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  • Mortar kills 20 at Damascus university as Turkey denies expelling refugees

    Mortar kills 20 at Damascus university as Turkey denies expelling refugees

    Mortar kills 20 at Damascus university as Turkey denies expelling refugees

    Syrian rebels bring war to capital as UNHCR investigates claims that Turkey forced refugees back across border after protest

    Martin Chulov in Beirut

    guardian.co.uk, Thursday 28 March 2013 19.34 GMT

    A Syrian refugee carries her children near the Turkish border.

    A Syrian refugee carries her children near the Turkish border. Ankara denied expelling scores of Syrian refugees after a protest. Photograph: Bulent Kilic/AFP/Getty

    A mortar strike on Damascus university killed about 20 students on Thursday, exposing the fragility of the capital’s most sensitive zone to attack.

    Syrian officials blamed rebel groups for the strike, which wounded dozens more students. The opposition denied responsibility. All the victims had been in an outdoors cafeteria near the heart of the campus. It was the second consecutive day that mortars had hit the city. An attack on Wednesday struck near a hotel, causing damage but no casualties.

    The presidential palace has in recent weeks also been hit by rockets and mortars fired by rebel groups, who have consolidated inroads they made earlier this year on the city’s southern and western outskirts.

    The groups are a mix of Islamist-leaning and more secular brigades. The jihadist group Jabhat al-Nusra is also active, particularly in the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp nearer the heart of the city, which it entered in January.

    Throughout the first three months of the year, loyalist forces and rebel groups have fought a series of savage battles on the urban fringes, often involving rockets and mortars and air strikes from the regime side. Rebels have been trying to cut off access to Damascus airport and to use the area as staging ground for an assault on the capital, which is protected by two of the Syrian military’s most capable divisions and a large special forces unit.

    Loyalist forces also command the high ground around Damascus and use mountains and ridges to shell rebel-held areas.

    Central Damascus, despite resounding to the sound of regular incoming and outgoing fire, has not been a main battlezone. Despite prolific military checkpoints, life in the city has appeared more normal than in many other Syrian towns and cities, allowing officials to project an air of “business as usual”.

    However, a succession of apparent suicide bombings, including an attack last week inside a mosque that killed a leading Muslim imam, are eroding trust in officials to keep the war far from the most important state institutions.

    Large numbers of Damascus residents, including much of the middle class and refugees, have fled the city for Lebanon or Jordan, both of which are now groaning under the influx. Lebanon alone is believed to be hosting 350,000 children of school age. Many thousands more have not been registered by authorities.

    Aid dollars have started to reach the sprawling tent cities that are housing the refugees, who number more than one million with those who have fled to Turkey included. The onset of spring, after a sharp but mercilessly short winter, has eased housing fears, but the camps remain in desperate need and often squalid.

    Brawls broke out at a camp near the Jordanian border on Thursday and Turkish riot police used water cannons in a camp in Akçakale after refugees protested over the death of a child from a tent fire, in which three other people were also wounded.

    The UNHCR, the UN refugee body, said it was investigating claims, denied by Turkey, that up to 60 Syrians from the camp’s 25,000 residents, had been forced to return to Syria after the disturbance.

    via Mortar kills 20 at Damascus university as Turkey denies expelling refugees | World news | guardian.co.uk.

  • Turkey’s Big Week Means New Clout In An Emerging Middle East

    Turkey’s Big Week Means New Clout In An Emerging Middle East

    By Karl VickMarch 28

    Newroz in QandilHAWRE MUHAMED / METROGRAPHY

    Kurds celebrate Newroz in the PKK controlled area of Qandil in the north of Iraqi Kurdistan.

    A sandstorm was kicking up at Ben Gurion International midday last Friday, winds bad enough to cancel the departure ceremony for President Obama’s winning trip to Israel. But in a sheet metal trailer on the tarmac, Obama was calming another storm, three years along and finally running out of bluster. In the box with him was his host, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Nentayahu.  In Netanyahu’s hand was a cell phone. And on the other end of the line was the prime minister of Turkey, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

    As arranged in advance by Obama and diplomats from all three countries, Bibi read out an official apology for the nine lives lost on the Turkish vessel Mavi Marmara in May 2010, when Israeli commandos boarded the aid ship en route to breaking Israel’s blockade on the Gaza Strip.  Netanyahu’s words, along with a promise to compensate survivors and continue to ease strictures on the Palestinian enclave, ended a diplomatic cleavage seated in sheer cussedness, and restored what one Israeli diplomat calls “the triangle” – made up of the two most stable and prosperous democracies in the Middle East, and the superpower that needs them on the same side.

    If that was all that went Erdogan’s way last week, he might have come in second to Obama, whose tour of Israel left the supposedly wary Jewish population something close to twitterpated.  But Erdogan had already pulled off a diplomatic coup of his own — and just one day earlier:  Abdullah Ocalan, the imprisoned head of the insurgent Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known by its intials in Turkish as the PKK, had agreed to end the country’s bloody 29-year civil war and bring the Kurdish struggle into the realm of representative politics.  In the space of two days, Erdogan – once jailed himself for an Islamist proclamation – had brought to life the foreign policy slogan of Turkey’s modern founder, the rigorously secular Kemal Ataturk: “Peace at home, peace abroad.”

    (MORE: New Day for the Kurds: Will Ocalan’s Declaration Bring Peace With Turkey?)

    The story of “Turkey’s Triumphs” appears in this week’s print edition of TIME, available to subscribers here.  It lays out the implications for the American strategy in the Middle East of the tentative rapprochement between Jerusalem and Ankara — closely allied before Erdogan’s rise to power.  Burying the hatchet should pay off first for Washington in Syria, the country coming apart between Israel and Turkey.   Both have huge stakes in the outcome of that Arab nation’s civil war, but while Turkey has been deeply involved in sheltering and arming the rebels, Israel has taken pains to stand back, keenly aware that even the perception of support for the uprising will be unhelpful, given its standing in the region.  The exception is Syria’s arsenal of advanced weapons, including chemical and biological arms; the Jewish state has already interceded once , and says it will again if they detect them falling into the hands of Hizballah or other terror groups.

    But history may well show that, if it holds, the pact with the Kurds will be of greater significance.  Turkey is home to perhaps half of the world’s at least 30 million Kurds, the largest population still seeking a homeland of their own, after being promised one, then denied it, as European leaders were drawing the map of the Middle East after World War I.  The uprising Ocalan began in 1984 claimed 40,000 lives; it sought secession for most of the war sought. Kurds now say they will be happy with equal rights and some form of cooperation with fellow Kurds across the borders in northern Iraq, western Iran and in Syria – where a Kurdish party allied with the PKK has won a measure of autonomy by keeping out of the civil war.   Its accommodation with the PKK may well give Ankara a new measure of influence in what happens with Syria’s Kurds.  It already enjoys close ties with Northern Iraq’s Kurdish government, to the point of cooperating on building a pipeline from the oilfields of Kirkuk, bypassing Baghdad.  Iraq’s Kurds, in turn, have a history of cooperation with Israel.  So in a way, what Obama did in the trailer in the sandstorm on the runway was to close a circle.  It’s far from a perfect circle, though, especially given Erdogan’s ardent support for the Palestinians, including Hamas.  The day after receiving the apology, he announced he was considering a trip to the Gaza Strip.  Washington said it wished he wouldn’t.

    But the Turks figure they’re on a roll, as Erodgan’s top advisor, Ibrahim Kalin, told TIME’s Pelin Turgut:  ”The apology in particular presents new opportunities for the moribund Middle East peace process, which the Obama administration has tried to revive without much success. We are aware of the obstacles to the realization of the two-state solution, including the occupation of Palestinian territories and the illegal settlements,” Kalin said.  ”But it is not impossible to establish peace and security for both Israelis and Palestinians, each having its own state and enjoying a free and dignified life.”

    via Turkey’s Big Week Means New Clout In An Emerging Middle East | TIME.com.

  • Israel, America and Turkey: A useful first step

    Israel, America and Turkey: A useful first step

    Warmer American relations with Israel help to end its Turkish tiff

    Mar 30th 2013 | ANKARA AND JERUSALEM |From the print edition

    FOR the first time in years, the whiff of a wind of change is wafting through Israel’s diplomatic air, thanks to Barack Obama’s recent visit. The message the American president imparted was that he is determined in his final term to have another go at making peace between Jews and Arabs in the Middle East. Though full of the usual bromides, his speech to a gathering of young Israelis percolated down to the undecided centre of Israeli politics, where distrust for Mr Obama—and for Palestinians—has been strong. The American president may have persuaded at least some such Israelis to ponder again the need for a Palestinian state.

    The trip’s more tangible result, however, was Mr Obama’s apparent success in persuading Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, to apologise at last to Turkey for the death of nine Turks killed by Israeli commandos in 2010 stopping a flotilla of Turkish boats from reaching Gaza.

    “Israelis love Turkey,” declares the blurb of an Israeli package-tour operator, hoping to promote the resort of Antalya once again as Israel’s favourite tourist destination. On the strength of Mr Netanyahu’s apology, he may be onto a winner.

    Just before Mr Obama flew out of Israel, he handed Mr Netanyahu his telephone to speak to Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister. After nearly four years of estrangement, America’s two most powerful and closest allies in the Middle East agreed to co-operate again. Once Israel’s compensation to the Turks has been settled, diplomatic relations will be restored.

    Both sides have much to gain. Israel hopes Mr Erdogan will rescue it from its isolation since the downfall of friendly regional autocrats, in particular in Egypt. The two countries may now be able to share copious amounts of natural gas recently found in the eastern Mediterranean. They should resume co-operation in military intelligence. And Israelis may soon again enjoy those tours. Even when relations were at their nadir, military sales continued, as did foreign trade worth $3 billion a year.

    All the same, the Israeli-Turkish strategic relationship is unlikely to be wholly restored, not least because of Mr Erdogan’s sharp tongue. A month ago he called Zionism “a crime against humanity”, so threatening to ruin America’s bridge-building. “The 1990s are over,” says Nimrod Goren, an Israeli academic who kept open a discreet channel when even Turkish and Israeli spies refused to exchange words.

    And a host of regional issues may yet prise them apart. Mr Netanyahu will turn a deaf ear to Mr Erdogan’s call for Israel to vacate East Jerusalem and the West Bank and to open up Gaza entirely. In his written apology, Mr Netanyahu said he would ease restrictions on supplies to that Palestinian coastal strip ruled by Hamas. But Israel seems bent on keeping up its blockade by air and sea, which first prompted Turkey’s flotilla to try to get there.

    Meanwhile Mr Erdogan’s party people hailed the apology as a big victory. “We stood firm and brought them to their knees,” tweeted a young party activist. Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s foreign minister, cut short a trip to Poland to bask in credit back home. Turkish newspapers announced that Mr Erdogan was planning a triumphal visit to Gaza, not least to see a new hospital being built by the Turks.

    Unless Mr Erdogan softens his rhetoric, a showdown with Israel could easily recur. Moreover, Turkey’s prime minister is likely to rebuff Mr Netanyahu’s request to help persuade Iran to drop its nuclear ambitions. Israel has had to discount hopes that the Turks would let its fighter aircraft fly over its territory. And it has so far failed to convince the Turks that Iran is close to getting a bomb. “Even if it could,” says Alon Liel, an Israeli ex-ambassador to Ankara, “Turkey doesn’t believe it is the target.”

    At least over Syria there may be scope for co-operation. After months of hesitation, Israel now agrees with Turkey that President Bashar Assad must go. Both Israel and Turkey agree that al-Qaeda should be prevented from reaping the fruits of Mr Assad’s fall. Israel, says Mr Liel, might even endorse Syria’s takeover by a Western-leaning Islamist government—at any rate, if it were modelled on Turkey’s.

    From the print edition: Middle East and Africa

    via Israel, America and Turkey: A useful first step | The Economist.

  • Israel’s apology to Turkey was anticipated, says minister

    Israel’s apology to Turkey was anticipated, says minister

    COMMERCE Minister Giorgos Lakkotrypis said yesterday that Israel’s apology to Turkey over the raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara had been anticipated.

    Lakkotrypis is due to visit Israel next month, ahead of a visit by President Nicos Anastasiades in May.

    “I assure you we are monitoring the situation and we will secure our state’s sovereign rights,” Lakkotrypis said.

    The head of the Hydrocarbons State Company (KRETYK), Charles Ellinas, said that Israel has taken no decisions.

    “I was in Israel last week and over there they examine all options…  there is a chance they would sell natural gas to Turkey but at the same time they are looking into exporting to Cyprus,” Ellinas said.

    Ankara Anatolia news agency has quoted Turkish energy minister Taner Tildiz as saying Turkey would suspend projects with Italian energy giant ENI in retaliation against the company’s involvement in oil and gas drilling off the coast of Cyprus.

    The ENI/Kogas consortium is due to begin drilling for hydrocarbons in Cyprus’ exclusive economic zone by early next year.

    ENI is also one of the partners in a pipeline project – the Samsun-Ceyhan – project from the Black Sea to the southern Mediterranean Turkish coast aiming to deliver Russian and Kazakh crude oil to Turkey.

    ‘We have decided not to work with ENI in Turkey, including suspending their ongoing projects,’ Taner Yildiz said.

    But Fox Business said that ENI chief, Paolo Scaroni, told reporters on the sidelines of a conference in Rome that the Samsun-Ceyhan project was not viable as yet.

    “This project is dormant as it isn’t profitable as long as the oil tanker rates to transport crude through the Bosphorous Straits remain at these (low) levels,” Scaroni was quoted as saying, adding that he was sorry about Turkey’s statements and was “hopeful” they could “find an accord”.

    via Israel’s apology to Turkey was anticipated, says minister – Cyprus Mail.

  • Turkey badly needed to end row with Israel. Netanyahu’s apology gave Obama a diplomatic breakthrough

    Turkey badly needed to end row with Israel. Netanyahu’s apology gave Obama a diplomatic breakthrough

    Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu granted the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan a face-saver for ending their three-year rift out of willingness to crown US President Barack Obama’s three-day visit with an impressive diplomatic breakthrough. He swallowed Israel and its army’s pride and, at the airport, with Obama looking on, picked up the phone to Erdogan and apologized for the killing by Israeli soldiers of nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists in 2010 aboard the Mavi Marmara, which was leading a flotilla bound on busting the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

    Turkish-drone

    The crowing comment by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu – “Turkey’s basic demands have been met; we got what we wanted” – was out of place, spiteful and ill-mannered.

    He knows perfectly well that for the past year, amid a constant stream of ranting abuse from Ankara, Israel has been quietly responding to Turkey’s desperate need for cooperation in four essential fields, which are disclosed here by DEBKAfile:
    1. The Turkish armed forces are heavily dependent on Israeli military technologies from the long years of the close alliance between the two countries, which Ankara cut short. This dependence applies most particularly to its drones, the backbone of today’s modern armies. It is also holding up the huge transaction for the sale of American Boeing Awacs electronic warning airplanes to Turkey.

    Boeing was unable to deliver the aircraft without Jerusalem’s consent, because a key component, the early warning systems, is designed in Israel. This consent has been withheld in the face of Turkey’s urgent need and the US aviation firm’s impatience to consummate the deal.

    Turkey is in need of those planes – not just to monitor events in neighboring wartorn Syria, but to complete its air defense lineup against Iranian ballistic missiles. Without the AWACs, the advanced FBX-radar system the US has stationed at the Turkish Kurecik air base is only partly operational. The Kurecik battery is linked to its equivalent at a US base in the Israeli Negev, a fact which Ankara chooses to conceal.

    2.  In view of the turmoil in Syria, the bulk of Turkey’s exports destined for the Persian Gulf and points farther east have been diverted to the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod, whereas just a year ago, they went through Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

    Since no end is seen to the Syrian conflict and the closure of the Turkish-Syrian border, more and more export traffic from Turkey is making its way through Haifa port and thence by rail across Israel to Jordan.  Turkish goods bound for destinations in Europe and the US are diverted to Israeli ports too as Egyptian ports are made increasingly dysfunctional by that country’s economic crisis..
    3. In the first year of the Syrian uprising, when Davutoglu was still a frequent traveler to Damascus for talks with Bashar Assad, Ankara entertained high hopes of becoming a major player for resolving the Syrian debacle.  But he also sought to strike a deal with the Lebanese Hizballah, Assad’s ally, for obstructing Israeli gas and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean
    Three years on, Turkish leaders have woken up to the realization that they had better hurry up and jump aboard the US-backed Israeli energy bandwagon or else they will miss out on an outstanding and lucrative economic development, namely, the forthcoming opening up of a Mediterranean gas exporting route to Europe.

    4. Turkey, Israel and Jordan are all in the same boat as targets for the approaching large-scale use of Syria’s chemical and biological weapons.
    This topic was high on the agenda of President Obama’s talks with Jordan’s King Hussein Friday, March 21, in Amman, after he had explored the subject with Israel’s prime minister in Jerusalem.
    Obama presented them with his plan to consolidate into a single US-led Turkish-Israeli-Jordan HQ the separate commands established six months ago in each of those countries to combat the use of unconventional weapons.
    This unified command would stand ready to launch units of the four armies into coordinated land and air action inside Syria upon a signal from Washington.
    The US president used his visits to Jerusalem and Amman to tie up the ends of this contingency plan with Netanyahu and Abdullah, while Secretary of State John Kerry got together with Erdogan in Ankara.

    However, this four-way military effort to combat the Syrian chemical threat could not have taken off with Ankara and Jerusalem not on speaking terms.
    This had been going on for three years, ever since Erdogan suspended military ties with Israel and downgraded diplomatic relations pending an Israeli apology for the Marmara incident, compensation for the victims and the lifting of its naval blockade on Gaza.

    The Turkish prime minister insisted on the Israeli prime minister paying obeisance to Turkish national honor. And finally Netanyahu relented. But Israel stood its ground on the last condition; a UN probe had pronounced the Israeli blockade legal and legitimate although its raid on the Turkish ship was deemed “excessive.” So the blockade remains  in place and, indeed, Friday, March 23, Israel’s new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, tightened it by restricting the Gaza offshore areas open to Palestinian Mediterranean fishermen.

    This was punishment for the four-rocket attack staged from Gaza on the Israeli town of Sderot Thursday, the second day of President Obama’s visit to Israel.
    DEBKAfile’s military sources comment that the new defense minister may have also been directing a reproach at the prime minister for apologizing to Turkey and admitting to “operational errors,” thereby casting aspersions on the professionalism of the Israel Navy’s Shayetet 13 commando unit and its legitimate action in defense of Israel’s legal Gaza blockade

  • Israel, Turkey let bygones be bygones

    Israel, Turkey let bygones be bygones

    By Editorial Board, Published: March 28

    THE DARKENING situation in the Middle East has produced a silver lining. With Syria’s civil war intensifying and Iran showing no sign of slowing its nuclear program, Israel and Turkey have patched a nearly three-year-old rift. In a March 22 phone call stage-managed by President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu apologized to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for the deaths of nine Turks in a 2010 Israeli raid on a ferry attempting to breach the sea blockade of the Gaza Strip. That should open the way for Israel and Turkey to begin sharing intelligence and strategies for managing the common threat they face from Syria — and to increase the pressure on Tehran.

    Rapprochement between Turkey and Israel, two regional powers with stable democratic governments, has a compelling logic at a time when the Middle East is gripped by war and sectarian rivalry and Egypt and Iraq are consumed with internal turmoil. But the incipient makeup will require careful nurturing. Mr. Erdogan, who only a few weeks ago equated Zionism with “crimes against humanity,” has been undiplomatically crowing about Mr. Netanyahu’s apology; more troubling, he has insisted that the deal requires Israel to lift its sea blockade of Gaza, even though the statements issued by the two governments do not say that. Secretary of State John F. Kerry, whose behind-the-scenes cajoling helped to produce the breakthrough, will need to keep working to ensure that the accord does not crumble.

    Washington Post Editorials

    Editorials represent the views of The Washington Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the editorial board. News reporters and editors never contribute to editorial board discussions, and editorial board members don’t have any role in news coverage.

    Israel and Turkey’s reconciliation will help contain the threat from Syria.

    Both governments, however, have powerful incentives to cooperate. As Mr. Netanyahu explained on his Facebook page, his decision to deliver an apology he had long refused was driven by the growing threat that Syria’s chemical weapons and other advanced arms may fall into the hands of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon or an al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria. The two governments can now pool intelligence — and they will need to communicate in the event that one or the other is compelled to take action to prevent the transfer of dangerous weapons. Israel can also take satisfaction over the alarm the accord prompted in Iran, which will worry that one constraint on Israeli military action against its nuclear facilities has been eased.

    Mr. Erdogan, for his part, aspires to return to the role of regional statesman that he occupied before the Arab revolutions, when he sought to broker deals among Israel, Syria and the Palestinian Hamas movement. “We are at the beginning of a process of elevating Turkey to a position so that it will again have a say, initiative and power,” he boasted, while promising to visit Gaza next month.

    That may be too much to expect: Mr. Netanyahu’s government is as unlikely to open negotiations with Hamas as it is to fully lift its Gaza blockade. Israel, for its part, has little hope that the strategic military cooperation it nurtured with Turkey before Mr. Erdogan came to power will be revived. Even modestly better relations with Turkey and Israel are nevertheless vital to U.S. interests in the Middle East — and to containing its growing disorder.

    via Israel, Turkey let bygones be bygones – The Washington Post.