Category: Regions

  • Arab Nation Hoax: Geared to Falsify Islamic History & Ruin Varied Nations disfiguratively Named Arab

    Arab Nation Hoax: Geared to Falsify Islamic History & Ruin Varied Nations disfiguratively Named Arab

    Dura_Europos

    Aramaean high priests of Mithras – Wall painting of the Mithraeum of Dura Europos, near Abu Kemal, Syria

    By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

     

    In an earlier article ), I explained the reasons for which there are no Kurds, and that the notion of a Kurdish nation is a Freemasonic Orientalist hoax geared to put under an impossible umbrella many different nations spanning from Anti-Taurus Mountains to Syria, Mesopotamia and the Zagros Mountains.

     

    The Hoax of a Kurdish Nation is not however the first of this kind. The first Orientalist hoax was that of the Arabic Nation. This forgery dates back to the late 18th and the 19th centuries and served as an example in the aforementioned article.

     

    – By misinterpreting historical processes,

    – by concealing historical evidence,

    – by disorienting regional academics from having a wide spectrum understanding of their fields,

    by diverting them from several related academic fields and disciplines, and – by machinating in a way to mislead regional universities, faculties of humanities, staff members and researchers and ultimately keep them at an academically underdeveloped level and disconnected from one another,

     

    … the colonial academia and diplomats make sure that a vast confusion and deception prevail in the minds of targeted nations only to serve as the wrong foundation for further theoretical, intellectual, ideological and political disorientation.

     

    I then briefly expanded on the Arab Nation Hoax, before focusing on the identity, the socio-political milieu, attitude and targets of the diverse nations, which for the needs of the Kurdish Nation Hoax became ‘Kurds’.

     

    The revelation of the non-Arab identity of the misfortunate nations that have been labeled ‘Arab’ by the Orientalist forgers triggered the interest of several readers, who wrote to me, because they had heard totally different presentations while studying in different universities in the region. To answer their questions and illuminate the topic more extensively, I decided to come up with a summarizing, yet all-encompassing text which, although unable to fully cover the subject, offers a panoramic view of the fundamental historical realities and their existing dimensions and ramifications.

     

    I will therefore first re-publish the part of the previous article which concerned the Arab Nation Hoax, then quote the questions included in the mails that I received, and finally expand properly.

     

    1. Who are those who have been fallaciously labeled ‘Arabs’

    The Arabic-speaking part of the populations of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Western Egypt are indeed Berbers, who gradually forgot Berber languages and spoke Arabic exclusively, because they accepted Islam, and consequently made of their religious language their sole language. This was a long process and the Arabization phenomenon was only of linguistic nature – not ethnic, not cultural.
    Similarly, Egyptians are not Arabs, but Hamitic Egyptians or ‘Copts’, if you want, who in different eras accepted Islam and gradually abandoned Coptic language. Egypt south of Assiut was still Christian for almost 300 years after Prophet Muhammad died. Today, there is no ethnic difference between Christian and Muslim Egyptians; literarily speaking, the country is inhabited by Christian Copts and Muslim Copts.

     

    In the same way, the ethnic origin of today’s Sudanese is Kushitic (Kushites being a branch of the Hamitic nations) or Nilo-Saharan; Sudan’s Kushites are Arabic-speaking natives, because after accepting Islam, they gradually abandoned Christian Sudan’s Makurian and Alodian Kushitic languages, which were later forms of Meroitic. i.e. the pre-Christian Sudan’s language which was written in hieroglyphic and linear characters. Linguistic Arabization is indeed a very recent phenomenon for Sudan’s Kushites, because the Christian state of Makuria lasted until the 14th c. and the Christian state of Alodia collapsed only in the late 16th c. On the other hand, the Nubians in the North and other Nilo-Saharan peoples in other parts of Sudan preserved however their languages down to our times, as Arabic is merely a religious language to them.
    More importantly, the Arabic-speaking part of the populations of SE Turkey, Syria, Iraq, SW Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates and the Saudi extreme North are not Arabs but Aramaeans (a Semitic nation) who gradually forgot their own Syriac Aramaic language (a major language of Patristic Literature and an international language across the land routes of trade between the Mediterranean World, East Africa, India, and China) and spoke Arabic because they accepted Islam. Their linguistic Arabization was a gradual phenomenon characterized by the affinity of the two languages (Syriac Aramaic and Arabic) and the similarity of the two writing systems, as Arabic originates from Syriac Aramaic.
    Last but not the least, the Yemenites and the Omanis are not Arabs, but indigenous Yemenites and Omanis who, after accepting Islam, gradually abandoned their pre-Islamic languages, namely Sabaean, Hinyarite and Hadhramawti, etc. and spoke Arabic. Two modern Yemenite indigenous languages, notably Mahri and Socotri, are descendants of the Ancient Yemenite languages that were of course categorized as Semitic. Mahri is spoken in Hadhramawt (Mahra) and in North Somalia, whereas Socotri is the only native language in the island of Socotra.

     

    The pre-Islamic Yemenite languages are documented with a great number of epigraphic texts dating to back to more than 1300 years before the arrival of Islam; they were written in the indigenous writing that had nothing to do with the pre-Islamic Arabic writing which appears only 300 years before Islam and is provenly a deformation of Syriac Aramaic.

    1. Reactions and questions from readers

     

    Simply amazing, dear Dr. Shamsaddin!

     

    I am astonished with your deep knowledge of the region and its history of ethnic components. But, as far as I know from the History of the Middle East that we have been taught at Al-Bayt University (Jordan), even before the Islamic expansion (al-futuhat al-islamiyya), some Arabic tribes did come out of Arabian Peninsula to live at the Northern parts, such as Palestine and Jordan. Or, at least, after the Islamic expansion, most of the tribes of Adnan (Northern Arabs) or Madar and Qahtan (Southern Arabs from Yemen) moved to Iraq, Sham and Egypt with the armies and settled there. So, that is one of the reasons why the autochthonous populations were Arabized. 

     

    The Qahtan tribes or the Yemenites settled mostly in Iraq, and the Madar tribes inhabited mostly Sham (Levant). And even after their Islamization, these tribes carried with them some of the historic enmity that pre-existed between them and which was revived in the wars between Ali and Mua’wiyyah, and later in the wars between the Umayyad dynasty and the Shia (partisans) of Ali and his successors. This is known in the books of literature and history as the hate or enmity between Ahl al-Sham and Ahl al-Iraq.

     

    So, I am little bit perplexed hearing that the Arab populations are hoaxes of Orientalist Freemasons. But, of course, I do not exclude that possibility, because that waste region cannot be homogeneous, especially knowing that it has been always a crossroad of different peoples, kingdoms and civilizations throughout history.

     

     

    1. General Outline of the Response

     

    Thank you for your commentary, dear friend! Basically, you make four points.

     

    You first speak about subjects of Oriental History taught in a Middle Eastern university. This is addressed here:

    1. I. ABOUT UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ISLAMIC EXPANSION & ISSUES RELATED TO ARABS

     

    You subsequently refer to the wider area of SE Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, and SW Iran before, during and in the aftermath of the Islamic Expansion phenomenon, so basically late 6th and 7th centuries CE. This is discussed here:

    1. II. THE PRESCRIBED, HIDDEN NATION: THE ARAMAEANS

     

    1. III. INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS AND INVADING ARMIES IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC EXPANSION

     

    1. IV. ISLAM: THE CULTURAL ARAMAIZATION OF THE ARABS

     

    and

     

    1. V. THE EARLY ISLAMIC INVASIONS: FIRST MISREPRESENTED AND DISFORMED BY THE WESTERN ORIENTALISTS, SECOND USED IDEOLOGICALLY & POLITICALLY BY THE COLONIAL GANGSTERS

     

    You then mention Ancient Yemen and the Yemenite migrations. This is answered here:

    1. VI. ANCIENT YEMEN AND ANCIENT ARABIA

     

    You finally discuss issues pertaining to homogeneity of the wider region. This is commented here:

    1. VII. HOMOGENEITY vs. HETEROGENEITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

     

    What follows is the main part of my response as per the above structure. Bear in mind, if you please, that this is merely a synopsis.

     

     

    1. The Dimensions of Early Islamic History Falsification by Western Orientalist Academia and the False Concept of Arabization (proper response to readers’ questions)

     

    1. I. ABOUT UNIVERSITY STUDIES IN ISLAMIC EXPANSION & ISSUES RELATED TO ARABS

     

    You say “we have been taught at Al-Bayt University (Jordan), even before the Islamic expansion (al-futuhat al-islamiyya), some Arabic tribes “.

     

    Within the context of modern academic disciplines, to give an example, there is ‘History of Ancient Egypt’, and there is ‘History of Egyptology’!

     

    The history of the modern academic disciplines per se is an important field to also study, if one desires really in-depth understanding. Several stages of knowledge acquisition and synthesis have passed ever since Champollion deciphered Egyptian Hieroglyphics and Rawlinson decoded Assyrian-Babylonian cuneiform. Many mistakes have been corrected in the process; and many alterations have been added! Such fields as History of Assyriology, History of Iranology, History of Indology, History of Islamology, etc. reveal a tremendous amount of insightful as regards how we came to conclude what he have drawn until now as conclusion in each of the aforementioned fields.

     

    With the colonial presence active and destructive on Ottoman soil under many different forms, one can easily understand that the Western Orientalism did not reflect a genuine interest for discovery of the past and exploration but soon turned out to be a multi-layered tool against the past, the present and the future of the Orient. In a way, it was a real robbery of the Oriental past, and by this I don’t mean the criminal, illegal and only provisory transportation of Oriental Antiquities in Western museums, libraries, institutes, research centers, universities, palaces, public places, auction houses, and ultimately privately homes. The worst robbery occurred at the theoretical, academic, intellectual, educational and cultural level. The collection of a sizable material record of Oriental Antiquities and its study and interpretation turned soon out to be not a true reflection of the historical past but a false projection of Western concepts, ideas and theories into the past under study. The new academic disciplines of Orientalism, instead of properly and effectively rectify the earlier acquired material record of ‘Classical’ (the term is false) Greco-Roman Antiquities, were only adjusted to it to help it expand.

     

    The ensued ‘systematized falsehood’ was not only diffused among the Western countries (due to the phenomenon of academic competition in an era of acute nationalisms) but also enforced in the colonial academic and educational institutions that emerged – with the deep involvement of the colonial Orientalist academia – in all these fake countries. But, by accepting the Western ‘systematized falsehood’, the modern Oriental students and scholars (who were formed under supervision of the Western Orientalists) only gravely undermined the importance of their countries’ past, severely minimized the value of their past in their nation-building process, and finally contributed to the formation of fake modern Oriental nations that are detached from their past and left without a diachronic cultural identity.

     

    Here, it is good to remember the French expression ‘bon pour l’ Orient’ (lit. ‘good for the Orient’) which implied that the product under discussion was not to be consumed or used in the Occident (by Westerners – due to its lower quality specifications)! All colonial academic institutions that were setup by Western academia on the soil of Ottoman provinces and in other Oriental lands were not proper copies of the Western universities and did not diffuse the same quality and depth of knowledge. Their Orientalist masters allowed these institutions to teach / diffuse in the Orient only the portion of their knowledge that would not make the Oriental academic institutions able to rival with their own Occidental establishments. Above all, these colonial academic-educational institutions were guided by their Orientalist masters to diffuse academic knowledge altered in a way that it would not be easy for the Oriental students (Algerian, Egyptian, Lebanese, Sudanese, Yemenite, Iraqi, Iranian, Pakistani, Indian, etc.) to realize that the Western ‘systematized falsehood’ – deliberately, viciously, and against all declared Western academic values – diminished the value of the Orient and the achievements of the Oriental civilizations in order to subordinate them to the Western historiography (the values of which – quite contrarily – were extremely maximized to appear as global).

     

    Several scholars like Edward Said criticized Orientalism, whereas others like Martin Bernal (in his monumental ‘Black Athena’) attacked the Western ‘systematized falsehood’ at its very epicenter, demonstrating that the ‘Classical’ civilization was subordinated to the Oriental civilizations. But to no avail!

     

    In the universities of Jordan, Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Yemen, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, all the staff members keep promoting – pathetically, idiotically and self-disastrously – the colonial ‘systematized falsehood’ that prevents them from really assessing the greatness of the Orient in its correct dimensions, from truly evaluating the historical truth and continuity of the Orient, and from detecting the detrimental harm that the Western system, which they studied (either in Paris or in Madinah), has done to their own countries, their nation-building process, and their historical heritage.

     

    However, the issue is far wider and permeates all disciplines of Humanities.

     

    In fact, behind Pan-Arabism (a false theory the beginning of which is retraced back to Jurji Zeydan and his Nahda movement) is hidden the (exported to the respective lands of the Orient) version ‘bon pour l’ Orient’ of the Western discipline of Arabology. But the origin of the Arabic studies in Western universities goes back to the 18th c.! The Western ‘systematized falsehood’ took more than a century to produce Pan-Arabism.

     

    One can expand up to writing books and books, but here suffice it to say that the ‘systematized falsehood’ is a perplex and multileveled affair. It does not only involve inaccuracies within one specific specialization field, but it also entails a severe detachment of each specialization field from other related fields. It goes up to the level of …. prohibition of an entire academic discipline! Once, I published an article – plead for a forbidden science: Aramaeology.

     

    Because, to come closer to the subject under discussion, if a student wants to focus on the early Islamic expansion, while studying Arabic language and literature and History of Early Islam, s/he has also to take compulsory courses on

    1. a) Aramaeans in the Eastern Roman Empire and in the Sassanid Iranian Empire,
    2. b) Political History of the Eastern Roman Empire,
    3. c) Political History of the Sassanid Iranian Empire,
    4. d) Political History of Pre-Islamic Yemen,
    5. e) Copts in the Eastern Roman Empire,
    6. f) Ancient Yemenite language and literature (which is fallaciously called ‘South-Arabian’, a ridiculous term coined by the masters of the ‘systematized falsehood’),
    7. g) Syriac {do not confuse the Christian Aramaic language that is called ‘Syriac’ with the modern adjective ‘Syrian’ which is used in relation with the modern fake state of Syria} Aramaic language and literature,
    8. h) Christian Kingdoms in Sudan,
    9. i) History of theological disputes in the Eastern Roman Empires,
    10. j) Religions in Pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia,
    11. k) History of Northern – Northwestern Africa form Carthage to the Islamic Arrival.

     

    The aforementioned are 11 (eleven) courses in total that should be compulsory for a syllabus of 28 courses leading to a Bachelor of Arts in History of Early Islam.

     

    Certainly, the above eleven courses are not offered in the respective faculties of the regional universities from Morocco to Uzbekistan to Indonesia! Why? Because all the universities – be they state, private or religious – in the wider region of Islam are mere colonial products and therefore not one among their staff members commands a comprehensive knowledge covering all aspects related to the History of Early Islam. Consequently, no one can put the correct syllabus down on a piece of paper.

     

    1. II. THE PRESCRIBED, HIDDEN NATION: THE ARAMAEANS

     

    In this subject, the support offered to the Arabization fallacy is epitomized in the following words: “some Arabic tribes did come out of Arabian Peninsula to live at the Northern parts, such as Palestine and Jordan. Or, at least, after the Islamic expansion, most of the tribes of Adnan (Northern Arabs) or Madar and Qahtan (Southern Arabs from Yemen) moved to Iraq, Sham and Egypt with the armies and settled there. So, that is one of the reasons why the autochthonous populations were Arabized. 

     

     

    Here, reading these few lines, one gets the impression that, in the middle of the 7th century, Mesopotamia (there was no ‘Iraq’ by that time – in fact, this was a new name just brought to use by the invading armies), Syria-Palestine, and Egypt were almost … uninhabited!

     

    Also, the aforementioned lands are wrongly divided in the above manner. In fact, these lands did not belong to independent countries; at the times of Prophet Muhammad’s early life, they were parts of the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Iranian Empire. But the local populations were basically Aramaeans (in the Asiatic part of the territories referred to) and Egyptians – Copts (in Egypt). Because of the constant Roman – Iranian wars, the borderlines between Syria and Mesopotamia used to change almost every year, but the local population was always Aramaean.

     

    The Aramaeans spread first from the desert to the neighboring lands of the Fertile Crescent around 1100 BCE and, after they were organized in several small kingdoms for many centuries, they were successively ruled (at times partly and at times entirely) by the Sargonid Assyrian, Nabonid Babylonian, Achaemenid Iranian, Macedonian, Seleucid Syrian, Arsacid Parthian, Roman, Sassanid Iranian and Eastern Roman Empires. In few cases, there were some relatively small, independent Aramaean states in the Late Antiquity (539 BCE – 622 CE, i.e. the period going from the rise of Achaemenid Iran to the rise of Islam), such as Urhoy, Hatra, Palmyra, Adiabene and Rekem/Petra.

     

    Centuries before the arrival of Islam, the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Philistines/Palestinians, and the Jews had been progressively assimilated among the more numerous Aramaeans. For most of the cases, Euphrates (Furat) river was the border between the Romans/Eastern Romans and the Sassanid Empire of Iran, so we are rather on the safe side, if we generalize saying that regularly Syria – Palestine was Eastern Roman (the term ‘Byzantine’ is another fallacy diffused by the promoters of the ‘systematized falsehood’) and Mesopotamia was Iranian.

     

    In the eve of the early expansion of Islam, very sizable cities existed in the territories mentioned. Among the greatest cities of Eastern Roman Syria and Palestine, we count the following:

     

    Antioch (Antakya in Turkey’s province of Hatay) – the main rival of Alexandria (although Antioch was in the inland)

     

    After having been the capital city (323-64 BCE) of the vast Seleucid Empire (that stretched from Central Turkey to India and, following the formation of Arsacid Iran at 250 BCE, only from Central Turkey to the Persian Gulf – always including Syria and Palestine) that was the main rival of the Egyptian state of the Ptolemies for about 250 years, Antioch became a major city – patriarchate of Eastern Christianity.

     

    This means that Antioch was as big and as important as only Constantinople, Rome and Alexandria within the entire Roman Empire, Eastern and Western.

     

    However, more importantly, Antioch and Alexandria represented the two strongest and opposite to one another theological schools of Christian Theology. More on the subject:

    http://www.monachos.net/library/index.php/patristics/themes/244-two-schools-alexandria-and-antioch

     

    To better visualize the School of Antioch – School of Alexandria antithesis, it is quite advisable to compare it with the four schools of jurisprudence (madh’hab of fiqh) in Sunni Islam, namely those of Al Shaffi’i, Abu Hanifa, Malik bin Anas, and Ibn Hanbal. But there was bitter theological rivalry between the two Christian cities, and it was due to even greater differences at the underlying level of thought structure & systematization, and logic & logic philosophy.

     

    Why does one need to expand to all this? Because the historical falsification as per which the aforementioned areas were arabized imposes any objective researcher and scholar to duly contextualize the event of the early Islamic expansion. To fully demonstrate that the term ‘arabization’ constitutes the epitome of colonial falsehood, one has to place the early Islamic invasions (and the ensuing settlement of certain populations in the areas under discussion) within the correct context. However, any historical event exists only within a context and without it, it is void and null.

     

    At the times of Prophet Muhammad, the population of only one city, namely Antioch, was much larger than the entire population of all the Arabs together (anything between double and triple). Yet, the Arabs were then inhabiting a sizable area, notably the mountains of Hedjaz (the Western part of the Peninsula between Yemen and the Gulf of Aqaba) and the desert (the central part of the peninsula).

     

    The same is also valid for Alexandria in Egypt, and for Tesifun (Ctesiphon) in Sassanid Mesopotamia (south of today’s Baghdad), which was at the time one of the two major Iranian capitals (Iran had always many capitals at the same time) along with Istakhr, which was located beyond the Zagros Mountains in Fars (near today’s Shiraz).

     

    Beyond Antioch, there were many other sizeable cities in early 7th c. CE Syria – Palestine:

     

    Edessa of Osroene or Urhay (today Urfa in SE Turkey), which had earlier been the capital of the Christian Aramaean Kingdom of Osroene (132 BCE to 214 CE) and then excelled as one of the most important cities-centers of Christianity worldwide

     

    Harran (or Carrhae)

     

    Beroea (today’s Aleppo – Haleb in Syria)

     

    Apamea (near Hama in Syria) – former treasure city of the Seleucids and an important Christian center

     

    Emessa (Homs in Syria)

     

    Tadmor / Palmyra – one of the wealthiest and most sizable Aramaean states that was also one of the most important trade centers of the ancient world as it was located on geostrategic position in the land trade routes between the Mediterranean world, Iran, India, Egypt, Central Asia, and China

     

    Laodicea (Latakiyeh in Syria)

     

    Damascus

     

    Bostra (today’s Bosra in Southern Syria close to the Jordanian border)

     

    Tyr (major Phoenician city of the coast)

     

    Sidon (major Phoenician city of the coast)

     

    Byblos (major Phoenician city of the coast)

     

    Beirut

     

    Heliopolis (Baalbek in today’s Lebanon)

     

    Caesarea of Palestine (known as Caesarea Maritima – south of Haifa on the coast) – a major Christian center

     

    Jaffa / Joppa – a major coastal city and an important religious – literary center for both, Christianity and Judaism

     

    Jerusalem

     

    Samaria (today’s Nablous) – the old capital of the ancient state of Israel that consisted of the ten tribes of the Hebrews, whereas the state of Judah regrouped the other two tribes. The local population was Chaldaean Aramaean and constituted the earliest Aramaean settlement in Palestine, as they were transferred from Southern Mesopotamia by Sargon Emperor of Assyria immediately after he invaded the Israelite capital and transported the entire population of Israel to the NE confines of the Assyrian Empire (722 BCE).

     

    Tiberias (Tabariyyah – on the coast of the homonymous lake in NE Palestine)

     

    Philadelphia – Decapolis (Amman in Jordan)

     

    Here, we cannot mention either Rekem – Petra (capital of the Aramaean Nabataean kingdom / 168 BCE – 106 CE) or Hegra – Mada’in Saleh (second capital of the Nabataean kingdom) because they both were progressively abandoned after the collapse of the local Aramaean kingdom.

     

    The above list is not exhaustive. Smaller cities like Jerash in Jordan or Apollonia of Palestine are not included. To establish a complete topographical list of the local towns, villages and hamlets, one would include thousands of inhabited places.

     

    The total population of Eastern Roman Syria – Palestine must have been around 5-6 million people in the early 7th c. CE. At those days, the Eastern Roman Empire, according all serious approximations, totaled 20 to 25 million people living in today’s South Balkans, Turkey, Syria-Palestine, Egypt and North Africa.

     

    The same concerns Mesopotamia in its totality – either totally controlled by the Sassanid Iranian Empire or shared at times between the Iranians and the Eastern Romans. There were many densely populated cities except the vast capital, Tesifun (Ctesiphon). It is rather safe to claim that Mesopotamia was more populous than Syria – Palestine, as this had always been the case. The Sassanid Empire totaled a population larger than that of the Eastern Roman Empire as it also controlled Central Asia and the North of India; it was however less centralized. According to some estimates, in the early 7th c. CE, the Sassanid Empire totaled 25 to 30 million people.

     

    1. III. INDIGENOUS POPULATIONS AND INVADING ARMIES IN THE EARLY ISLAMIC EXPANSION

     

    In face of the above mentioned, the inhabitants of Arabia in the early 7th c. CE did not total more than two to three hundred thousand (200000-300000) people. We know this as we know the approximate population of the cities where Prophet Muhammad lived or moved to, and the number of fighters who were engaged in battles that took place in order to prevent Prophet Muhammad’s rise of influence.

     

    In any case, key Greek and Roman historical records dating back to the 1st and the 2nd centuries of the Christian era provide us with significant details as regards Arabia, and the documentation we get from them is quite sufficient for estimations, considerations and comparisons. Texts like the Periplus of the Red Sea (composed by an Alexandrian Egyptian merchant and captain around 70 CE) and the Geography of the Egyptian Alexandrian scholar Ptolemy (around the middle of the 2nd c. CE) are in this case as valuable as the geographical references to the area made by the great Roman scholar Pliny the Elder in his Natural History (Historia Naturalis).

     

    It is to be always kept in mind that for several centuries the Roman Empire controlled a vast part of today’s Saudi Arabian territory (its NW corner) and more particularly the city – harbor of Leyke Kome (‘White Town’) which is identified with modern Umm Lajj on the coastland – although identification with al Wajh would be more conservative. Similarly, we know very well that Sassanid Iran occupied the entire coastland of the peninsula in the Persian Gulf (i.e. the coastlands of the modern states of Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Emirates and Oman) where the indigenous population was Aramaean.

     

    On the other hand, we have also to keep in mind that Najran belonged to Yemen and was inhabited by Yemenites, who are not Arabs, and the same concerns the Omanis. Only the desert and the central part of Hedjaz were inhabited by Arabs in pre-Islamic times. Makah at the times of Prophet Muhammad was an unimportant village of 5-6000 (five to six thousand) people. Yathrib (later known as Madinah) was one of the few big cities of the Arabs or even the biggest, but it still could not even be compared to one of the aforementioned big cities of Syria, Palestine or Mesopotamia. Sargonid Assyrian and Nabonid Babylonian control was extended over Yathrib which is first known thanks to Mesopotamian cuneiform literature more than 1200-1300 years before the emergence of Islam. Named Yathribu, the then small and peripheral city was the location of the summer palaces of the Nabonid kings, probably because of the prevailing weather conditions and the mild summers.

     

    At this point, it is easy to recapitulate. The pre-Islamic migrations of Arabian Peninsula tribes to Syria and Mesopotamia (Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanid Iranian Empire) are rather a matter of legend and not a proper historical record. Although it is certain that they happened, they were rather migrations of reigning families, which is very common across History; they were indeed accepted and welcomed locally by indigenous populations oppressed by foreign occupation soldiers, as the Aramaeans were heavily taxed and persecuted by the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Iranian administrations.

     

    The emigrated populations do not therefore represent but a small number of fighters and their families, and this means in every case only a few thousands of people (3000 – 5000) at the most. But even if we accept the hypothesis of the emigration of an entire tribe, again the number cannot be higher than 15000 or 20000 people, which is a tremendously high number of people moving, but still of minor importance for the millions of indigenous settled populations, namely the inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The settlement of immigrated populations may perhaps acquire some importance at the strictly local level, e.g. the area where they exactly settled. But again, in this case, it is crystal clear that the immigrated tribes were sooner or later assimilated to the settled populations that they encountered in their final area of settlement.

     

    However, any tribe originating from Ancient Yemen was not Arabic but Yemenite tribe, so quite different; this will be discussed later in this article.

     

    It is however true that, after the Islamic invasions, many soldiers settled in diverse places, and mainly in the area of the first capitals of the Caliphate, namely Syria (Damascus) and Mesopotamia (Baghdad), if not for any other reasons only to ensure the new Islamic state’s administration and defense.

     

    But who and how many were all the soldiers of the early Islamic armies – and when?

     

    Only correctly formulated questions can lead to correct conclusions. And to properly approach and understand the subject of the early Islamic armies, we need to answer the above, tripartite question. Why? Because a great part of the existing confusion / misperception of the event hinges on exactly this point: not all the details concerning the soldiers of the early Islamic armies were properly studied and taken into account, when the verdict was announced in favor of the arabization.

     

    Many view indeed the event of the early Islamic invasions as a one-moment monolith. That’s pretty absurd or deliberately / suspiciously wrong. A historical event that spans over 20 years, from the 630s to the 650s (to limit it to its main part), represents the historical evolution of an entire generation. In other words, it is not an event anymore, but rather a historical process.

     

    This automatically means that the ethnic (racial) composition of the early Islamic armies changed progressively from 633-4 to 640, to 645, to 650. As one victory succeeded another from 633 to 711, a certain number of indigenous people in Palestine, Mesopotamia, Syria, Iran, Egypt, Anatolia, Caucasus, Central Asia, North Africa, India and in the Iberian peninsula adhered to Islam, and started participating in the next stage of the expansion.

     

    What follows is a brief presentation of how and why this happened in a way that is still concealed from most!

     

    After the Arabs accepted the Prophet Muhammad’s calling, Ali preached in Yemen’s (then new) capital Sanaa in 630, two years before the Prophet died, and all the Yemenites and the Omanis accepted Islam peacefully. As Yemen and Oman were provinces of Iran, it is very remarkable that even the Iranian chief administrator accepted Ali’s preaching. Yemen had a much larger population than Arabia itself, as ancient records clearly evidence; texts like the Periplus of the Red Sea, Ptolemy’s Geography, Cosmas Indicopleustes’ Christian Topography (written only 20 or 30 years before Prophet Muhammad’s birth), and the much hated by the biased Freemasonic Orientalist scholarship text ‘Laws on the Homerites’, i.e. the legislation of the Ancient Yemenite state of Himyar by Saint Gregentios, Archbishop of Taphar (dating in the 1st half of the 6th c. CE) include extensive and valuable information in support of the aforementioned estimates of population.

     

    This means that at, until the death of Prophet Muhammad, Ali had already brought to Islam more people than Prophet Muhammad himself! At those days, the entire population of Yemen may have totaled 1 to 1.5 million people, thus outnumbering the Arabs by 5:1 to 7:1. The fact that Yemenites are totally dissociated from Arabs ethnically, linguistically and culturally will be discussed later.

     

    The normal consequence of the above realty is that, when the wars started between the Islamic Caliphate on one side and the Eastern Roman and the Sassanid Iranian Empires on the other, the very early Islamic armies (633-639) consisted of Arabs, Yemenites, Omanis, and few Persian and Roman new converts and proselytes (the likes of Salman al Farsi, etc.). Following the acceptance of Islam by non Arabs, Yemenites and others, it was very common for Arabs to give Arabic names or nicknames to the new converts and proselytes (thus, for example, Salman al Farsi was also called ‘Abu Abdullah’), but this did not make of them Arabs – in anything.

     

    However, at a later stage, when the Islamic armies fought at Nahavand (in the Zagros Mountains that separate today’s Iraq from Iran) and besieged Alexandria in Egypt (642), the combat forces were made of Arabs, Yemenites, Omanis, and Aramaeans from Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia – areas that had just been invaded few years ago, during the period 633-639. In just 5 years after Islam went out of the peninsula, a very remarkable part of the Islamic armies (1/4 to 1/3 by modest estimates) was composed of soldiers who were not native Arabic speakers.

     

    Subsequently, in the later stage of the Islamic expansion (650-711), Persian soldiers may have fought in Spain, and Egyptian soldiers may have fought in Northern India. So, Arabs became progressively a minority in the Islamic armies. At that level, the personal names of the soldiers mean absolutely nothing, because to Copts, Aramaeans, Persians, Berbers and others, adhesion to Islam meant immediate acquisition of Islamic personal names in Arabic.

     

    We know from crosschecked sources that even in the critical middle stage of the Islamic expansion (640-650), the Islamic armies were not numerous (ex. 30000 soldiers in the battle of Nahavand). Even if we suppose that all of them were Arabs (and we know that they were not), that all of them settled in only one of the newly invaded lands, for instance Syria (and we know that they did not limit themselves in only one), again we have to admit that their numbers were so minimal that they were finally assimilated among the indigenous populations, i.e the Aramaeans or the Copts, the Berbers and others.

     

    1. IV. ISLAM: THE CULTURAL ARAMAIZATION OF THE ARABS

     

    As regards the Arabization falsehood, there may be two more points to discuss, e.g. linguistic arabization and cultural arabization. Academia and intellectuals supporting the Orientalist hoax often refer to these points that are however null.

     

    Linguistic arabization does not mean or imply anything; within few generations and quite recently, African Americans became English native speakers in the US, and they forgot their past native languages that they were still speaking when they forst set foot on American soil. However, they did not become Indo-Europeans, or to put it more specifically Anglo-Saxons, as regards their ethnic origin. Neither can one ascribe them to the average English or White American culture.

     

    To some extent, the arabization hoax survived for so long, only to confuse everyone and have political ramifications of calamitous character (Pan-Arabism, Arab Nationalism, etc.), because there was something important missing in the syllabuses of departments specializing on History of the Islamic World.

     

    As a matter of fact, it is very wrong to study Early History of Islam as only Political History or History of Religion – and this is what happened until now either in the West or in the fake states that were formed after the dissolution of the major powers of the Islamic World, i.e. the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India. In fact, the most important dimension of the Early History of Islam, which remains highly disregarded and unstudied, lies within the field of History of Civilizations (and Cultures) – a far wider field whereby every religion is widely contextualized and highly parameterized.

     

    Actually, if we intend to study the diverse acculturation phenomena that took place in the 7th c. CE onwards due to the preaching of Islam by Prophet Muhammad, we have to focus primarily not on the Aramaeans and the Yemenites, but on the Arabs. In critical terms of Cultural Studies that have to apply in this case, the Arabs by accepting Islam, were profoundly, drastically and irrevocably aramaeanized and fully acculturated among the Christian Aramaeans. Islam viewed (not within the narrow context of religion but) as Culture was the most complete rejection of the earlier Arabic culture, legends, narratives, cults, beliefs, attitudes and – generally speaking – behavioral system. Aramaean culture, legends and narratives, as evoked by the new religion, replaced Arab culture following the preaching of Prophet Muhammad.

     

    It is only because of the biased, anti-Islamic attitude of the West that scholars and researchers specializing in Early History of Islam did not notice that, before and after Hijra, the opponents and enemies of Prophet Muhammad did not reject a new religion (because Islam had not yet been fully articulated) but disparate religious ideas and concepts (those preached by one of their compatriots who was neither a local magistrate nor a priest of an already known religion) that – all – constituted the foremost rejection of what had been known among as Arab culture. In fact, they reacted and opposed his teachings because what he evangelized was alien to their nomad Arab culture and drastically opposed their behavioral system to which they wanted to stick.

     

    Ages old, anti-Islamic hatred and hidden political motivations against the entire Islamic World were the reasons for which 18th and 19th c. Orientalists and Islamologists deliberately left vast fields of research and exploration unexploited and unstudied, because it was crystal clear to them that the end result would not correspond at all to their prefixed ideas and pre-arranged conclusions. As it happened, 20th c. Islamologists continued advancing on the footsteps of their predecessors and in the process a wide area of academic exploration remained terra incognita.

     

    To put it correctly, at the times of Hijra (622 CE), Islam was actually a ‘new’ religion only to Arabs – not to Aramaeans! Almost all the subjects discussed within the Quran and the Hadith at the times of Prophet Muhammad were known to Aramaeans (either exactly as preached or slightly different), but not to Arabs. By this, I don’t mean that the verses of the Quran were already known in the very form in which they were uttered, but that the underlying concepts, stories, and narratives, as well as the ensuing mindsets, mentalities, attitudes and behaviors preexisted.

     

    In this regard, there are plenty of examples. The entire cosmology of Islam, the narratives about the Creation, the expulsion from the original Paradise, the deviance of the early mankind, the morals of the Sodom and Gomorrah people (as reprimanded and castigated by God in the story of Lot / ch. 26, 160-171), and the Flood (involving Prophet Noah – Nuh), the stories about the Pharaoh, Moses (Musa) and the Exodus, about Jonah, and the moral concepts and values that they represent, the rejection of the Christian theory about Jesus’ divinity (which had already been rejected by the great Christian theologian and Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Nestorius 130 years before Prophet Muhammad was born), a great number of religious practices involving prayer, prostration, fasting, etc., the ensuing ethics and morals, attitudinal and behavioral systems preexisted among Aramaeans.

     

    Particularly, the Nestorian Aramaeans’ values, behaviors, knowledge, science and esthetics heralded in a way Prophet Muhammad and, after the diffusion of Islam beyond the peninsula, took the central part and played the main role in the rise of the Islamic Civilization. Arabic writing is in fact a later deformation of the Syriac Aramaic writing. For this reason, early Islam did not appear to the Christians of the times of Prophet Muhammad as another, distinct, religion but rather a new form of heresy or a radical reassertion and rehabilitation of Nestorianism.

     

    The implantation of Aramaean culture among Arabs through Islam and the early acculturation of the Arabs among the Aramaeans were the main reasons for which the populations of Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia were immediately favorable to the Islamic armies and did not support the defense of the country to which they belonged – either Eastern Roman Empire or Sassanid Iranian Empire.

     

    1. V. THE EARLY ISLAMIC INVASIONS: FIRST MISREPRESENTED AND DISFORMED BY THE WESTERN ORIENTALISTS, SECOND USED IDEOLOGICALLY & POLITICALLY BY THE COLONIAL GANGSTERS

     

    The aforementioned reality has been concealed at a global academic – educational – intellectual level, because it severely harms the ‘systematized falsehood’ that Western academia wanted to impose and did actually impose worldwide as regards the early Islamic expansion.

     

    At this point, one must take into consideration that the imposition of the ‘systematized falsehood’ did not occur only in Western universities and in the derivative establishments setup in colonized countries but also within the so-called Islamic universities (the likes of Al Azhar and Madinah universities) whereby misleading, constrained and trimmed, de-contextualizing syllabuses exist only to obscure students and perpetuate the prevailing ignorance of the real History of Islam among Muslim academics.

     

    As per the promoted and imposed Western ‘systematized falsehood’, the Islamic expansion phenomenon is called ‘Muslim / Islamic invasions’ or rather ‘Islamic / Muslim conquests’ (the last option is the title of the Wikipedia entry), and it is depicted as involving extensive bloodshed, fierce battles, and cruel attitudes that were supposedly imposed on an otherwise peaceful Christian Mediterranean world by some barbarians. In other words, Islam is depicted an external threat and an impending danger, whereas quite contrarily all the constituent elements of the Islam can be found on Eastern Roman territory.

     

    In this regard, it is useful to add that Oriental Christianity has also been deliberately kept unknown to all Western Christian schoolchildren and students (with the exception of the very few researchers who begin their specialization in this topic only in their postgraduate studies). It is definitely paranoid for a Western schoolchild and student to be given through their general education more info about India, Buddhism, and China than about Constantinipolitan Orthodoxy, Coptic and Syriac Monophysitism, East Aramaean Nestorianism, and Oriental Christianity.

     

    This hiatus is deliberate and serves the Western academics, who are the promoters of the ‘systematized falsehood’, to firmly dissociate and disentangle Islam from the Christian world. This viciously contradicts all the historical evidence. It is therefore not just a lie, but a criminal falsehood geared to be a time capsule for repetitive use any time the Freemasonic political establishment of the corrupt West intends to tarnish and demonize Islam.

     

    And the aforementioned analysis of the fact that the Orient was never arabized but, quite contrarily, the Arabs have been aramaeanized through Islam clearly demonstrates that the Western negative portrait of the early Islamic expansion is totally false. Islam as Culture and Civilization was developed under determinant Aramaean impact and was never an external factor to Christians. Even more importantly, the most original Christians of the early 7th c. CE and those, who had more direct and correct info about the preaching of Prophet Muhammad, did not hesitate to either adhere to Islam or remain Christian and reject the Eastern Roman rule. This is of colossal importance because, in full rejection of the Freemasonic Orientalist colonial evilness and lies, it means that for the true Christians, the Islamic rule, administration and ‘political power’ (being wrong the term is used only conventionally here) is definitely preferable to the devious and evil Roman or Western control.

     

    In addition to the above, the assumption of ‘a pre-Islamic peaceful Christian world which was interrupted by Islam’s conquering armies’ contradicts all historical sources, being viciously false, heinous and criminal because of its implications. Before the arrival of Islam, the Perso-Roman wars were not the only conflict in the wider region. Within the Roman Empire, many theological disputes ended in ceaseless conflicts and bloodshed. The rise of Arianism against official Roman Christianity in the 4th c. CE resulted in endless wars, fights, cruel oppression, and hundreds of thousands of dead. Donatism, considered as another heresy, turned North Africa to a permanent battlefield and to a land of oppression in the 4th and the 5th centuries.

     

    Starting already in the 2nd and the 3rd c. CE, Marcionism and Docetism were considered as heretic theological schools and therefore persecuted. However, they survived across many centuries only to give birth to other theological schools which, under strong Gnostic impact, contrasted with Roman and Constantinopolitan Christianity, leaving even significant traces within Islam.

     

    The prominent position offered to Jesus by Mani in his new religion (Manichaeism – Manawiyah in Arabic), which was preached in Ctesiphon (the Iranian capital at Mesopotamia) 400 years before Prophet Muhammad, confused Christianity while offering the newly risen Sassanid dynasty an excellent tool to attract Christian populations to a religion that incorporated elements of Gnosticisms, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. Manichaeism had an extraordinary expansion, without war, through trade and ideological mobilization, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Despite the great impact that Manichaeism had across the Roman Empire, it was bloodily persecuted, and the same occurred later in Iran as well, when Mazdeism (a reinstatement of the Zoroastrian orthodoxy) prevailed among the Sassanids. Persecuted Manichaean communities from NW Africa, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, Central Asia, and China left a voluminous material record without which it is absolutely impossible to assess the History of the Orient and therefore the History of the Islamic Caliphates. Even at its greatest expansion, Islam did not cover an area as large as that where Manicheans were dispersed worldwide – although they seldom controlled the administration of a country.

     

    The two strongest theological opponents of Official Christianity managed finally to control the patriarchates of Antioch and Alexandria in the 5th c. CE. Monophysitism is today the original form of Christianity accepted by the Copts, the Western Aramaeans (in Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan), the Armenians, the Georgians, and the Abyssinians. Monophysitism is actually a derogatory term given to Monophysites by their Roman and Constantinopolitan opponents; whenever mentioned across this text, it is used conventionally. The correct term would be Henophysitism; as theological system, it was the theoretical ‘child’ of the School of Alexandria. Following the rejection of the majority decision at the Council of Chalcedon (451) by the Monophysites, the schism became definite between the patriarchates of Rome and Constantinople on one side and those of the East on the other. Subsequently, Eastern Roman soldiers carried out plans of terrible persecution against the local populations. In few words, Monophysitism rejects the official Christian dogma that Jesus as Christ (Messiah) had two natures, i.e. divine and human, and stipulates that Jesus had only one. divine and human, nature.

     

    On the other hand, Nestorianism was the theoretical ‘child’ of the School of Antioch and was rejected in both, the Council of Ephesus (431) and the Council of Chalcedon. Eastern Aramaeans accepted Nestorianism overwhelmingly and Iranian Christians adhered to the dogma of Nestorius in their totality. Nestorius launched the Great Church of the Orient outside Roman territory and in the beginning many Nestorian Aramaeans moved from Eastern Roman Syria to Sassanid Iranian Mesopotamia. The result was that after the middle of the 5th c. CE (so, only 130 years before Prophet Muhammad’s birth), all the populations of the Eastern Roman Empire east of today’s Central Turkey rejected flatly the official religion of Constantinople. Nestorianism spread across Iran to Northern India, Central Asia, and China leaving evidence for more than 1000 years after Nestorius, who is also believed to be a Saint by the Christians of Malabar in Southwestern India. At the antipodes of Monophysitism, Nestorianism makes clear that Jesus had only a human nature, being thus far closer to Islam than any other system of faith.

     

    The fight of the terms took the forefront place of the polarization with the Nestorians introducing for Virgin Mary the term ‘Christotokos’ (Mother of the Christ) in flat rejection of the official Constantinopolitan term ‘Theotokos’ (Mother of God). Anti-Eastern Christian persecutions in the Eastern Roman Empire and the Sassanid Iranian Empire were as severe as the incessant wars between the two strongest states of the then known world.

     

    All these perplex, multifaceted and endless strives came to an end and different religions and denominations coexisted peacefully within the early Islamic caliphates (the Umayyad and the Abbasid dynasties). The rise of the Islamic Caliphates was a most beneficial event not only for those among the Aramaeans, the Persians, the Copts and the Berbers who accepted the new faith but also – and this is far more important – for those who preferred to remain Monophysitic Christian, Nestorian Christian, Manichaean and other and live under Islamic Rashidun (and later Umayyad and Abbasid) Caliphate rule rather than Eastern Roman tutelage or Sassanid Iranian scepter. This is clearly evidenced by texts like the Ta’rikh Batarikat al-Kanisah al-Misriyah by Severus ibn al-Mukaffa, Coptic bishop and historian, or the Chronicle of John of Nikiû.

     

    And this is exactly what the ‘systematized falsehood’ of the West does not want known to anybody about Islam. Even centuries after the Islamic expansion, the Oriental Christians preferred to live safely, securely, productively and peacefully under the Islamic Caliphate’s administration rather than to be exposed to the heavy taxation, persecution and cruelty of Constantinople or Rome. This is not strange at all. Anti-Islamism did not exist among the Christians of the early Islamic times; the wars fought were only due to the fact that the Constantinopolitan imperial power did not fully and irrevocably accept the permanent loss of their Oriental provinces.

     

    Only much later, Anti-Islamism became an influential political attitude in Western Europe; this happened only after the Pope of Rome, due to his military ineptitude, economic weakness, and political fragility was placed under Frankish political tutelage. The rise of the barbarian Frankish kingdom and the prevalence of Franks in Rome (800 CE) led to the First Great Schism (867 CE) between Constantinople and Rome, which was another Frankish trickery carried out in order to fully place Rome under Frankish control and offer the barbarian Franks the chance to alter / corrupt the Catholic Church of Rome from inside. Only after these developments, Anti-Islamism appears in Western Europe as a tool of Frankish political propaganda.

     

    In fact, the earliest texts of the Eastern Roman Empire that mention the explosion of Islam in Arabia (Chronicle Paschale and the Chronicle of Theophanes the Confessor) presented Islam as rather a Christian heresy, not an independent religion. This shows the religious – cultural vicinity of the two systems and, at the same time, demonstrates that the constant wars between the Eastern Roman Empire and the Islamic Caliphate between the 7th and the 11th centuries reflected basically economic and political interests and not a radical religious opposition or rejection.

     

    This is another key dimension of Oriental History that the modern Western falsifiers want the entire world not to know.

    1. VI. ANCIENT YEMEN AND PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIA

     

    Speaking about the Southern, Southwestern, Southeastern and Eastern confines of the Arabian Peninsula, one has to totally and irrevocably dissociate Yemen and Oman from the Pre-Islamic Arabs. The Ancient Yemenites and Omanis were not Arabs, and their languages were very different from Arabic, although they all were Semitic languages. Similarly, modern Yemenites are not related to Arabs in any sense, because Yemen accepted Islam without ever being occupied by a single Arab soldier. The so-called phenomenon of the Islamic invasions did not occur in Yemen, Oman, Somalia and the entire Eastern African coast – at all! And no Arabs settled in Yemen under any circumstances whatsoever.

     

    Ancient Yemen developed its own syllabic writing system at least 1000 years before the first pre-Islamic Arabic texts are attested in Hedjaz (and this happens as late as the middle of the 3 rd c. CE). The Ancient Yemenite kingdoms of Saba (Sheba), Qataban, Awsan, Ma’in, Himyar, and Hadhramawt are documented by the unearthed epigraphic evidence and they were also constantly referred to in Ancient Assyrian, Babylonian, Iranian, Greek and Roman historical sources. Oman was always an Iranian province, and we have attested Iranian occupation of Yemen in both, the Achaemenid period (550-330 BCE) and the Sassanid times (224-651 CE). Few years, after the Roman annexation of Egypt and the death of Cleopatra (30 BCE), Octavian sent the Roman fleet as far as Aden to destroy that wealthy city-harbor that controlled the Indian Ocean maritime trade and imposed heavy taxes on all products sent from India and East Africa through the Bab al Mandeb straits of the Red Sea to Alexandria and the Mediterranean world.

     

    Describing harbors, navigation details, trade centers, and products across the sea route of the trade (plus its land and desert extensions/ramifications) between the Mediterranean World, East Africa, India, Central Asia, Indochina-Indonesia, and China, the text Periplus of the Red Sea (written around 70 CE) offers a dramatic contrast between civilized Yemen and Arabia.

     

    In an article titled ‘Civilized Yemen vs. Barbaric Arabia: the Historical Divide will shape the Future’, published in Buzzle (6 August 2005), I included an English translation of the text, and I analyzed extensively the specific excerpt of this text. I republish the excerpt here as well:

     

    Starting by paragraph 19 of his text, the author describes the navigation at the Eastern edge of the Red Sea. He refers to Leuke Kome (“White Town”) as the first harbour and port of call on the sailor’s way to the south. Since the departure is given not from Arsinoe (Suez) but Myos Hormos (the Mouse’s Bay), which corresponds to al Ghardaq – Hurghada in the Egyptian Red Sea coast, and the distance mentioned is 1000 to 1500 stadia (1 stadium equals 185 m), we deduce that Leuke Kome must be identified as the modern coastal town Al Wadjh.

    The text refers to the Roman military presence (“ekatontarchos”: a centurion, officer leading 100 Roman soldiers), Roman fiscal presence (“paraleptes tes tetartes”: a customs officer dispatched in order to get 25% of the passing merchandise as tax), as well as a land road to the Aramaic Nabataean capital Rekem / Petra of King Malichus (certainly Malichus II). The Roman garrisons ensured safety for the land trade, since the main part of the merchandises (sent to Rekem and further on to Jerusalem, Damascus, Antioch, or Palmyra) was transported from Yemen by sea to Leuke Kome. Who were the inhabitants of that place? Since Leuke Kome does NOT belong to ‘Arabia’, we can deduce that they were probably Aramaeans, possibly of the highly civilized Nabataean branch, since the text makes a striking differentiation between them and the Arab inhabitants of the coast immediately in the south of Leuke Kome.

    According to the Periplus of the Red Sea, civilization ends at Leuke Kome, and starts again around Mouza that is in the modern Yemenite Red Sea coast. What lies between them is the realm of Arab barbarism according to the author of the text (paragraph 20), which reads as follows:

    “Immediately after this port (Leuke Kome) starts Arabia, which is extended alongside a large part of the Red Sea. It is inhabited by various peoples and tribes, whose languages differ either a little or totally. The coastal zone features many groups of huts of the fish–eaters, whereas the inland includes hamlets and pastures, being inhabited by a people who speak two languages and have a perverted character. These people rob those who deviate from their sailing just in the middle of the sea, and come nearby their coasts. They arrest all the shipwrecked, so that they make later use of them as captives. That is why the Kings of Yemen attack them, and hold many of them as prisoners. They are called Canraites (note: this is the single time this term was used in Ancient Greek literature). Truly, any sort of navigation nearby the coast of Arabia is particularly dangerous, and this area is characterized by a lack of ports and offers few possibilities of anchorage, being full of perilous rocks, difficult of reach because of the rocky precipices, and awful from any viewpoint. That is why when we sail south, we navigate in the open sea, and as fast as possible, until we reach the Katakekavmene Neso (‘Scorched Island’). Immediately after that island, there are plenty of lands inhabited by civilized people, who have large cattle, and use camels for their trade and transportation”.

    Here we are already among the ancient Yemenites! The Katakekavmene Island can be identified with Farasan islands, slightly north of the Northern Yemenite borderline. The text enters then paragraph 21, as follows:

    “Beyond these areas, in the last bay of the coast that is extended on our left during our navigation, lies Mouza, which is an official (“nomimon”: controlled by the state) port of call. If we follow the correct navigation line to the south, it lies in a distance of 12000 stadia from Berenice. The city is exclusively inhabited by Yemenites, captains and mariners, and is burgeoning with commercial activity (lit. “the trade is exceeding”) since it plays a vital role in the commerce up to Barygaza, and in this business the Mouza people use their own equipment”.

     

    I think that further comments are not needed. As a matter of fact, in the middle of the 1st c. CE when the Periplus was written, the merged kingdoms of Saba and Himyar had replaced Qataban, and controlled the entire Somali coast of Eastern Africa as colony (from the Horn of Africa to approximately the area of Dares salaam in today’s Tanzania). Similarly, the kingdom of Hadhramwt had the island of Socotra as colony. Yemenites had excellent navigational skills and know how, having been the undisputed masters of the Indian Ocean navigation for almost 1500 years before the arrival of Islam. Whenever we refer to Islamic times’ navigation between the Arabian Peninsula and Eastern Africa up to China, we mean that it was almost exclusively in the hands of the Yemenite Muslims who by accepting Islam started using Arabic and gradually abandoned their native language. They were called Arabs, but in fact they were not Arabs.

     

    However, in today’s Hadhramawt, Socotra and North Somalia (Bossasso), two languages originating from the Ancient Yemenite languages have survived. Hundreds of thousands of people are native in these languages. Last but not the least, the decipherment of the Ancient Yemenite writing was done through constant comparisons with Ge’ez which is the writing system of the Ancient Abyssinians and at the same time the religious language of the Christian Abyssinian state of Axum. In fact, Ge’ez is a late Yemenite writing and the striking similarities helped scholars rapidly complete the decipherment of the Ancient Yemenite writing. This is not strange at all because the Abyssinians are just a Yemenite tribe that crossed the Red Sea and settled in the African coast in the second half of the 1st millennium BCE. The name Habashat has been attested in Ancient Yemenite epigraphic evidence as well.

     

    1. VII. HOMOGENEITY vs. HETEROGENEITY IN THE MIDDLE EAST

     

    Speaking about the entire area of the Ottoman Caliphate (the term ‘Middle East’ being false and racist), one would however be wrong to conclude, in spite of the aforementioned, that the region has lacked homogeneity either historically or presently.

     

    Homogeneity does not exclude diversification. And diversification does not mean heterogeneity.

     

    In fact, before 500 years, there was an excellent, remarkable homogeneity among all peoples and nations inhabiting the vast area between Morocco and Indonesia, prior to the arrival of the Western European colonial powers. To move from the Atlantic coast to Buddhist Myanmar in 1530, one needed to cross only three borders, namely those between: a) the Berber Moroccan kingdom and the Ottoman Empire, b) the Ottoman Empire and Safavid Iran, and c) Safavid Iran and Mughal India.

     

    And despite all possible local wars among Muslim governments or conflicts between Muslims and followers of other religions in the wider region of the Islamic world, there was never hatred and evilness as much as after the arrival of the alien intruders, who came from Western Europe after they had already rejected Christianity and replaced it with Freemasonic Satanism in the backstage of politics back in their countries. It is only the presence of the French, the English, the Dutch, the Spaniards, the Portuguese, the Belgians, and the Americans that opened Pandora’s Box in Asia, Africa and America, turning high civilizations to utmost misery, excruciating poverty, abject materialism, fratricidal wreckage, and compact barbarism. They found a world that looked almost like a Paradise, and they turned it to the worst version of Hell.

     

  • NATO Press Release (2014)120: Wales Summit Declaration

    NATO Press Release (2014)120: Wales Summit Declaration

    Meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Heads of State and Government – NATO Wales Summit

    nato_wales

    Wales Summit Declaration

    Issued by the Heads of State and Government
    participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council
    in Wales 4-5 September 2014

    1. We, the Heads of State and Government of the member countries of the North Atlantic Alliance, have gathered in Wales at a pivotal moment in Euro-Atlantic security. Russia’s aggressive actions against Ukraine have fundamentally challenged our vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. Growing instability in our southern neighbourhood, from the Middle East to North Africa, as well as transnational and multi-dimensional threats, are also challenging our security. These can all have long-term consequences for peace and security in the Euro-Atlantic region and stability across the globe.
    2. Our Alliance remains an essential source of stability in this unpredictable world. Together as strong democracies, we are united in our commitment to the Washington Treaty and the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations. Based on solidarity, Alliance cohesion, and the indivisibility of our security, NATO remains the transatlantic framework for strong collective defence and the essential forum for security consultations and decisions among Allies. The greatest responsibility of the Alliance is to protect and defend our territories and our populations against attack, as set out in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. As stated in the Transatlantic Declaration that we issued today, we are committed to further strengthening the transatlantic bond and to providing the resources, capabilities, and political will required to ensure our Alliance remains ready to meet any challenge. We stand ready to act together and decisively to defend freedom and our shared values of individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.
    3. Today we reaffirm our commitment to fulfil all three core tasks set out in our Strategic Concept: collective defence, crisis management, and cooperative security. Here in Wales, we have taken decisions to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. We are reaffirming our strong commitment to collective defence and to ensuring security and assurance for all Allies; we are adapting our operations, including in Afghanistan, in light of progress made and remaining challenges; and we are strengthening our partnerships with countries and organisations around the globe to better build security together.
    4. Every day, our troops deliver the security that is the foundation of our prosperity and our way of life. We pay tribute to all the brave men and women from Allied and partner nations who have served, and continue to serve, in NATO-led operations and missions. We owe an eternal debt of gratitude to all those who have lost their lives or been injured, and we extend our profound sympathy to their families and loved ones.
    5. In order to ensure that our Alliance is ready to respond swiftly and firmly to the new security challenges, today we have approved the NATO Readiness Action Plan. It provides a coherent and comprehensive package of necessary measures to respond to the changes in the security environment on NATO’s borders and further afield that are of concern to Allies. It responds to the challenges posed by Russia and their strategic implications. It also responds to the risks and threats emanating from our southern neighbourhood, the Middle East and North Africa. The Plan strengthens NATO’s collective defence. It also strengthens our crisis management capability. The Plan will contribute to ensuring that NATO remains a strong, ready, robust, and responsive Alliance capable of meeting current and future challenges from wherever they may arise.
    6. The elements of the Plan include measures that address both the continuing need for assurance of Allies and the adaptation of the Alliance’s military strategic posture.
    7. The assurance measures include continuous air, land, and maritime presence and meaningful military activity in the eastern part of the Alliance, both on a rotational basis. They will provide the fundamental baseline requirement for assurance and deterrence, and are flexible and scalable in response to the evolving security situation.
    8. Adaptation measures include the components required to ensure that the Alliance can fully address the security challenges it might face. We will significantly enhance the responsiveness of our NATO Response Force (NRF) by developing force packages that are able to move rapidly and respond to potential challenges and threats. As part of it, we will establish a Very High Readiness Joint Task Force (VJTF), a new Allied joint force that will be able to deploy within a few days to respond to challenges that arise, particularly at the periphery of NATO’s territory. This force should consist of a land component with appropriate air, maritime, and special operations forces available. Readiness of elements of the VJTF will be tested through short-notice exercises. We will also establish an appropriate command and control presence and some in-place force enablers on the territories of eastern Allies at all times, with contributions from Allies on a rotational basis, focusing on planning and exercising collective defence scenarios. If required, they will also facilitate reinforcement of Allies located at NATO’s periphery for deterrence and collective defence. We will further enhance NATO’s ability to quickly and effectively reinforce those Allies, including through preparation of infrastructure, prepositioning of equipment and supplies, and designation of specific bases. Adequate host nation support will be critical in this respect. We will also ensure that our Allied forces maintain the adequate readiness and coherence needed to conduct NATO’s full range of missions, including deterring aggression against NATO Allies and demonstrating preparedness to defend NATO territory. We will enhance our Standing Naval Forces to support maritime situational awareness and to conduct the full spectrum of conventional maritime operations.
    9. We will ensure that the current NATO Command Structure remains robust, agile, and able to undertake all elements of effective command and control for simultaneous challenges; this includes a regional focus to exploit regional expertise and enhance situational awareness. Contributing Allies will raise the readiness and capabilities of the Headquarters Multinational Corps Northeast and will also enhance its role as a hub for regional cooperation. We will enhance our intelligence and strategic awareness and we will place renewed emphasis on advance planning.
    10. We will establish an enhanced exercise programme with an increased focus on exercising collective defence including practising comprehensive responses to complex civil-military scenarios. The Connected Forces Initiative (CFI) we agreed in Chicago will be instrumental in ensuring full coherence of the training and exercise elements of the Readiness Action Plan.
    11. Development and implementation of the adaptation measures will be done on the basis of the evolving strategic environment in the regions of concern, including in the eastern and southern peripheries of the Alliance, which will be closely monitored, assessed, and prepared for.
    12. We have tasked our Defence Ministers to oversee the expeditious implementation of the Readiness Action Plan, which will begin immediately.
    13. We will ensure that NATO is able to effectively address the specific challenges posed by hybrid warfare threats, where a wide range of overt and covert military, paramilitary, and civilian measures are employed in a highly integrated design. It is essential that the Alliance possesses the necessary tools and procedures required to deter and respond effectively to hybrid warfare threats, and the capabilities to reinforce national forces. This will also include enhancing strategic communications, developing exercise scenarios in light of hybrid threats, and strengthening coordination between NATO and other organisations, in line with relevant decisions taken, with a view to improving information sharing, political consultations, and staff-to-staff coordination. We welcome the establishment of the NATO-accredited Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence in Latvia as a meaningful contribution to NATO’s efforts in this area. We have tasked the work on hybrid warfare to be reviewed alongside the implementation of the Readiness Action Plan.
    14. We agree to reverse the trend of declining defence budgets, to make the most effective use of our funds and to further a more balanced sharing of costs and responsibilities. Our overall security and defence depend both on how much we spend and how we spend it. Increased investments should be directed towards meeting our capability priorities, and Allies also need to display the political will to provide required capabilities and deploy forces when they are needed. A strong defence industry across the Alliance, including a stronger defence industry in Europe and greater defence industrial cooperation within Europe and across the Atlantic, remains essential for delivering the required capabilities. NATO and EU efforts to strengthen defence capabilities are complementary. Taking current commitments into account, we are guided by the following considerations:
      • Allies currently meeting the NATO guideline to spend a minimum of 2% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence will aim to continue to do so. Likewise, Allies spending more than 20% of their defence budgets on major equipment, including related Research & Development, will continue to do so.
      • Allies whose current proportion of GDP spent on defence is below this level will:
        • halt any decline in defence expenditure;
        • aim to increase defence expenditure in real terms as GDP grows;
        • aim to move towards the 2% guideline within a decade with a view to meeting their NATO Capability Targets and filling NATO’s capability shortfalls.
      • Allies who currently spend less than 20% of their annual defence spending on major new equipment, including related Research & Development, will aim, within a decade, to increase their annual investments to 20% or more of total defence expenditures.
      • All Allies will:
        • ensure that their land, air and maritime forces meet NATO agreed guidelines for deployability and sustainability and other agreed output metrics;
        • ensure that their armed forces can operate together effectively, including through the implementation of agreed NATO standards and doctrines.
    15. Allies will review national progress annually. This will be discussed at future Defence Ministerial meetings and reviewed by Heads of State and Government at future Summits.
    16. We condemn in the strongest terms Russia’s escalating and illegal military intervention in Ukraine and demand that Russia stop and withdraw its forces from inside Ukraine and along the Ukrainian border. This violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity is a serious breach of international law and a major challenge to Euro-Atlantic security. We do not and will not recognise Russia’s illegal and illegitimate ‘annexation’ of Crimea. We demand that Russia comply with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities; end its illegitimate occupation of Crimea; refrain from aggressive actions against Ukraine; withdraw its troops; halt the flow of weapons, equipment, people and money across the border to the separatists; and stop fomenting tension along and across the Ukrainian border. Russia must use its influence with the separatists to de-escalate the situation and take concrete steps to allow for a political and a diplomatic solution which respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, territorial integrity, and internationally recognised borders.
    17. We are deeply concerned that the violence and insecurity in the region caused by Russia and the Russian-backed separatists are resulting in a deteriorating humanitarian situation and material destruction in eastern Ukraine. We are concerned about discrimination against the native Crimean Tatars and other members of local communities in the Crimean peninsula. We demand that Russia take the necessary measures to ensure the safety, rights and freedoms of everyone living on the peninsula. This violence and insecurity also led to the tragic downing of Malaysia Airlines passenger flight MH17 on 17 July 2014. Recalling United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2166, Allies call upon all states and actors in the region to ensure immediate, safe, and unrestricted access to the crash site of MH17 to allow resumption of the investigation and the repatriation of the remains and belongings of the victims still present at the site. Those directly and indirectly responsible for the downing of MH17 should be held accountable and brought to justice as soon as possible.
    18. We are also concerned by Russia’s pattern of disregard for international law, including the UN Charter; its behaviour towards Georgia and the Republic of Moldova; its violation of fundamental European security arrangements and commitments, including those in the Helsinki Final Act; its long-standing non-implementation of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE); and its use of military and other instruments to coerce neighbours. This threatens the rules-based international order and challenges Euro-Atlantic security. In addition, these developments may potentially have long-term effects on stability in the Black Sea region, which remains an important component of Euro-Atlantic security. Russia’s current actions are contrary to the principles on which the established confidence building mechanisms in the Black Sea were built. We will continue to support, as appropriate, regional efforts by Black Sea littoral states aimed at ensuring security and stability.
    19. While Russia continues to intervene militarily, arm separatists, and foment instability in Ukraine, we support the sanctions imposed by the European Union (EU), the G7, and others, which are an essential part of the overall international effort to address the destabilizing behaviour of Russia, bring it to de­escalate, and arrive at a political solution to the crisis created by its actions. Amongst these are measures taken by Allies including Canada, Norway and the United States, as well as the EU decisions to limit access to capital markets for Russian state-owned financial institutions, restrict trade in arms, establish restrictions for export of dual use goods for military end uses, curtail Russian access to sensitive defence and energy sector technologies, and other measures.
    20. Allies have had, and will continue in the course of our ongoing work, a strategic discussion regarding Euro-Atlantic security and Russia. This discussion provides the basis for NATO’s vision regarding our approach to, and the mechanisms of the Alliance’s relations with, Russia in the future.
    21. For more than two decades, NATO has strived to build a partnership with Russia, including through the mechanism of the NATO-Russia Council, based upon the NATO-Russia Founding Act and the Rome Declaration. Russia has breached its commitments, as well as violated international law, thus breaking the trust at the core of our cooperation. The decisions we have taken at the Summit demonstrate our respect for the rules-based European security architecture.
    22. We continue to believe that a partnership between NATO and Russia based on respect for international law would be of strategic value. We continue to aspire to a cooperative, constructive relationship with Russia, including reciprocal confidence building and transparency measures and increased mutual understanding of NATO’s and Russia’s non-strategic nuclear force postures in Europe, based on our common security concerns and interests, in a Europe where each country freely chooses its future. We regret that the conditions for that relationship do not currently exist. As a result, NATO’s decision to suspend all practical civilian and military cooperation between NATO and Russia remains in place. Political channels of communication, however, remain open.
    23. The Alliance does not seek confrontation and poses no threat to Russia. But we cannot and will not compromise on the principles on which our Alliance and security in Europe and North America rest. NATO is both transparent and predictable, and we are resolved to display endurance and resilience, as we have done since the founding of our Alliance. The nature of the Alliance’s relations with Russia and our aspiration for partnership will be contingent on our seeing a clear, constructive change in Russia’s actions which demonstrates compliance with international law and its international obligations and responsibilities.
    24. An independent, sovereign, and stable Ukraine, firmly committed to democracy and the rule of law, is key to Euro-Atlantic security.  At a time when Ukraine’s security is being undermined, the Alliance continues its full support for Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders. The broad support for United Nations General Assembly Resolution 68/262 on the Territorial Integrity of Ukraine, demonstrates the international rejection of Russia’s illegal and illegitimate ‘annexation’ of Crimea. We are extremely concerned by the further escalation of aggressive actions in eastern Ukraine. We see a concerted campaign of violence by Russia and Russian-backed separatists aimed at destabilising Ukraine as a sovereign state.
    25. We commend the people of Ukraine for their commitment to freedom and democracy and their determination to decide their own future and foreign policy course free from outside interference. We welcome the holding of free and fair Presidential elections on 25 May 2014 under difficult conditions and the signature of the Association Agreement with the European Union on 27 June 2014, which testify to the consolidation of Ukraine’s democracy and its European aspiration. In this context, we look forward to the elections to the Verkhovna Rada in October 2014.
    26. We encourage Ukraine to further promote an inclusive political process, based on democratic values and respect for human rights, minorities, and the rule of law.  We welcome President Poroshenko’s Peace Plan and call on all parties to meet their commitments, including those made in Geneva and Berlin. We call on Russia to engage in a constructive dialogue with the Ukrainian government. We actively support ongoing diplomatic efforts towards a sustainable political solution to the conflict which respects Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, and territorial integrity within its internationally recognised borders.
    27. We commend and fully support the actions of other international organisations that are contributing to de-escalation and pursuing a peaceful solution to the crisis, in particular the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the EU. We welcome the swift deployment of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission, which must be able to operate unhindered and have access to all regions of Ukraine in order to fulfil its mandate. We also welcome the decision by the EU to launch a Common Security and Defence Policy mission to assist Ukraine in the field of civilian security sector reform, including police and the rule of law.
    28. Recognising the right of Ukraine to restore peace and order and to defend its people and territory, we encourage the Ukrainian armed forces and security services to continue to exercise the utmost restraint in their ongoing operation so as to avoid casualties among the local civilian population.
    29. Ukraine is a long-standing and distinctive partner of the Alliance.  At our meeting here in Wales, we met with President Poroshenko and issued a joint statement. We highly value Ukraine’s past and present contributions to all current Allied operations as well as to the NATO Response Force. We encourage and will continue to support Ukraine’s implementation of wide-ranging reforms through the Annual National Programme, in the framework of our Distinctive Partnership. We have launched additional efforts to support the reform and transformation of the security and defence sectors and promote greater interoperability between Ukraine’s and NATO forces. These efforts are designed to enhance Ukraine’s ability to provide for its own security. We welcome Ukraine’s participation in the Partnership Interoperability Initiative and Ukraine’s interest in the enhanced opportunities within the Initiative, and look forward to its future participation.
    30. Russia’s illegitimate occupation of Crimea and military intervention in eastern Ukraine have raised legitimate concerns among several of NATO’s other partners in Eastern Europe. Allies will continue to support the right of partners to make independent and sovereign choices on foreign and security policy, free from external pressure and coercion. Allies also remain committed in their support to the territorial integrity, independence, and sovereignty of Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova.
    31. In this context, we will continue to support efforts towards a peaceful settlement of the conflicts in the south Caucasus, as well as in the Republic of Moldova, based upon these principles and the norms of international law, the UN Charter, and the Helsinki Final Act. The persistence of these protracted conflicts continues to be a matter of particular concern, undermining the opportunities for citizens in the region to reach their full potential as members of the Euro-Atlantic community. We urge all parties to engage constructively and with reinforced political will in peaceful conflict resolution, within the established negotiation frameworks.
    32. We are deeply concerned by the growing instability and mounting transnational and multi-dimensional threats across the Middle East and North Africa region. These threats directly affect the security of the people living there, as well as our own security. Peace and stability in this region are essential for the Alliance. Therefore, we emphasise the need for lasting calm and an end to violence. We continue to support the legitimate aspirations of the peoples in this region for peace, security, democracy, justice, prosperity, and the preservation of their identity. We will continue to closely monitor the situation and explore options for possible NATO assistance to bilateral and international efforts to promote stability and contribute to the response to the growing crisis in, and threats from, the Middle East region.
    33. The so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) poses a grave threat to the Iraqi people, to the Syrian people, to the wider region, and to our nations. We are outraged by ISIL’s recent barbaric attacks against all civilian populations, in particular the systematic and deliberate targeting of entire religious and ethnic communities. We condemn in the strongest terms ISIL’s violent and cowardly acts. If the security of any Ally is threatened, we will not hesitate to take all necessary steps to ensure our collective defence. The rapid deterioration of the security situation in Iraq and ISIL’s expanding threat underline the necessity for a political solution based upon an inclusive Iraqi government with cross-sectarian representation. Additionally, in light of the dramatic humanitarian consequences of this crisis and its repercussions on regional stability and security, many Allies have already provided, and are offering, security and humanitarian assistance to Iraq on a bilateral basis.
    34. We re-affirm NATO’s continued commitment to the NATO-Iraq partnership, through which we will revitalise our effort to help Iraq build more effective security forces. That partnership encompasses, within the existing Individual Partnership and Cooperation Programme, cooperation in the areas of: political dialogue; education and training; response to terrorism; defence institution building; border security; and communications strategy. Allies and partners should continue to help coordinate humanitarian assistance to Iraq through the appropriate channels. We welcome the role that the Euro-Atlantic Disaster Response Coordination Centre is playing. We have also agreed that NATO will help coordinate among Allies and partners security assistance support to Iraq; this could also include helping coordinate the provision of lift to deliver assistance. Should the Iraqi government request it, NATO will stand ready to consider measures in the framework of NATO’s Defence and Related Security Capacity Building Initiative with an eye to launching such an effort in the near term. NATO will support ongoing bilateral efforts of Allies and partners by soliciting and coordinating, on a voluntary basis, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance assets. Additionally, Allies will seek to enhance their cooperation in exchanging information on returning foreign fighters.
    35. We continue to follow the ongoing crisis in Syria with grave concern. We condemn in the strongest terms the campaign of violence against the Syrian people by the Assad regime, which caused the current chaos and devastation in this country. We call on the Syrian government to fully comply with the provisions of all relevant UNSCRs and to immediately commit to a genuine political transition in accordance with the 30 June 2012 Geneva Communiqué. We believe a negotiated political transition is essential to bring an end to the bloodshed. We highlight the important role of the moderate opposition to protect communities against the dual threats of the Syrian regime’s tyranny and ISIL’s extremism. More than three years of fighting have had dramatic humanitarian consequences and a growing impact on the security of regional countries. Despite possible destabilising effects on their economies and societies, NATO member Turkey, our regional partner Jordan, as well as neighbouring Lebanon, are generously hosting millions of refugees and displaced Syrians. The deployment of Patriot missiles to defend the population and territory of Turkey is a strong demonstration of NATO’s resolve and ability to defend and deter any potential threat against any Ally.
    36. We welcome the successful completion by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW)-United Nations Joint Mission and Allies of the removal and elimination of Syria’s declared chemical weapons, as called for in UNSCR 2118 and OPCW Executive Council decisions. NATO Allies played a key role in ensuring this success as well as in the destruction of the chemical materials themselves. We remain highly concerned by continuing reports of the use of chemicals as weapons in Syria. Twelve chemical weapon production facilities are still awaiting destruction and questions remain concerning the completeness and accuracy of Syria’s chemical weapons declaration. We urge the Assad government to answer all outstanding questions regarding its declaration to the OPCW, to address all remaining issues, and to take action to ensure full compliance with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention, UNSCR 2118, and OPCW Executive Council decisions.
    37. ISIL has, with its recent advance into Iraq, become a transnational threat. The Assad regime has contributed to the emergence of ISIL in Syria and its expansion beyond. ISIL’s presence in both Syria and Iraq is a threat to regional stability. It has become a key obstacle to political settlement in Syria and a serious risk to the stability and territorial integrity of Iraq. The people of Syria and Iraq and elsewhere in the region need the support of the international community to counter this threat. A coordinated international approach is required.
    38. We are deeply concerned by the ongoing violence and the deteriorating security situation in Libya, which threaten to undermine the goals for which the Libyan people have suffered so much and which pose a threat to the wider region. We urge all parties to cease all violence and engage without delay in constructive efforts aimed at fostering an inclusive political dialogue in the interest of the entire Libyan people, as part of the democratic process. Recognising the central role of the UN in coordinating international efforts in Libya, we strongly support the ongoing efforts of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) to achieve an immediate ceasefire, scale down tensions, and contribute to national reconciliation. Our Operation Unified Protector demonstrated NATO’s determination, together with regional Arab partners, to protect the Libyan people. On the basis of NATO’s decision in October 2013, following a request by the Libyan authorities, we continue to stand ready to support Libya with advice on defence and security institution building and to develop a long-term partnership, possibly leading to Libya’s membership in the Mediterranean Dialogue, which would be a natural framework for our cooperation.
    39. While Mali has re-established a constitutional order, we recognise that terrorist acts and the trafficking of arms, drugs, and people across the Sahel-Sahara region threaten regional and our own security. We welcome the efforts of the UN and underscore the importance of a strong commitment by the international community to address the complex security and political challenges in this region. In this respect, we welcome the comprehensive Sahel strategies of the African Union and the EU. We also welcome the robust and credible military commitment of Allies in the Sahel-Sahara region, which contributes to the reaffirmation of the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the African countries concerned, and to the security of the Alliance. NATO is prepared to explore, upon request by the countries concerned, where it can contribute to address these challenges, in full coordination with UN, EU, regional and bilateral efforts.
    40. In the strategically important Western Balkans region, democratic values, the rule of law, and good neighbourly relations continue to play a pivotal role in maintaining lasting peace and stability. The Alliance remains fully committed to the stability and security of the region, and we will continue to actively support the Euro-Atlantic aspirations of countries in this region. Allies and their Western Balkans partners actively contribute to the maintenance of regional and international peace, including through regional cooperation formats.We welcome Serbia’s progress in building a stronger partnership with NATO and encourage Belgrade to continue on this path. We also welcome the progress achieved in Kosovo and encourage further efforts to strengthen democratic institutions and the rule of law throughout a multi-ethnic Kosovo. The 8 June 2014 parliamentary elections were largely in line with international standards and an important milestone. We look forward to the expeditious formation of a representative and inclusive government, committed to the EU-facilitated Belgrade-Pristina dialogue. We welcome the improvement of the security situation and the progress achieved through the dialogue. We commend both parties for their commitment to the Belgrade-Pristina agreement of 19 April 2013 and encourage continued work on its full implementation.
    41. We met yesterday in an expanded meeting on Afghanistan and, together with our International Security and Assistance Force (ISAF) partners, we issued a Wales Summit Declaration on Afghanistan.
    42. For over a decade, NATO Allies and partner nations from across the world have stood shoulder to shoulder with Afghanistan in the largest operation in the history of the Alliance. This unprecedented effort has enhanced global security and contributed to a better future for Afghan men, women, and children. We honour the Afghan and international personnel who have lost their lives or been injured in this endeavour.
    43. With the end of ISAF in December 2014, the nature and scope of our engagement with Afghanistan will change. We envisage three parallel, mutually reinforcing strands of activity: in the short term, NATO Allies and partner nations stand ready to continue to train, advise, and assist the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) after 2014 through the non-combat Resolute Support Mission; in the medium term, we reaffirm our commitment to contribute to the financial sustainment of the ANSF; in the long term, we remain committed to strengthening NATO’s partnership with Afghanistan. We count on Afghanistan’s commitment and cooperation.
    44. We recognise the particular importance of advancing regional cooperation and good neighbourly relations for the security and stability of Afghanistan. We remain determined to support the Afghan people in their efforts to build a stable, sovereign, democratic, and united country, where rule of law and good governance prevail, and in which human rights for all, especially the rights of women, including their full participation in decision making, and those of children, are fully protected. Working with the Government of Afghanistan and the wider international community, our goal remains to never again be threatened by terrorists from within Afghanistan. Our commitment to Afghanistan will endure.
    45. We commend the Kosovo Force (KFOR) for the successful conduct of its mission over the past 15 years, in accordance with UNSCR 1244. KFOR will continue to contribute to a safe and secure environment and freedom of movement in Kosovo in close cooperation with the Kosovo authorities and the EU, as agreed. KFOR will also continue to support the development of a peaceful, stable and multi-ethnic Kosovo. The Alliance will continue to assist the Kosovo Security Force with advice on the ground and will keep the nature of further support under review.
    46. We will continue to maintain KFOR’s robust and credible capability to carry out its mission. Sustained improvement in the security situation and the successful implementation of agreements reached in the EU-facilitated dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina will allow NATO to consider a possible change in its force posture. Any reduction of our troop presence will be measured against clear benchmarks and indicators, and will remain conditions-based and not calendar-driven.
    47. Operation Active Endeavour in the Mediterranean will continue to adapt to meet evolving security risks in an area of essential strategic interest to the Alliance. Somalia-based piracy has not been eradicated. NATO has contributed to a steady reduction in pirate activity off the coast of Somalia through Operation Ocean Shield, working in coordination with the relevant international actors, including the EU and other nations, in line with the relevant decisions taken. We have agreed to continue NATO’s counter piracy involvement off the coast of Somalia until the end of 2016, utilising a focused presence to optimise the use of NATO assets. Both of these operations contribute to enhancing the Alliance’s maritime situational awareness, interoperability, and engagement with partners.
    48. The greatest responsibility of the Alliance is to protect and defend our territory and our populations against attack, as set out in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty. No one should doubt NATO’s resolve if the security of any of its members were to be threatened. NATO will maintain the full range of capabilities necessary to deter and defend against any threat to the safety and security of our populations, wherever it should arise.
    49. Deterrence, based on an appropriate mix of nuclear, conventional, and missile defence capabilities, remains a core element of our overall strategy.
    50. As long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will remain a nuclear alliance. The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Allies. The independent strategic nuclear forces of the United Kingdom and France have a deterrent role of their own and contribute to the overall deterrence and security of the Alliance. The circumstances in which any use of nuclear weapons might have to be contemplated are extremely remote.
    51. The Allies’ conventional forces make essential contributions to the deterrence of a broad range of threats. They contribute to providing visible assurance of NATO’s cohesion as well as the Alliance’s ability and commitment to respond to the security concerns of each and every Ally.
    52. Missile defence can complement the role of nuclear weapons in deterrence; it cannot substitute for them. The capability is purely defensive.
    53. Arms control, disarmament, and non-proliferation continue to play an important role in the achievement of the Alliance’s security objectives. Both the success and failure of these efforts can have a direct impact on the threat environment of NATO. In this context, it is of paramount importance that disarmament and non-proliferation commitments under existing treaties are honoured, including the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, which is a crucial element of Euro-Atlantic security. In that regard, Allies call on Russia to preserve the viability of the INF Treaty through ensuring full and verifiable compliance.
    54. The threat to NATO populations, territory, and forces posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles continues to increase and missile defence forms part of a broader response to counter it. At our Summit in Lisbon in 2010 we decided to develop a NATO Ballistic Missile Defence (BMD) capability to pursue our core task of collective defence. Missile defence will become an integral part of the Alliance’s overall defence posture and contribute to the indivisible security of the Alliance.
    55. The aim of this capability is to provide full coverage and protection for all NATO European populations, territory, and forces against the increasing threats posed by the proliferation of ballistic missiles, based on the principles of indivisibility of Allies’ security and NATO solidarity, equitable sharing of risks and burdens, as well as reasonable challenge, taking into account the level of threat, affordability, and technical feasibility, and in accordance with the latest common threat assessments agreed by the Alliance. Should international efforts reduce the threats posed by ballistic missile proliferation, NATO missile defence can and will adapt accordingly.
    56. At our Summit in Chicago in 2012, we declared the achievement of an Interim NATO BMD Capability as an operationally significant first step, offering maximum coverage, within available means, to defend our populations, territory, and forces across southern NATO Europe against a ballistic missile attack. NATO Interim BMD is operationally capable.
    57. Today we are pleased to note that the deployment of Aegis Ashore in Deveselu, Romania is on track to be completed in the 2015 timeframe. Aegis Ashore will be offered to NATO and will provide a significant increase in NATO BMD capability. We are also pleased to note the forward deployment of BMD-capable Aegis ships to Rota, Spain. Building on the Interim Capability, the additional Aegis BMD-capable ships could be made available to NATO.
    58. Today we are also pleased to note that additional voluntary national contributions have been offered, and that several Allies are developing, including through multinational cooperation, or are acquiring further BMD capabilities that could become available to the Alliance. Our aim remains to provide the Alliance with a NATO operational BMD that can provide full coverage and protection for all NATO European populations, territory, and forces, based on voluntary national contributions, including nationally funded interceptors and sensors, hosting arrangements, and on the expansion of the Active Layered Theatre Ballistic Missile Defence (ALTBMD) capability. Only the command and control systems of ALTBMD and their expansion to territorial defence are eligible for common funding.
    59. We note the potential opportunities for cooperation on missile defence, and encourage Allies to explore possible additional voluntary national contributions, including through multinational cooperation, to provide relevant capabilities, as well as to use potential synergies in planning, development, procurement, and deployment. We also note that BMD features in two Smart Defence projects.
    60. As with all of NATO’s operations, full political control by Allies over military actions undertaken pursuant to this capability will be ensured. To this end, we will continue to deepen political oversight of NATO BMD as the capability develops. We welcome the completion of the Alliance’s review of the arrangements for NATO Interim BMD Capability and note that the Alliance will be ready to make use of additional Allied contributions as they are made available to the Alliance. We also task the Council to regularly review the implementation of the NATO BMD capability, including before the Foreign and Defence Ministers’ meetings, and prepare a comprehensive report on progress and issues to be addressed for its future development by our next Summit.
    61. We remain prepared to engage with third states, on a case-by-case basis, to enhance transparency and confidence and to increase ballistic missile defence effectiveness. Initial steps have been made and could lead to various forms of engagement with third states on missile defence. As we did in Chicago in 2012, we reaffirm that NATO missile defence is not directed against Russia and will not undermine Russia’s strategic deterrence capabilities. NATO missile defence is intended to defend against potential threats emanating from outside the Euro-Atlantic area.
    62. The Alliance reaffirms its long-standing commitment to conventional arms control as a key element of Euro-Atlantic security and emphasises the importance of full implementation and compliance to rebuild trust and confidence. Russia’s unilateral military activity in and around Ukraine has undermined peace, security, and stability across the region, and its selective implementation of the Vienna Document and Open Skies Treaty and long-standing non-implementation of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty (CFE) have eroded the positive contributions of these arms control instruments. Allies call on Russia to fully adhere to its commitments. Allies are determined to preserve, strengthen, and modernise conventional arms control in Europe, based on key principles and commitments, including reciprocity, transparency, and host nation consent.
    63. At our last Summit in Chicago we set ourselves the ambitious goal of NATO Forces 2020: modern, tightly connected forces equipped, trained, exercised, and commanded so as to be able to meet NATO’s Level of Ambition and so that they can operate together and with partners in any environment. We judge that the goal remains valid and reaffirm our commitment to delivering it. The Readiness Action Plan complements and reinforces NATO Forces 2020 by improving our overall readiness and responsiveness.
    64. NATO needs, now more than ever, modern, robust, and capable forces at high readiness, in the air, on land and at sea, in order to meet current and future challenges. We are committed to further enhancing our capabilities. To this end, today we have agreed a Defence Planning Package with a number of priorities, such as enhancing and reinforcing training and exercises; command and control, including for demanding air operations; intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; NATO’s ballistic missile defence capability, in accordance with the decisions taken at the 2010 Lisbon and 2012 Chicago Summits, including the voluntary nature of national contributions; cyber defence; as well as improving the robustness and readiness of our land forces for both collective defence and crisis response. Fulfilment of these priorities will increase the Alliance’s collective capabilities and better prepare NATO to address current and future threats and challenges. We have agreed this Package in order to inform our defence investments and to improve the capabilities that Allies have in national inventories. In this context, NATO joint air power capabilities require longer-term consideration.
    65. We continue to emphasise multinational cooperation. Following the Joint Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (JISR) initiative launched at our Chicago Summit, work is on track to deliver an initial operational capability to support NATO operations and NATO Response Force rotations from 2016 onwards. In this context, we note the progress in the development of the Alliance Ground Surveillance capability that will become available for operational deployment in 2017. Furthermore, NATO’s Airborne Early Warning and Control Force will continue to be modernised to maintain its full operational capability. JISR exemplifies the advantages of multinational cooperation in capability development and employment among Allies, which allow for significant operational and cost benefits. In this spirit, several Allies are establishing a multinational MQ-9 remotely-piloted air system users group, in particular to enhance interoperability and reduce overall costs.
    66. In a similar vein, we highlight the fact that, since we launched the Smart Defence initiative at our Chicago Summit, an ever growing number of multinational projects have been set up to help Allies harmonise requirements, pool resources, and achieve tangible benefits in terms of operational effectiveness as well as cost efficiency. We are building on this positive momentum, in particular to address Alliance priority capability requirements. Specifically, two groups of Allies have agreed to work on, respectively, increasing the availability of air-to-ground Precision Guided Munitions, and on the provision of a deployable airbase capability, and have signed Letters of Intent to this effect. A further two groups of Allies have decided to establish concrete projects for improving JISR information exchange in operations and ballistic missile defence, including naval training.
    67. Today we have also endorsed the NATO Framework Nations Concept. It focuses on groups of Allies coming together to work multinationally for the joint development of forces and capabilities required by the Alliance, facilitated by a framework nation. Its implementation will contribute to providing the Alliance with coherent sets of forces and capabilities, particularly in Europe. It will help demonstrate European Allies’ willingness to do more for our common security and also improve the balance of the provision of capabilities between the United States and European Allies as well as among European Allies themselves. To implement this concept, today, a group of ten Allies, facilitated by Germany as a framework nation and focusing on capability development, have, through a joint letter, committed to working systematically together, deepening and intensifying their cooperation in the long term, to create, in various configurations, a number of multinational projects to address Alliance priority areas across a broad spectrum of capabilities. They will initially concentrate on creating coherent sets of capabilities in the areas of logistics support; chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear protection; delivering fire-power from land, air, and sea; and deployable headquarters. Another group of seven Allies, facilitated by the United Kingdom as a framework nation, have also agreed today to establish the Joint Expeditionary Force (JEF), a rapidly deployable force capable of conducting the full spectrum of operations, including high intensity operations. The JEF will facilitate the efficient deployment of existing and emerging military capabilities and units. Additionally, a group of six Allies, facilitated by Italy as a framework nation and based on regional ties, will focus on improving a number of Alliance capability areas, such as stabilisation and reconstruction, provision of enablers, usability of land formations, and command and control. Other groupings are being developed in line with the Framework Nations Concept.
    68. Two Allies have announced their intention to establish a Combined Joint Expeditionary Force, to be delivered from 2016 and to be available for the full spectrum of operations, including at high intensity.
    69. We continue to build on the experience gained in recent operations and improve our interoperability through the Connected Forces Initiative (CFI). Today we have endorsed a substantial CFI Package consisting of six key deliverables, including the high-visibility exercise Trident Juncture 2015, with 25,000 personnel to be hosted by Spain, Portugal, and Italy; a broader and more demanding exercise programme from 2016 onwards; and a deployable Special Operations Component Command headquarters. As a key component in delivering NATO Forces 2020, the CFI addresses the full range of missions, including the most demanding, thereby demonstrating the continued cohesion and resolve of the Alliance. It provides the structure for Allies to train and exercise coherently; reinforces full-spectrum joint and combined training; promotes interoperability, including with partners; and leverages advances in technology, such as the Federated Mission Networking framework, which will enhance information sharing in the Alliance and with partners in support of training, exercises and operations.
    70. In this context, NATO will continue to work closely with the EU, as agreed, to ensure that our Smart Defence and the EU’s Pooling and Sharing initiatives are complementary and mutually reinforcing, and to support capability development and interoperability with a view to avoiding unnecessary duplication and maximising cost- effectiveness. We welcome the efforts of NATO nations and EU member states, in particular in the areas of strategic airlift and air-to-air refuelling, medical support, maritime surveillance, satellite communication, and training, as well as efforts of several nations in the area of remotely piloted aircraft systems. We also welcome the national efforts in these and other areas by European Allies and partners, which will benefit both organisations. The success of our efforts will continue to depend on mutual transparency and openness between the two organisations. We encourage making the fullest use of existing NATO-EU mechanisms to this effect.
    71. The geopolitical and economic importance of the maritime domain in the 21st century continues to grow. NATO needs to adapt to a complex, more crowded, rapidly evolving, and increasingly unpredictable maritime security environment. This necessitates a strengthening of the Alliance’s maritime capabilities, which should not be seen in isolation but as an integral part of NATO’s larger toolbox to safeguard the Alliance’s interests. We will therefore continue to intensify and expand our implementation of the Alliance Maritime Strategy, further enhancing the Alliance’s effectiveness in the maritime domain and its contributions to deterrence and collective defence, crisis management, cooperative security, and maritime security. We will reinvigorate NATO’s Standing Naval Forces by making their composition and the duration of national contributions more flexible and, in principle, no longer using them for protracted operations or for operations with low-end tasks. In addition, we will enhance their education, training, and exercise value, especially at the high end of the spectrum. We will also investigate ways to enhance further the effectiveness of the full range of Alliance maritime capabilities. Greater co-ordination, cooperation, and complementarity with relevant international organisations, including the EU, in line with the relevant decisions taken, as well as work with partner and non-partner nations, will be an important element of the implementation of the Alliance Maritime Strategy. We welcome the adoption of the EU’s Maritime Security Strategy in June 2014, which will potentially contribute to the security of all Allies.
    72. As the Alliance looks to the future, cyber threats and attacks will continue to become more common, sophisticated, and potentially damaging. To face this evolving challenge, we have endorsed an Enhanced Cyber Defence Policy, contributing to the fulfillment of the Alliance’s core tasks. The policy reaffirms the principles of the indivisibility of Allied security and of prevention, detection, resilience, recovery, and defence. It recalls that the fundamental cyber defence responsibility of NATO is to defend its own networks, and that assistance to Allies should be addressed in accordance with the spirit of solidarity, emphasizing the responsibility of Allies to develop the relevant capabilities for the protection of national networks. Our policy also recognises that international law, including international humanitarian law and the UN Charter, applies in cyberspace. Cyber attacks can reach a threshold that threatens national and Euro-Atlantic prosperity, security, and stability. Their impact could be as harmful to modern societies as a conventional attack. We affirm therefore that cyber defence is part of NATO’s core task of collective defence. A decision as to when a cyber attack would lead to the invocation of Article 5 would be taken by the North Atlantic Council on a case-by-case basis.
    73. We are committed to developing further our national cyber defence capabilities, and we will enhance the cyber security of national networks upon which NATO depends for its core tasks, in order to help make the Alliance resilient and fully protected. Close bilateral and multinational cooperation plays a key role in enhancing the cyber defence capabilities of the Alliance. We will continue to integrate cyber defence into NATO operations and operational and contingency planning, and enhance information sharing and situational awareness among Allies. Strong partnerships play a key role in addressing cyber threats and risks. We will therefore continue to engage actively on cyber issues with relevant partner nations on a case-by-case basis and with other international organisations, including the EU, as agreed, and will intensify our cooperation with industry through a NATO Industry Cyber Partnership. Technological innovations and expertise from the private sector are crucial to enable NATO and Allies to achieve the Enhanced Cyber Defence Policy’s objectives. We will improve the level of NATO’s cyber defence education, training, and exercise activities. We will develop the NATO cyber range capability, building, as a first step, on the Estonian cyber range capability, while taking into consideration the capabilities and requirements of the NATO CIS School and other NATO training and education bodies.
    74. NATO recognises the importance of inclusive, sustainable, innovative, and globally competitive defence industries, which include small and medium-sized enterprises, to develop and sustain national defence capabilities and the defence technological and industrial base in the whole of Europe and in North America.
    75. The proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction (WMD), as well as their means of delivery, by states and non-state actors continues to present a threat to our populations, territory, and forces. The Alliance is resolved to seek a safer world for all and to create the conditions for a world without nuclear weapons in accordance with the goals of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) in a way that promotes international stability and is based on the principle of undiminished security for all. Addressing serious proliferation challenges remains an urgent international priority.
    76. We call on Iran to seize the opportunity of the extension of the Joint Plan of Action until 24 November 2014 to make the strategic choices that will restore confidence in the exclusively peaceful nature of Iran’s nuclear programme. We continue to call on Iran to comply fully with all its international obligations, including all relevant Resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors. We also underscore the importance of Iran’s cooperation with the IAEA to resolve all outstanding issues, in particular those related to possible military dimensions of its nuclear programme.
    77. We are deeply concerned by the nuclear and ballistic missiles programmes and proliferation activities of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and call on it to comply fully with all relevant UNSCRs and the 2005 Joint Statement of the Six-Party Talks. We call on the DPRK to abandon all its existing nuclear and ballistic missile programmes in a complete, verifiable, and irreversible manner and immediately cease all related activities. We strongly condemn the DPRK’s December 2012 launch, which used ballistic missile technology, the nuclear test carried out by the DPRK in February 2013, and the various launches of short- and medium-range ballistic missiles since February 2014. We call on the DPRK to refrain from any further nuclear tests, launches using ballistic missile technology, or other provocations.
    78. The upcoming 2015 NPT Review Conference is an opportunity for parties to reaffirm support for this Treaty and for its non-proliferation, disarmament and peaceful uses pillars. Allies support efforts towards the success of this conference. We call for universal adherence to, and compliance with, the NPT and the Additional Protocol to the IAEA Safeguards Agreement and call for full implementation of UNSCR 1540 and welcome further work under UNSCR 1977. We call on all states to commit to combating effectively the proliferation of WMD through the universalisation of the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and through the Proliferation Security Initiative. We also call on all States to continue strengthening the security of nuclear materials and of radioactive sources within their borders, as they were called on to do by the Nuclear Security Summits of 2010 (Washington), 2012 (Seoul), and 2014 (The Hague). We will also ensure that NATO is postured to counter Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear (CBRN) threats, including through the Combined Joint CBRN Defence Task Force.
    79. Terrorism poses a direct threat to the security of the citizens of NATO countries and to international stability and prosperity more broadly, and will remain a threat for the foreseeable future. It is a global threat that knows no border, nationality, or religion – a challenge that the international community must fight and tackle together. We reaffirm our commitment to fight terrorism with unwavering resolve in accordance with international law and the principles of the UN Charter. NATO Allies are exposed to a wide range of terrorist threats. NATO has a role to play, including through our military cooperation with partners to build their capacity to face such threats, and through enhanced information sharing. Without prejudice to national legislation or responsibilities, the Alliance strives at all times to remain aware of the evolving threat from terrorism; to ensure that it has adequate capabilities to prevent, protect against, and respond to terrorist threats; and to engage with partners and other international organisations, as appropriate, promoting common understanding and practical cooperation in support of the UN Global Counter-Terrorism Strategy, including in areas such as Explosive Risk Management. Building on our Defence Against Terrorism Programme of Work, we will continue to improve our capabilities and technologies, including to defend against Improvised Explosive Devices and CBRN threats. We will keep terrorism and related threats high on NATO’s security agenda.
    80. NATO Allies form a unique community of values, committed to the principles of individual liberty, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. The Alliance is convinced that these shared values and our security are strengthened when we work with our wide network of partners around the globe. We will continue to engage actively to enhance international security through partnership with relevant countries and other international organisations, in accordance with our Berlin Partnership Policy.
    81. Partnerships are, and will continue to be, essential to the way NATO works. Partners have served with us in Afghanistan, Kosovo, and other operations, sacrificing alongside Alliance troops, and work with us in combating terrorism and piracy. Partners make significant contributions to our practical cooperation activities in a number of different areas, including Trust Funds. Together with our partners, we have built a broad cooperative security network. Allies are resolved to maintain and build on this legacy, as our partnerships play a crucial role in the promotion of international peace and security. At this Summit, we therefore collectively pledge to strengthen the political dialogue and practical cooperation with our partners who share our vision for cooperative security in an international order based on the rule of law. We will continue to build defence capacity and interoperability through such initiatives as the Defence Education Enhancement Programme and the Professional Development Programme. We will also continue to promote transparency, accountability, and integrity in the defence sectors of interested nations through the Building Integrity programme.
    82. This year we celebrate twenty years of the Partnership for Peace (PfP). PfP and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council are, and will continue to be, a part of our vision of a Europe whole, free, and at peace. They have forged political ties across Europe, through the Caucasus and into Central Asia; they have also been the foundation for practical cooperation to address common threats to our shared security, including in the field of human security. This cooperation was driven, at heart, by the common values and principles to which Allies and partners have all committed in the PfP founding documents. They include the promise to refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, to respect internationally recognised borders, and to settle disputes by peaceful means. These principles are as important as ever today and must be upheld unequivocally across the Euro-Atlantic community.
    83. We reaffirm our commitment to the Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) and Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) and the principles that underpin them; MD and ICI remain two complementary yet distinct partnership frameworks. We look forward to deepening our political dialogue and practical cooperation in both fora, building on many years of steady progress. We remain open to welcoming new members from the Mediterranean and the broader Middle East region to these frameworks.
    84. This year we also celebrate twenty years of the Mediterranean Dialogue. Today, as the Mediterranean region faces huge security challenges with wide-ranging implications for Euro-Atlantic security, the importance of this forum, which brings together key countries from NATO’s southern border, is clearer than ever. Enhancing the political dimension of MD will help to address the challenges of the region. We stand ready to continue working with our MD partners to make the most of the opportunities offered by their partnership with NATO, including individual partnership and cooperation programmes.
    85. We also celebrate ten years of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which has helped to promote understanding and security cooperation with our partners in the Gulf region. We encourage our ICI partner countries to be proactive in taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by their partnership with NATO, including individual partnership and cooperation programmes.
    86. We will also intensify efforts to engage with and reach out to those partners across the globe that can contribute significantly to addressing shared security concerns. The Berlin Partnership Policy has created increased opportunities for these countries to work individually with NATO at the political and practical level. We welcome that some of our partners across the globe have seized these opportunities by providing support to operations and engaging in security cooperation and dialogue to enhance common understanding of our shared security interests.
    87. We will likewise look to further develop relations with relevant regional international organisations, such as the Gulf Cooperation Council and the Arab League, and be open to engaging with others, including in the context of regional crisis situations.
    88. As combat operations end in Afghanistan, we will ensure that the bonds forged between Allied and partner nations’ armed forces remain as strong as ever. We have fought together. Now we will focus on preparing and training together. We have therefore adopted a comprehensive Partnership Interoperability Initiative to enhance our ability to tackle security challenges together with our partners. Here in Wales, our Defence Ministers launched the Interoperability Platform, meeting with 24 partners 1that have demonstrated their commitment to reinforce their interoperability with NATO. These partners have been invited to work with us to take forward dialogue and practical cooperation on interoperability issues. Defence Ministers also met with five partners 2 that make particularly significant contributions to NATO operations to discuss further deepening dialogue and practical cooperation as part of the enhanced opportunities within the Partnership Interoperability Initiative. We stand ready to consider the addition of other partners as their contributions and interests warrant.
    89. Today we have decided to launch a Defence and Related Security Capacity Building Initiative to reinforce our commitment to partner nations and to help the Alliance to project stability without deploying large combat forces, as part of the Alliance’s overall contribution to international security and stability and conflict prevention. The Initiative builds upon NATO’s extensive expertise in supporting, advising and assisting nations with defence and related security capacity building. Building on our close cooperation and following their requests, we have agreed to extend this initiative to Georgia, Jordan, and the Republic of Moldova. We are also ready to consider requests from interested partners and non-partners, as well as to engage with international and regional organisations, with an interest in building their defence and related security capacity through this demand-driven initiative. We reaffirm NATO’s readiness to provide defence and related security capacity advisory support for Libya when conditions permit. We will pursue these efforts in complementarity and close cooperation with other international organisations, in particular the UN, the EU, and the OSCE, as appropriate. Some partner nations themselves can bring unique partner insight and contributions to NATO capacity building efforts. We welcome the appointment of NATO’s Deputy Secretary General as Special Coordinator for Defence Capacity Building, as well as the establishment of a military hub in the NATO Command Structure, to help ensure a timely, coherent and effective NATO response, taking into account efforts by partners and individual Allies, on a voluntary basis.
    90. We attach great importance to ensuring women’s full and active participation in the prevention, management, and resolution of conflicts, as well as in post-conflict efforts and cooperation. We remain committed to preventing conflict-related sexual and gender-based violence. Since our last Summit in Chicago, we have made significant progress in implementing UNSCR 1325 on Women, Peace and Security and related resolutions. We are now implementing the results of the Review of the Practical Implications of UNSCR 1325 for the Conduct of Operations. A revised Policy and Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security have been developed with our partners in the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council and with other partners 3. The establishment of a permanent position of NATO Special Representative for Women, Peace and Security underscores the Alliance’s active engagement and commitment to this agenda. NATO’s cooperation with partner nations, international organisations, and civil society has been strengthened and should be further enhanced. Our ongoing efforts to integrate gender perspectives into Alliance activities throughout NATO’s three core tasks will contribute to a more modern, ready, and responsive NATO. We have directed the Council to submit a progress report on NATO’s implementation of UNSCR 1325 and related resolutions for our next Summit.
    91. We recall NATO’s firm commitment to the implementation of UNSCR 1612 and related resolutions on the protection of children affected by armed conflict and remain deeply concerned about the damaging effects of armed conflicts on children. NATO will continue to carry out its responsibilities as part of the wider international effort and to build on initiatives already taken to properly integrate this issue into the planning and conduct of its operations and missions, as well as its training, monitoring, and reporting. Therefore, in close cooperation with the UN, NATO will assess how to ensure it is sufficiently prepared whenever and wherever the issue of Children and Armed Conflict is likely to be encountered.
    92. The Open Door Policy under Article 10 of the Washington Treaty is one of the Alliance’s great successes. Successive rounds of NATO enlargement have enhanced the security and stability of all our nations. The steady progress of Euro-Atlantic integration fosters reform, strengthens collective security, and ensures the stability necessary for prosperity. NATO’s door will remain open to all European democracies which share the values of our Alliance, which are willing and able to assume the responsibilities and obligations of membership, which are in a position to further the principles of the Treaty, and whose inclusion will contribute to the security of the North Atlantic area. We reaffirm our strong commitment to the Euro-Atlantic integration of the partners that aspire to join the Alliance, judging each on its own merits. Decisions on enlargement are for NATO itself. We encourage partners to continue to implement the necessary reforms and decisions to advance their aspirations and prepare for membership, and we will continue to offer political and practical support to their efforts. Today we have endorsed decisions that take forward our Open Door Policy based on progress by individual partners that aspire to join the Alliance.
    93. NATO recognises Georgia’s significant efforts to strengthen its democracy and to modernise its military forces and defence institutions. We welcome the democratic development of Georgia, including through the peaceful transfer of power following parliamentary and presidential elections in 2012 and 2013, respectively. We encourage Georgia to continue implementation of reforms, including consolidating democratic institutions, taking forward judicial reforms, and ensuring full respect for the rule of law. NATO highly appreciates Georgia’s sizeable contribution to the ISAF operation and recognises the sacrifices Georgian troops have made in Afghanistan. Together with Georgia’s offer to participate in the NATO Response Force, these contributions demonstrate Georgia’s role as a contributor to our shared security. At the 2008 Bucharest Summit we agreed that Georgia will become a member of NATO and we reaffirm all elements of that decision, as well as subsequent decisions. Since then, Georgia has made significant progress and has come closer to NATO by implementing ambitious reforms and making good use of the NATO-Georgia Commission and Annual National Programme. We note that Georgia’s relationship with the Alliance contains the tools necessary to continue moving Georgia forward towards eventual membership. Today we have endorsed a substantial package for Georgia that includes defence capacity building, training, exercises, strengthened liaison, and enhanced interoperability opportunities. These measures aim to strengthen Georgia’s defence and interoperability capabilities with the Alliance, which will help Georgia advance in its preparations towards membership in the Alliance.
    94. We reiterate our continued support to the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Georgia within its internationally recognised borders. We welcome Georgia’s full compliance with the EU-mediated cease-fire agreement and other multilateral measures to build confidence. We welcome Georgia’s commitment not to use force and call on Russia to reciprocate. We continue to call on Russia to reverse its recognition of the South Ossetia and Abkhazia regions of Georgia as independent states and to withdraw its forces from Georgia. We encourage all participants in the Geneva talks to play a constructive role as well as to continue working closely with the OSCE, the UN, and the EU to pursue peaceful conflict resolution in the internationally recognised territory of Georgia.
    95. We welcome the significant progress made by Montenegro in its reforms, its constructive role in the Western Balkans region and the contribution that it makes to international security, including its contribution to our engagement in Afghanistan. In recognition of Montenegro’s progress towards NATO membership, the Alliance has agreed to open intensified and focused talks with Montenegro, and agreed that Foreign Ministers will assess Montenegro’s progress no later than by the end of 2015 with a view to deciding on whether to invite Montenegro to join the Alliance. These talks will be conducted in conjunction with the Membership Action Plan (MAP) process. In the meantime, we look to Montenegro to continue its efforts to address the remaining challenges, particularly with respect to rule of law and completing security sector reform. We also welcome the increase in public support in Montenegro for NATO membership and encourage continued efforts in this area.
    96. We reiterate the agreement at our 2008 Bucharest Summit, as we did at subsequent Summits, to extend an invitation to the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 4 to join the Alliance as soon as a mutually acceptable solution to the name issue has been reached within the framework of the UN, and strongly urge intensified efforts towards that end. An early solution, and subsequent membership, will contribute to security and stability in the region. We encourage and support the continuation of reform efforts within the country, particularly with a view to ensuring effective democratic dialogue, media freedom, judicial independence, and a fully-functioning multi-ethnic society based on full implementation of the Ohrid Framework Agreement. We also encourage further efforts to develop good neighbourly relations. We appreciate the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s long-standing contribution to our operations and its active role in regional cooperation. We value the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia’s long-standing commitment to the NATO accession process.
    97. We continue to fully support the membership aspirations of Bosnia and Herzegovina. We look forward to free and fair general elections in October, which we hope will lead to an efficient and effective government coalition, ready to address the issues related to the country’s Euro-Atlantic aspirations. We acknowledge the efforts undertaken since 2012 to come to a political agreement on registering the immovable defence property to the state. We remain concerned that little progress has been achieved to comply with the condition set by NATO Foreign Ministers in Tallinn in April 2010. As Allied Foreign Ministers will keep developments under active review, we encourage the leadership of Bosnia and Herzegovina to take the necessary steps in that regard so that its first MAP cycle can be activated as soon as possible. We appreciate Bosnia and Herzegovina’s contributions to NATO-led operations, and we commend its constructive role in regional dialogue and security.
    98. Here in Wales, our Foreign Ministers have met their counterparts from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, Montenegro, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Ministers discussed the progress made by these countries, the Euro-Atlantic integration process, and other key Summit issues, including the international security situation. NATO is grateful to these partners for the significant contributions that they continue to make to NATO’s objectives and to international security and stability.
    99. In light of NATO’s operational experiences and the evolving complex security environment, a comprehensive political, civilian, and military approach is essential in crisis management and cooperative security. Furthermore, it contributes to the effectiveness of our common security and defence, without prejudice to Alliance collective defence commitments. Today we reaffirm our decisions taken at the Lisbon and Chicago Summits. The comprehensive approach is conducive to more coherence within NATO’s own structures and activities. Furthermore, NATO has developed a modest but appropriate civilian capability in line with Lisbon Summit decisions. As part of NATO’s contribution to a comprehensive approach by the international community, we will enhance cooperation with partner nations and other actors, including other international organisations, such as the UN, the EU and the OSCE, as well as non-governmental organisations, in line with decisions taken. We will ensure that comprehensive approach-related lessons learned, including from ISAF, will be carried forward and applied in various strands of work and new initiatives, including, as appropriate, the Readiness Action Plan, the Connected Forces Initiative, the Defence and Related Security Capacity Building Initiative, and the Partnership Interoperability Initiative.
    100. In the spirit of the comprehensive approach and in light of a changing security environment in Europe, our Foreign Ministers met with the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the OSCE Chairman-in-Office and the Secretary General of the Council of Europe to discuss closer cooperation. At a time when the values and principles that underpin the major institutions in the Euro-Atlantic area are being challenged, Allies emphasised the need to work together to ensure our shared goal of a Europe whole, free and at peace. We look forward to continuing the dialogue to advance this further.
    101. NATO’s cooperation with the United Nations (UN) strengthens international security. We welcome our regular political dialogue on areas of common interest. We are encouraged by the growing practical cooperation between the staffs of our organisations, including exchanges of best practices and lessons learned in operations, training and exercises, and sharing of expertise. We are committed to exploring ways to reinforce our practical support to UN peace operations, including by enhancing cooperation between NATO and the UN in building defence and related security capacity.
    102. The European Union (EU) remains a unique and essential partner for NATO. The two organisations share common values and strategic interests. In a spirit of full mutual openness, transparency, complementarity, and respect for the autonomy and institutional integrity of both NATO and the EU, and as agreed by the two organisations, we will continue to work side-by-side in crisis management operations, broaden political consultations, and promote complementarity of the two organisations to enhance common security and stability. The current strategic environment has highlighted the need for further strengthening our strategic partnership and reinforcing our joint efforts and our common message.
    103. NATO recognises the importance of a stronger and more capable European defence, which will lead to a stronger NATO, help enhance the security of all Allies and foster an equitable sharing of the burden, benefits and responsibilities of Alliance membership. In this context, we welcome the EU member states’ decisions to strengthen European defence and crisis management, including at the European Council in December 2013.
    104. We look forward to continued dialogue and cooperation between NATO and the EU. Our consultations have broadened to address issues of common concern, including security challenges like cyber defence, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, counter-terrorism, and energy security. We will also seek to work more closely together in several other areas, including maritime security, defence and related security capacity building, and addressing hybrid threats, in line with decisions taken.
    105. Non-EU Allies continue to make significant contributions to the EU’s efforts to strengthen its capacities to address common security challenges. For the strategic partnership between NATO and the EU, non-EU Allies’ fullest involvement in these efforts is essential. We encourage further mutual steps in this area to support a strengthened strategic partnership.
    106. We welcome the Secretary General’s report on NATO-EU relations. We encourage him to continue to work closely with the EU High Representative and the leaders of other EU institutions across the broad spectrum of the NATO-EU strategic partnership and provide a report to the Council in time for the next Summit.
    107. As demonstrated most recently by its activities in the framework of the Russia-Ukraine crisis, the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) plays an important role in addressing the security challenges in the Euro-Atlantic area. We fully support efforts undertaken by the OSCE and continue to work closely with the OSCE in areas such as conflict prevention and resolution, post conflict rehabilitation and in addressing new security threats. We are committed to further enhancing our cooperation, both at the political and operational level, in all areas of common interest.
    108. We welcome the increasing emphasis by the African Union (AU) on addressing transnational security threats, and its growing efforts to build the African capacity to rapidly respond to emerging conflicts. We encourage deeper political and practical cooperation between NATO and the AU to support the African Union in establishing a more robust African peace and security capacity. Based on the AU’s request, NATO will continue to provide technical support and stands ready to explore, in consultation with the AU, opportunities to expand our logistical, training, and planning assistance in support of African peacekeepers. We welcome the recent progress in establishing a sound legal framework for NATO-AU cooperation.
    109. A stable and reliable energy supply, the diversification of routes, suppliers and energy resources, and the interconnectivity of energy networks remain of critical importance. While these issues are primarily the responsibility of national governments and other international organisations, NATO closely follows relevant developments in energy security, including in relation to the Russia-Ukraine crisis and the growing instability in the Middle East and North Africa region. We will continue to consult on and further develop our capacity to contribute to energy security, concentrating on areas where NATO can add value. In particular, we will enhance our awareness of energy developments with security implications for Allies and the Alliance; further develop NATO’s competence in supporting the protection of critical energy infrastructure; and continue to work towards significantly improving the energy efficiency of our military forces, and in this regard we note the Green Defence Framework. We will also enhance training and education efforts, continue to engage with partner countries, on a case-by-case basis, and consult with relevant international organisations, including the EU, as appropriate. Today we have noted a progress report on NATO’s role in energy security and we task the Council to continue to refine NATO’s role in energy security in accordance with the principles and guidelines agreed at the Bucharest Summit and the direction provided by subsequent Summits and the Strategic Concept. We task the Council to produce a further progress report for our next Summit.
    110. Key environmental and resource constraints, including health risks, climate change, water scarcity, and increasing energy needs will further shape the future security environment in areas of concern to NATO and have the potential to significantly affect NATO planning and operations.
    111. At the 2010 Lisbon Summit, Allies agreed on an ambitious reform programme, encompassing reviews of the Agencies and NATO Command Structure; resource reform; Headquarters reform; and an end-to-end review of all structures engaged in NATO capability development. Heads of State and Government took stock of progress at the 2012 Chicago Summit.  Since then, NATO has continued to reform by instituting new policies, overhauling its structures, and streamlining procedures to improve efficiency and to ensure our Alliance is responsive and agile against the diverse challenges and threats it faces.
    112. NATO has adapted to drive further financial reform, harnessed the best efforts of our International Staff and International Military Staff, developed its NATO Command Structure, and achieved a greater level of coherence between its Agencies. While significant progress has been made in the reform of the Alliance, ongoing initiatives still need to be fully delivered and further efforts will be required. We have tasked further work in the areas of delivery of common funded capabilities, reform governance and transparency and accountability, especially in the management of NATO’s financial resources. We look forward to a further report on progress on these reforms by the time of our next Summit.
    113. We express our appreciation for the generous hospitality extended to us by the Government of the United Kingdom and the people of Wales. The decisions we have taken at our Summit will help to keep our nations and populations safe, the bond between Europe and North America strong, and our region and the world stable. We will meet again in Poland in 2016.

     

     

    1.  Australia, Austria, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Finland, Georgia, Ireland, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Republic of Korea, Republic of Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Morocco, New Zealand, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 4, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates.
    2. Australia, Finland, Georgia, Jordan, and Sweden.
    3. Afghanistan, Australia, Japan, Jordan, New Zealand and the United Arab Emirates.
    4. Turkey recognises the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name.
  • There is no Kurdish Nation – it is a Freemasonic Colonial, Orientalist Hoax!

    There is no Kurdish Nation – it is a Freemasonic Colonial, Orientalist Hoax!

     

    By Prof. Muhammad Shamsaddin Megalommatis

    Kurds do not exist. They are an entire Orientalist fabrication – pretty much like Arabs do not exist.

    By forging false, fake entities, Freemasons trigger what looks like a fratricidal war, which in reality is not fratricidal properly speaking, but it consists in the true, normal reaction of two or more distinct elements that have been arbitrarily portrayed as one and drawn together. Even worse for the trickery of the Orientalist Freemasonic ateliers, these distinct elements – ingredients of explosive fake states were presented under alien ideological terms and unacceptable philosophical conditions (those declared at the times of the so-called Enlightenment) that could never make of these elements one entity.

    1. Islamic Caliphate & Eastern Roman Empire: multi-cultural mechanisms able to secure the cohabitation of many different nations with diverse cultures

      Islam could easily, effectively and successfully make of different nations (or of two peoples in one specific place) one coherent entity. This was possible even, if there were Christians among these two peoples (or within one people). In this manner, the historical rule of Islam preserved the identity of, and the peace among, many different peoples throughout centuries. One has to note here that Identity is far higher a value than Peace for all nations of the world, because peace with disfigured identity is tantamount to excruciation.

    Christianity could do exactly the same thing and the Eastern Roman Empire did so for many long centuries as well – either before or after the emergence of Islam. In the Oriental Empires, freedom of faith, cultural heritage, and national identity were highly revered values – in great contrast with the modern Western World and in total opposition to the Freemasonic Orientalist lies about either the Caliphate or the Eastern Roman Empire.

    It was not bad actually to live as a Christian in Omayyad Damascus or Abbasid Baghdad – there were many churches, and Christians were protected and quite often invited to assume responsibilities in high magistrates.

    Neither was it bad to live as Muslim in Eastern Roman Constantinople where there was a mosque as early as 300 years after Prophet Muhammad died (around the middle of the 10th c.).

    1. Western Freemasonic Evil unleashed in the Orient

    All the evil was unleashed in the Orient, when colonial armies and navies, Orientalist explorers and academia, and heinous Freemasonic swindlers impersonating the Western countries’ diplomats attempted through viciously unethical and overtly anti-Christian methods to expand their influence across the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and Mughal India in the 18th and the 19th centuries.

    To prepare, implement and secure their long-planned, ominous colonial predominance, the Western academia fabricated fake entities that can only generate internal wars because exactly they are not proper entities. Then, they projected these fake entities onto their targets, i.e. the colonized nations. The evil deeds of the Western academia were superbly marketed by Western diplomats, agents, intellectuals, reporters and travelers worldwide as ‘Orientalist academic disciplines’; analytical guidelines were then conveyed to the respective agents and diplomats of the colonial countries for proper execution of the plan, implementation of the fake entities, and diffusion of the distortive sciences among the indigenous nations.

    The first Orientalist hoax was that of the Arabic Nation.

    1. There are no Arabs.

      As a matter of fact, there are no Arabs.

    The Arabic-speaking part of the populations of Mauritania, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya and Western Egypt are indeed Berbers, who gradually forgot Berber languages and spoke Arabic exclusively, because they accepted Islam, and consequently made of their religious language their sole language. This was a long process and the Arabization phenomenon was only of linguistic nature – not ethnic, not cultural.
    Similarly, Egyptians are not Arabs, but Hamitic Egyptians or ‘Copts’, if you want, who in different eras accepted Islam and gradually abandoned Coptic language. Egypt south of Assiut was still Christian for almost 300 years after Prophet Muhammad died. Today, there is no ethnic difference between Christian and Muslim Egyptians; literarily speaking, the country is inhabited by Christian Copts and Muslim Copts.

    In the same way, the ethnic origin of today’s Sudanese is Kushitic (Kushites being a branch of the Hamitic nations) or Nilo-Saharan; Sudan’s Kushites are Arabic-speaking natives, because after accepting Islam, they gradually abandoned Christian Sudan’s Makurian and Alodian Kushitic languages, which were later forms of Meroitic. i.e. the pre-Christian Sudan’s language which was written in hieroglyphic and linear characters. Linguistic Arabization is indeed a very recent phenomenon for Sudan’s Kushites, because the Christian state of Makuria lasted until the 14th c. and the Christian state of Alodia collapsed only in the late 16th c. On the other hand, the Nubians in the North and other Nilo-Saharan peoples in other parts of Sudan preserved however their languages down to our times, as Arabic is merely a religious language to them.
    More importantly, the Arabic-speaking part of the populations of SE Turkey, Syria, Iraq, SW Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Qatar, Emirates and the Saudi extreme North are not Arabs but Aramaeans (a Semitic nation) who gradually forgot their own Syriac Aramaic language (a major language of Patristic Literature and an international language across the land routes of trade between the Mediterranean World, East Africa, India, and China) and spoke Arabic because they accepted Islam. Their linguistic Arabization was a gradual phenomenon characterized by the affinity of the two languages (Syriac Aramaic and Arabic) and the similarity of the two writing systems, as Arabic originates from Syriac Aramaic.
    Last but not the least, the Yemenites and the Omanis are not Arabs, but indigenous Yemenites and Omanis who, after accepting Islam, gradually abandoned their pre-Islamic languages, namely Sabaean, Hinyarite and Hadhramawti, etc. and spoke Arabic. Two modern Yemenite indigenous languages, notably Mahri and Socotri, are descendants of the Ancient Yemenite languages that were of course categorized as Semitic. Mahri is spoken in Hadhramawt (Mahra) and in North Somalia, whereas Socotri is the only native language in the island of Socotra.

    The pre-Islamic Yemenite languages are documented with a great number of epigraphic texts dating to back to more than 1300 years before the arrival of Islam; they were written in the indigenous writing that had nothing to do with the pre-Islamic Arabic writing which appears only 300 years before Islam and is provenly a deformation of Syriac Aramaic.

    1. There are no Kurds.

    Similarly, there are no Kurds. The notion or concept of a ‘Kurdish nation’ is just an Orientalist hoax, the latest of the sort. In the same manner, the implantation, the imposition and the diffusion of the fake notion, concept, name, identity (and the ensuing behavioral and ideological systems) of an ‘Arab nation’ plunged the wider region into ceaseless strives and wars over the past century, the implantation of the Kurdish hoax is geared only to open the Gates of the Hell across the Anti-Taurus and Zagros Mountains and from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia.

    1. Two distinct nations in Turkey fallaciously called ‘Kurds’

    – Zaza vs. Kurmanji
    In Turkey, what people in the West call ‘Kurds’ are mainly two distinct nations, notably the Zaza and the Kurmanji. The two nations communicate via two different languages, namely Zazaki and Kurmanji that are as distinct from one another as German is from Armenian. These two nations hate deeply one another, far more than any of them is loathing the ruling Turkish speaking nation of Turkey.

    The Zaza, as they are less populous than the Kurmanji, vehemently reject the Western, Freemasonic, Orientalist myth of a ‘Kurdish’ nation, and consider their forced consideration as ‘Kurds’ as an evil political tool to ensure Kurmanji supremacist plots and an otherwise idiotic and primitive, mountainous imperialism.

    Both nations undertook short-lived and badly failed rebellions, after Kemal Ataturk put an end to the Ottoman Caliphate and launched the Turkish Republic in 1923; however, those rebellions were purely Islamic, Caliphatic of character and their leaders did not express a ‘Kurdish’ but a Muslim identity.

    Among those who are fallaciously categorized as Kurds, few other marginal minority groups live in Turkey – notably the Yazidis.

    Similar situations prevail in what is falsely called ‘Kurdistan’ in Iraq and in Iran. True, in Syria, there are only Kurmanji; if they want to achieve self-determination, it is certainly their right, but their state should be named Kurmanji Republic. By no means can such a state encompass territories inhabited by the Zaza. One should also take into consideration that in Turkey, Zaza and Kurmanji live basically in different areas in the southeastern part of the country and that they do not tolerate intermarriages, whereas members of either of these two nations often enter into intermarriage with Turks!!!

    1. Different nations in Iraq that are fallaciously called ‘Kurds’

    – Bahdinani

    In Iraq, among the first to be erroneously categorized as ‘Kurds’ are the Bahadinani, who are also known as Bahdinani or Bahdini, as they are named after the part of Turkey-Iraq border region that is called Bahdinan where a local principality existed for 450 years (late 14th c. to mid 19th c.) as a tiny buffer zone between the Ottoman Caliphate and Safavid Iran (between the cities of Hakkari aand Amadiyah).

    Bahdinani may look close to Kurmanji, but it is not identical. English Wikipedia (that is the richest version of the multilingual portal) does NOT offer an article on the subject, because this version (or rather section) represents the focus of Freemasonic interference, falsification and systematic misinformation. Yet, Swedish Wikipedia seems to be more sensitive and informative on this matter, probably because there may be in Sweden more Bahdinani than Kurmanji, and they never accept to identify themselves otherwise ).

    The Swedish text reads:

    Badinani (även bahdini) där en nordkurdisk dialekt som har inslag av arabiska ord och uttryck. Dialekten talas främst i det tidigare emiratet av Badinan som under 13-1800-talet låg i södra Kurdistan i Irak. Näraliggande dialekter är Kurmancî (som använder latinska alfabetet) och sorani (som använder ett modifierat arabiskt alfabet), men det finns många regionala varianter som ibland är oförståeliga sinsemellan. Badinani använder det modifierade arabiska alfabetet.

    A rough English translation of the above text reads:

    Badinani (also Bahdini) is a Northern Kurdish dialect that has elements of Arabic words and expressions. The dialect is spoken mainly in the former emirate of Badinan during 1300’s-1800’s low in southern Kurdistan, in Iraq. Adjacent dialects are Kurmancî (using the Latin alphabet) and Sorani (using a modified Arabic alphabets), but there are many regional variations that are sometimes unintelligible between themselves. Badinani uses the modified Arabic alphabet.

    The text is clear; beyond the major issue of national identification (or ethnic group identity), there are differences between Bahdinani and Kurmanji at the level of language. However, an even more important difference between the two distinct groups is the fact that Bahdinani is written in Farsi characters (this is what is called ‘modified Arabic alphabet’) whereas Kurmanji is written in Latin characters – something that the Bahdinani traditionalists rightly find abhorrent. This is also revealed in an interesting blog specializing in courses of Bahdinani language (http://learn-bahdini-kurdish.blogspot.com).

    Assuming that Bahdinanis will accept Kurmanji supremacist attitudes is an outrage. It is tantamount to forcing the Belgians Flemish to be called Dutch, or East Anglia’s English to be called Saxons. None of them would accept.

    – The Yazidis

    Yazidis are Kurmanji-speaking natives, who mainly live in Iraq and in Armenia (and very few of them in Turkey), but they don’t either consider themselves as Kurmanji or accept to be given the false label ‘Kurdish’.

    More importantly, the Yazidis make of their religious difference (they are not Muslims but ‘Yazidis’) the major characteristic of their nation. Yazidis (also known as Yazdanis) have three holy books that all are other than the Quran. Their religion emerged under strong Gnostic impact, but Ali ibn Abi Talib, Islam’s First Imam and Fourth Caliph, is highly venerated among Yazidis. For these reasons, they reject the Kurmandji supremacist attitude in Turkey while they also dissociate themselves from Bahdinanis in Iraq.

    It is quite telling that, in Armenia where the Yazidis constitute the main minority of that country, they strictly and obstinately demanded that the local government does NOT name them ‘Kurds’ in any way and under any circumstances whatsoever.

    As the Yazidis constitute the majority of the inhabitants in the Dohuk region of North Iraq, I demanded – back in 2008/9 – the creation of the Yazidi Republic with Dohuk as capital, involving also population relocation for the process to be completed. If this occurred in order at the time, they would now make a small state of ca. 1 million people, and they would face no discrimination at the hands of any other government or organized crime like the ‘Kurdish’ peshmerga and the bogus-Islamists of ISIS.

    Average people in Western Europe and North America must stop accepting blindly the vicious policies of their governments and wonder the following:

    –          Why does tiny Slovenia with a population of 1.5 million people have the right to self-independence and the Yazidis with a population of 1 million people do not have this right?

    The answer to this question reveals the dire reality, namely that there are evil plans for the entire area between the Mediterranean and India – and these plans existed for long, having been prepared by the-powers-that-be.

    – Sorani

    Except the aforementioned, North Iraq is home to the Sorani nation, which is the second ethno-linguistic group, after the Kurmanji, that currently pretends to be ‘Kurdish’. Like the Kurmanji, they never harbored similar ideas in the past, and their political – ideological shift occurred only after two Sorani tribal thugs willingly became dependent on the Western colonial countries in order to obtain weapons.

    Gradually, the two notorious thugs, who initially were quite inimical to one another, were bribed enough to forget their tribal rivalry and come under systematic French-UK-US (F-UK-US) guidance or to put it correctly tutelage. At a more recent stage, following Iraq’s occupation by the US, the two corrupt thugs, i.e. Talabani and Barzani, showed a definite predilection for the Mossad only to be subsequently propelled to national Iraqi leadership and spread for Israel’s sole interests a systematic bloodshed against many North Iraqi nations that do not accept to be called ‘Kurds’ – which went deliberately unreported by the world’s biased mainstream media. 

    The two ominous persons would be easily disregarded as comical, if they were not dark enough in their secret plans and dangerous enough in their ignorance, servility and corruption. They are the main responsible for today’s chaos in Iraq and for the persecution of other nations either directly in their hands or indirectly in the hands of others.

    To put it correctly, Talabani and Barzani are not Kurds at all. They are Sorani nationals, and if they had the honest intention to respect the rights of the other adjacent nations and setup their own Soran national land as an independent country, they would draw respect too.

    The major problem in their shameless case is that the Western policy of flattering impotent trash, of making false promises to thugs-turned-national leaders, and of inflating ambitions in the sick minds and evil hearts of viciously materialistic persons brought some results, and the two criminals gradually developed a dangerous Sorani supremacist attitude and ‘Kurdish’ imperialistic viewpoints that do not bode well for the region’s safety, peace and future.

     

    Sorani do not understand either Bahdinani or Kurmanji, but the corrupt and the idiots, who have been bought in the false vision of ‘Kurdish’ nationalism, pretend that it is easy for the native speakers of either language to understand the other. This pretension is false and deeply inaccurate. Spaniards and Portuguese understand one another to some extent, but speaking the truth, they admit that they constitute two different nations.

    Certainly the differences between Sorani and Kurmanji are not as big as those between Russian and Chinese, but this is meaningless. We are living at the times when the Catalans and the Galicians demand their self-determination and national independence. Going opposite to this trend guarantees only a bloody future in the wider region between the Mediterranean Sea, the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the Persian Gulf.

    In addition, the differences between Kurmanji and Sorani, which are similar to those between Italian and Castilian Spanish, are definitely exacerbated by the use of different writing systems (Latin for Kurmanji and Farsi for Sorani).

    And what would be the point of hypothetically considering today’s Italians and Spaniards as one nation and of arbitrarily merging them into a fictional ‘Latin Republic’?

    There is however another dimension to the issue of Sorani nation. Speaking of languages with minimal written literature involves first, lack of grammatical and syntactical standards and second, the survival of several dialects. This is far more relevant to the case of Sorani rather than of Kurmanji. But it will only produce further troubles, if the existing evil plans are materialized.

    Sorani is highly variant and the Sorani dialects comprise of the following dialects: Hawleri (in Erbil), Babani, Garmiani, and Jafi in Iraq, and Ardelani and Mukri (or Mukriani) in Iran. These dialects will be the first to be threatened with extinction in an independent ‘Kurdistan’. They will be erased to the benefit of a standardized Sorani, which is a modern linguistic construction to which the vicious enemies of all of these nations, far in the West  and in the darkness of their Freemasonic Orientalist ateliers, attempt nowadays to attach the ‘idea’ of writing Sorani in Latin characters! This now looks like a faraway detail, but within an independent ‘Kurdistan’ it will become decisively explosive.

    – Fayli

    In addition to the aforementioned, other nations living in Iraq have been fallaciously categorized as ‘Kurds’ as well. The Fayli nation is at times believed to be a subdivision of Luris (which means another nation, as different from the other so-called ‘Kurdish’ groups as Catalans are from Italians).

    For very deep historical reasons that go far beyond the limits of the present summarizing article, the Faylis have become an entire chapter of Freemasonic Orientalist speculation and Western diplomatic planning. Here, suffice it to say that the secrecy of Western contacts with the Fayli nation is an age-old mystery and goes back to the Crusades.

    What follows in only a brief, perspicacious glance at some recent, still disparate data and random points, which are false enough to make a shrewd observer realize that significant strengths are pulled in the central border region between Iraq and Iran, and in the highly targeted Zagros Mountains region.

    The effort to depict the Faylis as a stateless people can be easily identified as a hint for a possible future fake state of Parthia (of which nothing has been publicly said let alone demanded until now)! To promote this concept, which will emulate further colonial divisions and strives, the Orientalist forgers diffuse the paramount falsehood that the ethnic name of the Faylis can be derived from that of the Arsacid dynasty of Pahlavi, which is absolutely false and the related argumentation appears to be nonsensical. As per the vicious forgers, who have recently produced supportive literature, the Faylis are the modern descendents of the Parthians – which is an even more far-fetched innuendo.  

    Even more incredible is the number of 6 million of people ( ! ) that the English Wikipedia, the obedient and subservient, global promoter of all Freemasonic lies, dares to ascribes to the Failis in the homonymous entry. This simply means that the secret plans for Iran’s cantonization in the post-nuclear attack period have already advanced up to the level of extreme details, borderline demarcation, and population subdivision parameterization.

    The aforementioned number for the Fayli is absolutely ludicrous, as they don’t exceed 400000 upon the most favorable calculations. If there were 6 millions of Faylis in the world, Iraq’s population should be 100 million people, and thus Iran would have 300 million inhabitants. The exorbitant nature of the figure only epitomizes the vicious preparations of what is going to take place after Israel’s long-anticipated nuclear attack against Iran. Cruel dictators-in-the-making are evidently awaiting in the wings only to spread further chaos and death in the Zagros Mountains and from Mesopotamia to Central Asia.

    More specifically, Faylis are expected to have been programmed for a definitely calamitous role, when the silly puppets Talabani and Barzani will be swept away by the forthcoming national-religious ‘Kurdish’ radicalization, which will not appear before the proclamation of the fake ‘Kurdish’ state and the arrival of its supposed ‘representative’ in the UN. The hellish nightmare will only come thereafter.

    – Gorani

    There may be few Goranis in Iraq, but the bulk of this nation lives in Iran. Many linguists attempt to associate them with Turkey’s Zaza in an effort to bring both distinct nations within the ominous boiling cauldron of ‘Kurdistan’, but this is mistakenly obnoxious and fully irrelevant. Gorani as language is very different from Kurmanji and Sorani, and despite some morphological affinities with Zaza, it cannot be associated with it.

    If there is an independent ‘Kurdistan’, even at the limited level of today’s Iraqi borderlines, the Goranis will be automatically exposed to severe persecution, grave assimilation, brazen expulsion, and systematic extinction.

    – Hawrami, Kakai (Yarsani), Sarli, and Shabak

    Iraq is also inhabited – in smaller numbers – by the Hawrami people whose majority lives in Iran. The Hawrami nation is distinct from the Gorani, despite all Western academic efforts of association.

    Contrarily, Kakai is a Gorani ethno-religious group that is quite different from the mainstream Gorani Muslims. Kakais follow another religion, Ahl-e Haq, and are rather named Yarsanis in Iran (see below).

    The Sarli people are a severely persecuted and often deported small nation whose language has affinities with Gorani. 

    Finally, beyond the above, there is also another ethnic-religious group, a Mesopotamian nation that risks facing the same persecution as the Yazidis at the hands of the ISIS fake Muslim gangsters: these are the Shabak who live in Sinjar and around, i.e. west of Dohuk and close to the border point with Turkey and Syria. The Shabak are neither Yazidis nor Muslims. Their religion has some affinities with either, but their language is one Turkic dialect – different from Turkey’s Turkish, Azeri or Turkmen. It is – for those familiar with Ottoman History – a dialect of Qizilbash (today there are only few Qizilbash left in Turkey). Calling the Shabak ‘Kurds’ is tantamount to vicious ignorance and as erroneous as identifying the Chinese as Zulu.

    1. Different nations in Iran that are fallaciously called ‘Kurds’

    – Ahl e Haq (Yarsani)

    Now, in Iran, except the Sorani and Gorani nations, there are Hawrami, Sandjabi, Kalhori, Malekshahi, Garusi, Laki and other minor nations that are fallaciously categorized as ‘Kurds’. In addition, the outright majority of the Ahl-e Haq (also known as Yarsani in Iran), an ethnic-religious group (like the Yazidis) of basically Gorani speaking people, lives there.

    More importantly, Ahl-e Haq do not identify themselves as Gorani – pretty much like the Yazidis, who do not identify themselves as Bahdinani or Kurmanji. Ahl-e Haq total approximately 1 million people, and if they fall into the hands of some criminal groups promoted by the West – like today’s ISIS – they will face the same fate as the Yazidis of Iraq.

    1. Conclusions

    From the above, it becomes crystal clear that by calling all these different nations and ethnic-religious groups as ‘Kurds’, the Western academia, the diplomats, the agents, the governments and the mass media of the Western countries commit deliberately a criminal act, which merely heralds a massive, programmed extinction of the aforementioned nations in series of unequivocal fratricidal conflicts that will be automatically unleashed, when precariously formed alliances within the forthcoming fake state of ‘Kurdistan’ will turn one upon the other in search of absolute power, financial treasure, and regional predominance.

    As a matter of fact, putting the Zaza, the Kurmanji, the Sorani and the Gorani together within the same state, and calling them with one generic appellation, is tantamount to launching today a fictional ‘Prussian Republic’ with Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Latvians, Belarus and Russians re-baptized as Prussians! It would explode immediately.

    The criminal effort to set up today a fake state called ‘Kurdistan’ out of the aforementioned many different nations would have a parallel if, in 1800, French, English and American diplomats, agents, military, statesmen, and journalists diffused the idea of a ‘Balkan nation’ necessary to co-exist on the European territory of the Ottoman Empire, insisting that there are no differences between Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, Muslims of Bosnia, Catholics of Croatia, Slovenes, Vlachians, Albanians, Turks, Pomaks, Roma and Greeks, and that all these nations constitute only one people and must therefore share one country!

    Who would not have expected in that case one nation to fight upon the other within that hypothetical ‘Balkan’ state where they would have been arbitrarily and against their own will thrown altogether?

    Yet, so many differences exist today among those Balkan nations as among all those who are being disastrously labeled as ‘Kurds’.

    1. It won’t be ‘Kurdistan’, but …. Suicidistan!

    The generic name ‘Kurds’ in the modern Western languages originates from the Turkish name Kürt and the Kurmanji name Kurd to which the Latin term Cyrtii and the Medieval Greek term Kurtoi seem to be associated. However, the ancient appellations do not offer any definite identification; we cannot know whether these ancient terms before 2000 years denoted the ancestors of the Zaza, the forefathers of the Kurmanji, the precursors of the Sorani or the past generations of the Gorani who are all unrelated to one another. The same concerns the respective Arabic and the Farsi terms (Akrad and Gord).

    In Classical Arabic, the name Akrad (which is therefore wrongly translated as ‘Kurds’ in Modern English) was not an ethnic or national name, but a collective appellation applied to many different nations that inhabited the Anti-Taurus Mountains and the Zagros Mountains, an area also known in Classical Arabic as Jebal (mountains). Similarly, Atrak did not mean ‘Turks’ in Classical Arabic; it meant all the Turkic-speaking nations known, e.g. Seljuq, Ottoman Tukrs, Turkmen, Azeris, Qizilbash, Uzbek, Kazakhs, Uighurs and others. 

    And when we have generic names in historical texts written in other languages (like the Arabic term ‘Akrad’) we cannot know to whom they refer; the Soranis? the Goranis? the Kurmanji? For these cases, the reality of an impossible identification forces us to fully reject the historicity of the term involved, as we don’t know to whom it applies. 
    With the diffusion of the colonial influence, the use of these two words (Akrad and Atrak) in Modern Arabic changed and started reflecting the criminal, colonial viewpoint, thus meaning basically the non-existing ‘Kurds’ (Akrad) and Turkey’s Turks only (Atrak).

    In spite of the identification impossibility, the generic name was systematically diffused and extended among all the other local, regional and international languages and nations in order to effectively confuse all and – in the process – to overwhelmingly promote the evil plans of the Freemasonic Orientalist colonials.

    What is even more suspicious about today’s so-called ‘Kurds’, who are merely diverse fanatics and lunatic nationalists of unrelated background (Kumrnaji and Sorani basically), is that we know with great surety that their forefathers never imagined and never envisioned to separate from the Ottoman Caliphate or Safavid Iran, and – more generally – from the state to which they belonged.

    Finally, if there is an independent ‘Kurdistan’, it will soon be turn out to be a … Suicidistan. This means that the curse of God has fallen on all those materialistic, bribed and besotted people of the regional political microcosm and that they will all soon vanish as per the Judgment of God. Constantly across History, God used an evil to punish a good person or nation that went astray.

  • Parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan

    Parliamentary elections in Uzbekistan

    uzbekistan mapThis year’s most crucial political event in Uzbekistan is to become the parliamentary elections due on the first Sunday of the third decade of December. Uzbekistan has a bicameral parliament. The Legislative Chamber (lower house) consist of 150 members. One hundred and thirty five of them are elected in accordance with territorial electoral districts on the multiparty basis. Fifteen seats are granted to the Ecological Movement of Uzbekistan, given the importance of nationwide issues related to ecology, public healthcare and protection of the environment. The Senate (upper ouse) is formed from among the deputies of local representative bodies of government during their joint sessions, in equal quantity – per six persons – from the Republic of Karakalpakstan, regions and the city of Tashkent. Sixteen members of the Senate are appointed by the President of Uzbekistan from among the most authoritative citizens of the country. The term of office of the Parliament is 5 years. In accordance with the results of parliamentary elections in 2009, four political parties are represented at the Legislative Chamber of the Oliy Majlis of the Republic of Uzbekistan: the Movement of Entrepreneurs and Businesspeople – the Liberal Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (UzLiDeP), the People’s Democratic Party of Uzbekistan (PDPU), the Milliy Tiklanish (National Revival) Democratic Party of Uzbekistan, and Adolat (Justice) Social Democratic Party of Uzbekistan. The forthcoming elections are to substantially differ from the previous ones, since they are going to be held amid the enhancement of powers of the parliament and further deeping of democratization of electoral system. As part of implementation of the Concept of Further Deeping of Democratic Reforms and Establishing Civil Society in the Country, put forward by the President of the Republic of Uzbekistan Islam Karimov at the joint session of both chambers of the parliament on November 12, 2010, amendments were introduced in 2011, 2012 and 2014 to some articles of the Constitution of the Republic of Uzbekistan (Articles 32, 78, 80, 93, 96, 98, 103 and 117) and laws on elections, which serve as a legal basis for further democratization of the activities of legislative and executive branches of power, as well as the electoral system. A number of amendments and addenda have been introduced into the electoral legislation to clearly identify the forms and methods of election campaign, inadmissibility of its conduct not only on the election day, but also a day before the voting, elevation of effectiveness in the mechanisms of securing equal opportunities for candidates and political parties during this crucial phase of the election campaign, along with the creation of additional legal guarantees for early voting, the establishment of polling stations in places of detention. Legal mechanisms of securing transparency during elections have been enhanced. The Central Election Commission (CEC) has been vested with a status of permanently operating and independent constitutional body. The mechanism of its activities has been defined that provides for the preparation and holding of elections without interference of any other government body, and principles of its activities have been approved: that is, independence, legality, collegiality, publicity and fairness. A law is to be passed in the nearest future to envisage a substantial expansion of powers and the consolidation of financial independence of the CEC. In May this year, the CEC approved an action plan to prepare and hold elections to the Oliy Majlis of the Republic of Uzbekistan, regional, district and municipal Kengashes (Councils) of people’s representatives in 2014, which includes a set of measures to ensure the legality, transparency, openness and publicity at all stages of the election campaign. The openness and transparency in the work of all electoral commissions is to be provided by way of holding their meetings with participation from political parties, mass media and observers. The participation of observers from international institutions and foreign states is also envisioned along with the observers and authorized representatives of political parties. The action plan also stipulates the creation of extensive and equal opportunities for political parties and candidates for deputies in utilizing the possibilities of mass media during the election campaign in order to inform the electorate and general public about their election programs, along with providing the voters with timely updates the voters about the progress of preparation and conducting of elections. Therefore, a great significance is attached in Uzbekistan to the conduct of forthcoming parliamentary elections at a high level in accordance with international norms and principles, for their results are to define the strategy and path of development of the nation for the next 5 years.     Embassy of Uzbekistan  Republic  in Azerbaijan

  • A massacre against the Türkmen by this terrorist organization ISIL in Emirli is imminent

    A massacre against the Türkmen by this terrorist organization ISIL in Emirli is imminent

    A massacre against the Türkmen by this terrorist organization ISIL in Emirli is imminent   

    taha

    Sadly the Kurdish policy/regime toward the Türkmen people is no different from that of the Arabisation policy that was carried out against the Türkmen during Saddam Hussein’s reign.

    Following the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government in 2003 and the control of Northern Iraq by the Kurdish Regional Government, the Iraqi Türkmen’s situation has deteriorated dramatically. At that time the Türkmen expected to see justice, equality and human rights but tragically the reverse has been happening. The lands of the Türkmen people have been confiscated and at times destroyed; many Türkmen have been kidnapped, arrested and assassinated. The Türkmen people have been subjected to tremendous pressure from the Kurdish party militias, to disregard their Türkmen identity and they are been forced to blend Kurdish society.

    The current disregard of the Türkmen people’s situation is unacceptable in Türkmeneli. The Türkmen people are again been subjected to a most brutal campaign by a terrorist Islamic State in Iraq, the Levant (ISIL) militants, thousands of Türkmen were forced to flee the Türkmen District of Telafer, when jihadists overran the area.

    The Türkmen people in the sub-district of Taze Khormatu, Tuz Khormatu and specifically the sub_district of Emirli has been under siege by the terrorist organization ISIL for the last two months. Their water, electricity, medical and food supply has been cut off and they have been living in horrific conditions. A massacre against the Türkmen by this terrorist organization ISIL in Emirli is imminent and tragically avoidable.

    When thousands of the Yazidis religious minority were forced to flee Sinjar as the jihadists overran their area, this prompted an international aid operation and helped to trigger the US air strikes.

    Türkmens are questioning why Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, and the Czech Republic do not show this same solidarity/urgency towards the Iraqi Türkmen people.  As over 100,000 Türkmen people have sought refuge as thousands of Türkmen are executed by the terrorist Islamic State (IS) militants.

    Türkmen are also questioning why Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, Canada, and Britain are not showing the same solidarity toward the Iraqi Türkmen in Emirli, who have been under siege for the past two months? Türkmens believe that the humanitarian aid should be distributed equally and fairly to all the Iraqi people who are fleeing Islamic militants in Northern Iraq.

    The Türkmen and Christian people are left defenceless, after the occupation of the city of Mosul by the terrorist Islamic State militants and the retreat of the Iraqi army from Mosul and Kerkuk. The Kurdish armed forces, instead of fighting and stopping the State militants from occupying Türkmen villages around the city of Kerkuk, have used the sectarian chaos in Iraq to expand their autonomous territory to include Kerkuk.

    Kerkuk sits on vast oil deposits, that could make the Kurdish region an independent state that many dream of in Iraq’s mountainous north and beyond, more viable. Türkmen question why Germany, France, the Czech Republic, Italy, Canada, and Britain did not stop the Kurdish Peshmerga from occupying the Türkmen city of Kerkuk without question their objective?

    While the Islamic State militants have swept across northern Iraq, pushing back Kurdish regional forces, threatening the Kurdish regional Capital of Erbil and driving tens of thousands of Christians and members of the Yazidis religious minority from their homes, Germany, France, Czechs Republic and Britain have shown great empathy towards the Kurdish people.

    Funnelling arms to the Kurdish Peshmerga forces by Britain, the United States and some European countries can start to change the dynamics in the region. The U.S. and EU’s provision of arms support for the Kurds is a good and positive step against the terrorist organization ISIL. However, this help should not only be given to the Kurdish people, the Türkmen people should also be given arms support. If the support is only limited to the Kurds, it could be an indication that there are other plans/incentives behind the decision of establishing a Kurdish state.

    The U.S. and EU’s stance on supporting the Kurds could be motivated by plans to divide Iraq into three parts that consist of a Shiite region in the south, a strengthened Kurdish region in the north and a Sunni region in the central Iraq.  This action would be totally rejected by the Türkmen people and civil war will be imminent if this plan is implemented by the U.S. and EU’s countries. In the view of many Türkmen, an independent Kurdish state would further destabilize the region and create new tensions, possibly also within the states neighbouring Iraq.

    In the view of many Türkmen, ignoring the plight of the Türkmen could be seen to be part of a plan for creating a special region for Christians and Yazidis on the Nineveh plane. The Türkmen would be the biggest losers from the implementation of such a plan. The Türkmen have suffered a lot during and after the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraqi Türkmen, the third largest ethnic group affected by the violence in Iraq, should also be equally armed by Britain to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

    The Türkmen people totally disapprove of sending weapons only to the Kurdish Peshmerga as these weapons could later be used by the Kurdish Peshmerga, to suppress the other ethnic groups in Northern Iraq. The Türkmen, Christian and Yazidis were betrayed by the Kurdish Peshmerga when they retreated from the Türkmen district of Telafer and sub- district of Beshir, Kusteppa, Biravchi, Makhmur and Sinjar.

    The Kurdish Peshmerga left the Türkmen, Christian and Yazidis under the mercy of the terrorist organization ISIL. The Kurdish Peshmerga is fighting to protect their own state, not for the Iraqi people as is believed. The Türkmen are worried about the formation of an independent Kurdish state, as this would risk further destabilizing the region.

    The Türkmen people of Iraq are extremely anxious to see the US and the West take action against the terrorist organization ISIL. However, the US, England, France, Italy, Canada, and Germany should show the same equality and empathy towards the Türkmen people. Iraqi Türkmen people are asking for arms/help/support from the West, asking for equal treatment to fight the terrorist organization ISIL.

    Mofak Salman Kerkuklu

    Türkmen Liberation Front

  • Major World Capital Just Fell to Islamists

    Major World Capital Just Fell to Islamists

    In a series of horrifying events, Islamists have seized a major world capital, proclaiming their own government and presenting the world with another crisis, similar to the unstable threat ISIS poses.

    The Muslim militia group Al-Fajr has taken control of Tripoli’s airports, flying the flag of Islam over the Libyan people.

    The group has also overtaken other locations in the capital, in a coup called Operation Dawn, a combination of Islamist and forces from Misrata:

    Fajr Libya (Operation Dawn), a coalition of Islamist and Misrata forces, captured the airport on Saturday in fierce fighting against pro-government militias after a five-week siege that has battered parts of the capital. Television images from the scene showed jubilant bearded militias dancing on wrecked airliners, firing machine guns in the air and chanting “Allah O Akbar” (“God is great”). On Sunday, they set the airport buildings ablaze, apparently intending to destroy rather than hold it.

    After weeks of battling, the victory has secured extremist control over Tripoli, a city of 2.2 million people, which was triggered by Islamist parties losing elections in July.

    “The general national congress will hold an emergency meeting in Tripoli to save the country,” said congress spokesman Omar Ahmidan.

    Libyan parliament has labeled Operation Dawn a “terrorist organization,” after the attack leaves the country with two governments, one in Tripoli and one in the east.

    There are few regular forces for the government to call on, with the prime minister, Abdullah Al Thinni needing to persuade nationalist and tribal militias to try to recapture the capital. Dawn militias are consolidating their hold on the capital by rounding up government sympathisers and people from Zintan, whose militia defended the airport.

    “Units from Garyan and Abu Salem are circling the area looking for any Zintani they can find,” said one frightened resident hiding at an address in the city.

    Perhaps the biggest immediate threat is that officials fear militants will use airliners at the three airports Fajr now controls for terror attacks on neighboring countries.

    In response, Algeria has deployed air defense missiles, and Egypt and Tunisia have banned flights from western Libyan airports.

    Footage shows Islamists dancing on wrecked planes and firing machine guns while chanting “Allahu Akbar.”

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2dhHfZmjmk