Tag: conflict

Tunnel by tunnel, Israel demolishes Gaza underground network in hunt for Oct 7 mastermind

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Beneath us are, according to the Israeli colonel accompanying us, 160 miles of tunnels radiating out from Khan Younis. The scale is staggering. Gaza itself is only 25 miles long and barely seven miles wide.
On Friday morning, a Telegraph reporter and photographer were escorted into a suburb of Gaza’s southernmost city by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) largely to give a better understanding of how the war is being waged.

The tunnels explain Israel’s slow progress. It’s been almost four months since the massacre in which 1,200 people were killed and more than 240 people taken hostage. By Israel’s standards, this is an already overlong war. Since the start of the conflict, more than 200 IDF soldiers have died, including 24 last week on the deadliest day of the campaign for the Israeli military.”

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“He likens the tunnels to the London Underground, many of them interconnected but also serving different purposes. “I cannot go into details but today we feel we have a very good solution for the tunnels,” he says.

Incrementally, the IDF has been able to map them out. “Every second or third building has an entrance shaft. It can be in the courtyard or inside the building itself. The network is so extensive. Each tunnel is marked with an icon. They [the marks] are usually by the entrance shaft,” says Lt Col Anshi.

In the street battles in Khan Younis, Hamas fighters can suddenly appear from nowhere. “They jump out with an RPG [rocket-propelled grenade]. We are not fighting an organised conventional army but small squads of four to six fighters. Our main challenge is to shoot them in the few seconds when they are popping out of the hole,” says Lt Col Anshi.

It’s like the fairground game of whack-a-mole, but with dire consequences for the loser. “There is no army vs army like in the old days. It is two terrorists coming out of a hole shooting and we are firing back.”

As we stand discussing the progress of the war, the gunfire coming from the city intensifies. From time to time – every 10 minutes or maybe less – a huge explosion rings out and accompanying smoke, black or dark grey billows into the sky.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tunnel-tunnel-israel-demolishes-gaza-160000966.html

‘Trainwreck’: Conservative GOP senators break on border, Ukraine deal as Donald Trump pressures Republicans

Posted on by Lone Candle

““If someone is running for president and is trying to actively undermine governance, that’s bad,” Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., told USA TODAY. “Is it really better to have 10,000 people crossing a day illegally or 5,000? Clearly it’s 5,000. So somebody who is trying to defeat legislation, all in the name of running for office? That is irresponsible.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., acknowledged the new political challenges of linking Ukraine aid to border policy in the closed-door meeting Wednesday, according to reporting by Punchbowl. “We don’t want to do anything to undermine” Trump, McConnell reportedly said. “We’re in a quandary.””

https://www.yahoo.com/news/trainwreck-conservative-gop-senators-break-004108227.html

The War on Terror Zombie Army Has Assembled

Posted on by Lone Candle

“All of the ghosts—or perhaps zombies—of U.S. foreign policy for the past 30 years seem to be assembling into one big war. Since the Obama administration, Washington has promised to pull U.S. forces out of the Middle East, while quietly dabbling in proxy wars all over the region. That arrangement turned out to be neither stable nor sustainable. Right under everyone’s noses, and without permission from Congress, the United States has gone from proxy warfare back to direct combat in the Middle East.
The immediate cause of the crisis was unexpected: the mass Hamas-led killing and kidnapping of Israelis last October and the Israeli invasion of Gaza in response. But the underlying dynamics were there for everyone to see. American leaders believed that they could impose an unpopular order on the Middle East without putting in much effort and freeze the Middle East’s conflicts on Washington’s terms. And like an overconfident character in a horror movie, the Biden administration accidentally foreshadowed the bloody events to come.

“The Middle East region is quieter today than it has been in two decades now,” National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said a week before the war. “Now challenges remain—Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the tensions between Israelis and Palestinians—but the amount of time that I have to spend on crisis and conflict in the Middle East today compared to any of my predecessors going back to 9/11 is significantly reduced.””

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“The Trump administration was unbothered. “The biggest threat that our allies and partners in the region face is not the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It’s Iran. You’ve got to start there,” Trump administration official Brian Hook said in August 2020. As was the Biden administration. Current Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in January 2021 that “it’s hard to see near-term prospects for moving forward” on the issue.

Perhaps the United States alone could have solved the conflict; perhaps no one could have. Either way, Washington had tied itself to the outcome. Israel continued to receive U.S. military aid in greater amounts and with fewer conditions than any other country. And the Abraham Accords made Israel a key part of the entire Middle East’s security architecture.

Meanwhile, Tehran was licking its wounds. Although the Islamic Republic of Iran is internationally isolated and domestically losing control, it has many cards left to play. Iranian leaders can still count on a large arsenal of missiles and drones and an array of pro-Iran guerrilla forces across the region. (The Houthis are one such group.) Saudi Arabia, once an advocate for bombing Iran, decided to cut its losses and accept a diplomatic deal with Iran last year.

“The stage was set, then, for the October war to spread all over the region. The Abraham Accords were exposed as both fragile and unpopular in the Arab world, especially after Israeli leaders began to talk about expelling Palestinians from Gaza en masse. Iran had a golden opportunity to escalate on its terms. Hezbollah, the pro-Iran party in Lebanon, immediately began firing on Israeli territory. Biden sent two aircraft carriers to the region to deter any further escalation against Israel, while also talking Israel out of a preemptive war on Lebanon.

Iraqi militias broke their truce with Americans the following week. The U.S. bases originally set up to overthrow Saddam Hussein and repurposed for the war against the Islamic State were now redoubts against Iran’s Iraqi supporters. Like the Obama and Trump administrations before it, the Biden administration cited the original Iraq War authorization to justify its newest battle.

Then the Houthis began to menace international commerce. Houthi spokesman Yahya Sare’e claimed that Israeli shipping was a “legitimate target” until the siege of Gaza was lifted. Echoing the logic of liberal American hawks, he claimed that Yemen had a responsibility to protect Palestinian civilians. But the Houthi attacks also struck non-Israeli ships and drove international shipping companies out of the Red Sea, which normally carries around 10 percent of global trade.

As it turned out, the problem wouldn’t take care of itself. Despite the Abraham Accords, no Arab state except Bahrain was willing to intervene against the Houthis on behalf of Israeli shipping. (Saudi Arabia also seemed more concerned with maintaining its own truce.) Biden decided to cobble together his own fleet to fend off the Houthi assaults.”

https://reason.com/2024/01/12/the-war-on-terror-zombie-army-has-assembled/

China Has New Full-Scale Target Of America’s Ford Supercarrier

Posted on by Lone Candle

“China has constructed a new aircraft carrier target on a sprawling range in the northwestern end of the country that is a dead-ringer for the U.S. Navy’s newest supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. The target underscores the People’s Liberation Army’s continued focus on expanding and refining its ability to engage American carriers and other warships over long distances, which includes a growing arsenal of anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles. This is all part of China’s evolving anti-access and area denial strategy across much of the Western Pacific.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/china-full-scale-target-americas-004037381.html

Massive Attack On Al Assad Air Base In Iraq, Airstrikes Hit Houthi Missiles (Updated)

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Al Assad Air Base in Iraq, where U.S. military personnel and contractors are based, came under a massive barrage from Iranian-aligned militant groups in the country. The attack was so big that reports state it overwhelmed Al Assad’s air defenses, with multiple projectiles landing within its permitter, causing injuries.”
…
The Islamic Resistance in Iraq, which is a blanket moniker for a number of groups hostile to the U.S. and Israel over the war in Gaza, claimed responsibility for the attack. It caused minor injuries to U.S. personnel and seriously injured one Iraqi.
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“The U.S. has around 2,500 troops in Iraq as part of the anti-ISIS mission there. This would be the 58th attack on U.S. facilities in Iraq since the war between Israel and Gaza lit off after Hamas’s cross-border terror attacks on October 7th, according to Reuters.”
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“in and around the Red Sea, it seems clear now that the U.S. is carrying out a sustained hunt aimed at striking the Houthi’s anti-ship weapons prior to launch. Yet another round of preemptive air strikes were carried out yesterday, with three missiles being destroyed.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/massive-attack-al-assad-air-214819320.html