in the recent attacks. Between 1970 and 2015, more than ten thousand people were killed in over eighteen thousand attacks, according to the University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database. The deadliest decades were, by far, the nineteen-seventies and eighties—during the era of Germany’s Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy’s Red Brigades, Spain’s E.T.A., Britain’s Irish Republican Army, and others. The frequency of attacks across Europe reached as high as ten a week. In 1980, I covered what was then the deadliest terrorist attack in Europe since the Second World War when a bomb, planted in a suitcase, blew up in the waiting room of Bologna’s train station. Eighty-five people were killed; body parts were everywhere. A neo-fascist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei, claimed credit.
 Yet May is correct: modern terrorism is still evolving. Read on....
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-different-and-dangerous-is-terrorism-today

The New Yorker

Does the Manchester Attack Show the Islamic State’s Strength or Weakness?By Robin WrightTen hours after Salman Abedi blew himself up outside the Manchester Arena, where the American pop star Ariana Grande was performing, ISIS claimed a grisly attack that killed twenty-two people and injured dozens more. “With Allah’s grace and support, a soldier of the Khilafah (caliphate) managed to place explosive devices in the midst of the gatherings of the Crusaders in the British city of Manchester,” the group boasted on social messaging apps, in multiple languages. The odd thing—for a group that has usually been judicious about its claims and accurate in its facts—is that it got key details wrong.
The discrepancies were conspicuous—and clumsy. In one early claim, the message referred to a “security detachment,” as if there were multiple operatives. It implied that the attack involved multiple bombs left on site. It missed the fact that a lone bomb had been detonated in a single suicide operation. It did not refer to a “martyr,” as it usually does when perpetrators are killed. It did not name or claim Abedi.

“It looks like the work of ISIS,” a U.S. counterterrorism official told me on Monday, although the British investigation was ongoing. Yet the mistakes also spurred speculation about ISIS’s command of foreign operations, its communications with operatives or sympathizers, and even its access to news, which had already reported the basics of the attack. Just how much has ISIS been disrupted?Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-the-manchester-attack-show-the-islamic-states-strength-or-weakness

The New Yorker

Trump's Simplistic Strategy on Jihadism
By Robin Wright 
Six days after the 9/11 attacks, in 2001, President George W. Bush went to the Islamic Center in Washington to dampen fears of a clash of civilizations between the Islamic world and the West. “The face of terror is not the true face of Islam,” he said. “Islam is peace.” President Barack Obama’s main speech to the Islamic world, in 2009, called for a “new beginning” between Muslim and Western nations, noting “civilization’s debt to Islam.” Declaring to Cairo University students that “we also know that military power alone is not going to solve the problems,” he, too, envisioned political and economic solutions to countering extremism.Donald Trump took a starkly different tack during the campaign. “I think Islam hates us,” Trump told Anderson Cooper, on CNN, fourteen months ago. He told both MSNBC and Fox News that he’d be willing to close mosques in the United States.  At the Presidential debate last October, in Las Vegas, he was particularly critical of Saudi Arabia. “These are people that push gays off buildings,” he said. “These are people that kill women and treat women horribly, and yet you take their money.”On Sunday, on his first trip abroad as President, Trump tried to hit the reset button in Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of Islam. He heralded Islam as “one of the world’s great faiths,” and his visit as the beginning of “a new chapter” between the United States and the Islamic world. In a palace of dazzling opulence, he spoke to dozens of leaders assembled by the Saudis from the Arab and Muslim world. In turn, the oil-rich kingdom, which is weathering its own political and military turmoil, treated him like royalty, with billboards across the Saudi capital covered with Trump’s face.http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/does-the-manchester-attack-show-the-islamic-states-strength-or-weakness

The New Yorker

Iran's Moderates Win Election
But It Won't Matter to Trump
By Robin Wright
Donald Trump arrived in Saudi Arabia this weekend to launch a new Middle East coalition designed to confront Iran, just as Tehran announced the reëlection of President Hassan Rouhani, the man who dared to engage diplomatically with the United States. Rouhani won a commanding victory: fifty-seven per cent in a four-way race, with seventy-per-cent turnout. He fended off a challenge from a populist right-wing cleric, Ebrahim Raisi, a rising political star backed by hard-line power centers such as the Revolutionary Guards. Street celebrations erupted Saturday night from Tehran to Mashhad, the eastern city with Iran’s holiest shrine. 
President Trump’s trip symbolizes a formal U.S. reversal on Iran. There is no foreign-policy issue over which Trump and former President Barack Obama disagree more. Trump’s mobilization of Sunni Arab regimes to challenge predominantly Shiite Iran risks increasing regional and sectarian tensions in the energy-rich Gulf. New sanctions, some imposed last week by the White House and others in the pipeline in Congress, threaten to undermine the spirit of diplomacy created during two years of arduous negotiations between Tehran and the world’s six major powers. It produced a deal, in 2015, containing Iran’s nuclear program—the most important nonproliferation treaty in more than a quarter century.Read on...http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/irans-moderates-win-election-but-it-wont-matter-to-trump

The New Yorker

The Lights Are Going Out in the Middle East
By Robin Wright
Six months ago, I was in the National Museum in Beirut, marvelling at two Phoenician sarcophagi among the treasures from ancient Middle Eastern civilizations, when the lights suddenly went out. A few days later, I was in the Bekaa Valley, whose towns hadn’t had power for half the day, as on many days. More recently, I was in oil-rich Iraq, where electricity was intermittent, at best. “One day we’ll have twelve hours. The next day no power at all,” Aras Maman, a journalist, told me, after the power went off in the restaurant where we were waiting for lunch. In Egypt, the government has appealed to the public to cut back on the use of light bulbs and appliances and to turn off air-conditioning even in sweltering heat to prevent wider outages. Parts of Libya, which has the largest oil reserves in Africa, have gone weeks without power this year. In the Gaza Strip, two million Palestinians get only two to four hours of electricity a day, after yet another cutback in April. 

The world’s most volatile region faces a challenge that doesn’t involve guns, militias, warlords, or bloodshed, yet is also destroying societies. The Middle East, though energy-rich, no longer has enough electricity. From Beirut to Baghdad, tens of millions of people now suffer daily outages, with a crippling impact on businesses, schools, health care, and other basic services, including running water and sewerage. Little works without electricity.. Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-lights-are-going-out-in-the-middle-east

The New Yorker

What Donald Trump 
Can Expect in the Middle East
By Robin Wright 
In 1974, Richard Nixon became the first American President to visit Saudi Arabia and Israel—as well as Syria—on a swing intended to chalk up triumphs abroad and, more pointedly, to divert attention from the escalating Watergate crisis at home. It was a reassuring trip for the beleaguered President. He promoted a new peace process and talked up a regional realignment to stabilize the Middle East after the 1973 war. Leaders fêted him. Flag-waving crowds lined the streets, even in Damascus. The trip didn’t change his fate. Two months later, Nixon resigned.This weekend, Donald Trump will try to escape the turmoil of his Presidency for a tour of the Middle East. He, too, will stop in Saudi Arabia and Israel. He, too, is talking about Middle East peace and a regional realignment, this time a coalition made up of Israel and the conservative Sunni monarchies, centered around the Gulf sheikhdoms, Egyptians, and Jordanians. He, too, is expected to be fêted. The world’s most volatile region will offer Trump a diversion from Washington for at least a week, even though revelations that he spilled classified intelligence (provided by an ally) to the Russians are likely to dog him.
On his first Presidential trip abroad, Trump has outsized ambitions—both naïve and godlike—laden with religious symbolism from all three Abrahamic faiths. Will he have any success? Read on....http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/donald-trumps-three-religion-tour-of-the-middle-east

The New Yorker

Rescuing the Last Two Animals from the Mosul Zoo
By Robin Wright
Mosul’s forlorn little zoo, a collection of rusted cages in a park near the Tigris River, was abandoned by its keepers in October, as the Iraqi Army began to liberate the city from the Islamic State. For three months, the zoo was a staging ground for isis fighters. More than forty of the zoo animals died, either as collateral damage—trapped between warring combatants—or from starvation. By January, when the eastern half of Mosul was freed, only two animals had survived: Lula, a caramel-colored female bear, and Simba, a three-year-old lion.
Animals, like people, suffer from war psychoses, including P.T.S.D. During the most intense urban combat in history, Lula ate her two cubs from hunger and stress. Simba had been one of three lions. Simba’s father, weak and emaciated, was killed by his mate to provide food for herself and Simba. In the wild, lionesses hunt for the entire pride. She, too, soon succumbed.

Concerned about the fate of Lula and Simba, residents in Mosul sent frantic Facebook messages to Four Paws International, an animal-protection agency based in Austria, appealing for help. In mid-February, the organization dispatched Amir Khalil to Mosul. Khalil is an Egyptian veterinarian who has spent a quarter century saving animals in war zones on three continents. He found Lula deeply traumatized and starving; her snout protruded through her cage’s rusted bars, anxiously seeking food and water. Simba had grown so scrawny that his rib cage was exposed. He wouldn’t stop pacing in his small enclosure. Read on...http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/rescuing-the-last-two-animals-at-the-mosul-zoo

The New Yorker

War, Terrorism 
and the Christian Exodus from the Middle East
By Robin Wright   
A decade ago, I spent Easter in Damascus. Big chocolate bunnies and baskets of pastel eggs decorated shop windows in the Old City. Both the Catholic and Orthodox Easters were celebrated, and all Syrians were given time off for both three-day holidays on sequential weekends. I stopped in the Umayyad Mosque, which was built in the eighth century and named after the first dynasty to lead the Islamic world. The head of John the Baptist is buried in a large domed sanctuary—although claims vary—on the mosque’s grounds. Muslims revere John as the Prophet Yahya, the name in Arabic. Because of his birth to a long-barren mother and an aged father, Muslim women who are having trouble getting pregnant come to pray at his tomb. I watched as Christian tourists visiting the shrine mingled with Muslim women.
At least half of Syria’s Christians have fled since then. The flight is so pronounced that, in 2013, Gregory III, the Melkite Patriarch of Antioch, Alexandria, and Jerusalem, wrote an open letter to his flock: “Despite all your suffering, stay here! Don’t emigrate! We exhort our faithful and call them to patience in these tribulations, especially in this tsunami of stifling, destructive, bloody and tragic crises of our Arab world, particularly in Syria, but also to different degrees in Egypt, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon,” he wrote. “Jesus tells us, ‘Fear not!’ Syria’s Christians are part of a mass exodus taking place throughout the Middle East, the cradle of the faith. Today, Christians are only about four per cent of the region’s more than four hundred million people—and probably less.Read on...http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/war-terrorism-and-the-christian-exodus-from-the-middle-east

The New Yorker

Trump Drops the Mother of All Bombs
By Robin Wright 
The Mother of All Bombs--the largest conventional weapon in the US arsenal--is so big it cost $300 million to develop and $16 million apiece to produce. The US used it for the very first time this week against the smallest militia it faces anywhere in the world.When it was first tested, in 2003, the largest conventional weapon in the United States arsenal set off a mushroom cloud visible for twenty miles. The potential damage from the twenty-two-thousand-pound bomb was so vast that the Pentagon ordered a legal review to insure that the device wouldn’t be deemed an indiscriminate killer under the Law of Armed Conflict, the body of law that regulates behavior during wartime. The MOAB was compared to a small nuclear weapon. It’s so large that no U.S. warplane is big enough to drop it: it has to be offloaded from the rear of a cargo plane, with the help of a parachute. Read on...http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-drops-the-mother-of-all-bombs-on-afghanistan