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Entries in New York Times (126)

Tuesday
Sep272011

Turkey Feature: Ankara Offers Itself as the Answer in the Middle East (Shadid)

President Erdoğan at UN, 22 Sept 2011 No one is ready to declare a Pax Turkana in the Middle East, and indeed, its foreign policy is strewn this year with missteps, crises and gains that feel largely rhetorical. It even lacks enough diplomats. But in an Arab world where the United States seems in retreat, Europe ineffectual and powers like Israel and Iran unsettled and unsure, officials of an assertive, occasionally brash Turkey have offered a vision for what may emerge from turmoil across two continents that has upended decades of assumptions.

Not unexpectedly, the vision’s center is Turkey.

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Sunday
Aug072011

Afghanistan: "Deadliest Day" for US as 30 Troops Die When Copter Shot Down (Rivera/Rubin/Shanker)

In the deadliest day for American forces in the nearly decade-long war in Afghanistan, insurgents shot down a Chinook transport helicopter on Saturday, killing 30 Americans, including some Navy Seal commandos from the unit that killed Osama bin Laden, as well as 8 Afghans, American and Afghan officials said.

The helicopter, on a night-raid mission in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province, to the west of Kabul, was most likely brought down by a rocket-propelled grenade, one coalition official said.

The Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, and they could hardly have found a more valuable target: American officials said that 22 of the dead were Navy Seal commandos, including members of Seal Team 6. Other commandos from that team conducted the raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that killed Bin Laden in May. The officials said that those who were killed Saturday were not involved in the Pakistan mission.

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Thursday
Aug042011

Libya Interview: Qaddafi's Son Saif Al-Islam "We Will Ally with Radical Islamists" (Kirkpatrick)

After six months battling a rebellion that his family portrayed as an Islamist conspiracy, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s son and one-time heir apparent said Wednesday that he was reversing course to forge a behind-the-scenes alliance with radical Islamist elements among the Libyan rebels to drive out their more liberal-minded confederates.

“The liberals will escape or be killed,” the son, Seif al-Islam el-Qaddafi, vowed in an hourlong interview that stretched past midnight. “We will do it together,” he added, wearing a newly grown beard and fingering Islamic prayer beads as he reclined on a love seat in a spare office tucked in a nearly deserted downtown hotel. “Libya will look like Saudi Arabia, like Iran. So what?”

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Monday
Aug012011

Media Feature: Al Jazeera English Makes It to the US...Well, New York City (Stelter)

Every cable news channel has its moment.

CNN had the gulf war. Fox News had the war on terror. And Al Jazeera English had the Arab Spring.

But six months after widespread protests erupted in the Middle East, the Qatar-based Al Jazeera has not gained distribution on any major cable or satellite systems in the United States. The channel’s supporters say they feel it has been blacklisted; the distributors say they have to contend with limited channel space.

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Sunday
Jul312011

Belarus Follow-Up: Regime to Ban People from Standing and Doing Nothing

Soon-to-be-Illegal Activity in BelarusIron-fisted authorities in Belarus have responded to a burst of creative modes of protest by young protesters with a rather surreal innovation of their own: a law that prohibits people from standing together and doing nothing.

A draft law published Friday prohibits the “joint mass presence of citizens in a public place that has been chosen beforehand, including an outdoor space, and at a scheduled time for the purpose of a form of action or inaction that has been planned beforehand and is a form of public expression of the public or political sentiments or protest".

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Monday
Jul252011

Syria 1st-Hand: Debating the Future in Homs (Shadid)

Clock Square in Homs, 15 May 2011Syria is awash in such stories of solidarity these days, bridging traditional divides that have colored the country’s politics for generations. But far from disappearing, the old divisions of geography, class and, in particular, religious sect are deepening.

Syrians offer different explanations. Protesters blame the cynical manipulation of a government bent on divide and rule, and the government points to Islamist zealots seeking to impose a tyranny of the majority.

Which prevails — new loyalties born of revolution, or old rivalries entrenched in smaller identities — may decide the fate of Syria’s four-month revolt.

Colliding along the front lines of the uprising, and especially here in Homs, these forces suggest a grim reality of the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad: the longer his government remains in power, the less chance Syria has to avoid civil strife, sectarian cleansing and the kind of communal violence that killed at least two dozen people in Homs last week. Unlike in Egypt, and despite the protesters’ hope and optimism, time is not necessarily on their side, a point that some of them admit.

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Wednesday
Jul202011

Syria Snapshot: A Fragile Freedom in Hama (Shadid)

Hama, 1 July 2011In this city that bears the scars of one of the modern Middle East’s bloodiest episodes, the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad has begun to help Syrians imagine life after dictatorship as it forges new leaders, organizes its own defense and reckons with a grim past in an uncertain experiment that showcases the forces that could end Mr. Assad’s rule.

Dozens of barricades of trash bins, street lamps, bulldozers and sandbags, defended in various states of vigilance, block the feared return of the security forces that surprisingly withdrew last month. Protests begin past midnight, drawing raucous crowds of youths celebrating the simple fact that they can protest. At dusk, distant cries echo off cinder blocks and stone that render a tableau here of jubilation, fear and memory of a crackdown a generation ago whose toll — 10,000, 20,000, more — remains a defiant guess.

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Sunday
Jul172011

Libya Snapshot: Why the Insurgents Are Struggling in the Advance on Tripoli (Chivers)

The capture last week by Libyan fighters opposed to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of the mountain village of Qawalish signaled a shift in the front lines in the rebels’ slow advance toward Tripoli, Libya’s capital. It also provided a fine-grained view of the western rebels at war, offering insights into their leadership, logistics, tactics and conduct on the battlefield.

Some of what emerged was grim, including the aggressive and sustained looting and arson of Qawalish that followed the rebels’ entry into the town. (The arson continued on Monday. Almost a week after the town fell, two homes and an auto-parts shop were freshly ablaze.) These were crimes. But other rebel actions spoke to different elements of the character of opposition fighting units in the mountains — including the mix of enthusiasm, inexperience and initiative that has in turns both endangered the rebels and at times made them safe. In Qawalish, all of this could be readily seen.

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Friday
Jul082011

Pakistan Feature: US Government "Pakistani Intelligence Killed Journalist Saleem Shahzad"

Saleem ShahzadNew classified intelligence obtained before the May 29 disappearance of the journalist, Saleem Shahzad, 40, from the capital, Islamabad, and after the discovery of his mortally wounded body, showed that senior officials of the spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, directed the attack on him in an effort to silence criticism, two senior administration officials said.

The intelligence, which several administration officials said they believed was reliable and conclusive, showed that the actions of the ISI, as it is known, were “barbaric and unacceptable,” one of the officials said.

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Thursday
Jul072011

Terrorism Special: Taking Apart the Myth about the 2005 London Bombing and "Multi-Culturalism"

Kenan Malik's mono-causal explanation in The New York Times for the atrocity of six years ago is simplistic, divorced from history, ignorant of the scholarship on violent extremism, and oblivious to the evidence around the 7-7 bombings, including from the British security service MI5.

Official multiculturalist policies may indeed be a problem for western societies (although it is of interest that Malik omits from his analysis a country, Canada, that is more diverse than the UK and which for decades has embraced multiculturalism as an official aspect of its national identity), but it was not the sole cause of 7-7 or other post-9/11 acts of terrorism.

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