The American Israel Public Affairs Committee is expected to launch its first ads in the coming weeks against its next top target this cycle: Rep. Jamaal Bowman in New York’s 16th Congressional District.

AIPAC’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, is expected to run new ads against Bowman, a member of the progressive “Squad,” as the Democratic primary election for the solidly blue House seat approaches next month, according to Bowman’s campaign and another source with knowledge of the race.

“We’ve heard from inside sources that AIPAC is planning to spend up to $25 million dollars against Congressman Bowman, making this the most expensive House primary in U.S. history,” Bowman campaign manager Gabe Tobias said in a statement to The Intercept. “Their MAGA billionaire donors are spending everything they have against us because they know that Jamaal Bowman speaks for a majority of Democratic voters — from a ceasefire in Gaza to Medicare for All — and that our Democratic coalition can only be defeated with millions of dollars spent to divide our communities.”

“Their MAGA billionaire donors are spending everything they have against us because they know that Jamaal Bowman speaks for a majority of Democratic voters.”

Bowman’s challenger, Westchester County Executive George Latimer, was recruited by AIPAC. The group has helped Latimer raise just under $1 million so far, including almost half of his total contributions in the final quarter of 2023 and about a quarter of his total haul so far.

Latimer has raised $3.6 million to Bowman’s $2.7 million, including from Republican donors and supporters of former President Donald Trump. The two will face off in the primary on June 25. (Neither the United Democracy Project nor Latimer’s campaign responded to requests for comment.)

AIPAC planned to spend at least $100 million this cycle to oust members of the Squad , who have led calls for a ceasefire in Gaza and an end to U.S. military support for Israel. The lobby group’s threat would make it the largest player in the Democratic Party primary season. The group, however, has now distanced itself from the pledge after one of its top targets, Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., won her primary last week.

AIPAC spent $5 million against Lee in 2022 and had tried and failed to recruit at least two candidates to challenge her this cycle. AIPAC had reportedly been in touch with challenger Bhavini Patel’s campaign, but Patel has not said whether the group recruited her to run against Lee. And AIPAC withheld a formal endorsement in the race.

The lack of an endorsement allowed AIPAC to claim a total victory in Pennsylvania; after Patel’s loss, AIPAC celebrated without mentioning the Pittsburgh race. The group posted on Twitter that all six of its endorsed candidates in Pennsylvania had won their races. “Being pro-Israel is good policy and good politics!” AIPAC tweeted .

“The policies AIPAC stands for are deeply unpopular with Democratic voters, that’s why their ads don’t mention Israel ever,” Lee tweeted on Tuesday. “You know what Dem voters overwhelmingly support? A permanent ceasefire now. Conditioning military funding to [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu. Policies that we’ve led on from the beginning. AIPAC is livid that our Democratic voters are not aligned with their Republican megadonors who want to send billions in bombs & weapons to incite another endless war abroad. Being pro-peace and anti-war is what our voters want.”

GOP Cash, Attacking the Squad

Following Lee’s victory, AIPAC is now focusing its efforts on ousting Bowman, but other members of the Squad remain in its sights. The group is also targeting Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and backing her opponent Wesley Bell, but that primary won’t take place until August.

AIPAC is expected to spend at least $20 million in each race, according to Democratic operatives with knowledge of both primaries. The group was also expected to put significant resources into ousting Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. Tlaib has two challengers who have not yet had to report fundraising numbers, including one who was a write-in candidate in the 2018 primary that Tlaib won. Omar has far outraised her opponents, including her AIPAC-backed challenger from 2022, Don Samuels .

“AIPAC started this cycle promising to take out every single member of the Squad and they have already failed at that goal with Summer’s resounding victory last week,” said Usamah Andrabi, the communications director of Justice Democrats, a progressive group that backs the Squad members, in a statement to The Intercept. “Now, their Republican billionaire megadonors want to go all-in to make up for their failures by trying to defeat a former middle school principal and educator because nothing is a greater threat to right-wing power than everyday people having a megaphone in Washington through a Congressman Jamaal Bowman and Congresswoman Cori Bush.”

Bowman is one of the reasons AIPAC started spending directly on elections after having been primarily focused on lobbying, one of the group’s longtime directors wrote in a blog post in 2022. Bowman’s ouster of longtime AIPAC stalwart Rep. Eliot Engel , D-N.Y., in 2020 came as a shock to the group, which launched its new political action committees the next cycle.

As AIPAC has started to spend directly on elections, the group aligned itself with far-right Republicans. During the 2022 cycle, AIPAC endorsed more than 100 Republicans who voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Since then, AIPAC-supported Democratic primary candidates have taken support from the most extreme wing of the GOP, including donors who have supported Republicans like Trump; Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas; Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo.; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; and Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake. Patel encouraged Republicans to switch parties to vote in the primary against Lee, and an AIPAC donor urged Republicans to switch parties to vote against Bowman.

Latimer, for his part, has raised money from Republicans while trying to distance himself from the party. Trump fundraiser Steve Louro, who has given $5,000 to Latimer’s campaign, announced earlier this month that his Republican friend would host a fundraiser for Latimer in May. Latimer’s campaign distanced themself from Louro’s invitation and said they had no control over who hosts the fundraiser.

Latimer has raised more than $80,000 from donors who supported Trump and more than $200,000 from other Republican donors. One of more than a dozen Republicans who recently gave to Democratic Sen. John Fetterman’s campaign told The Intercept he recently switched his party registration to Democrat so he could vote against Bowman.

The post AIPAC’s Next Top Target? Rep. Jamaal Bowman appeared first on The Intercept .

Police attack pro-Palestine demonstrators at the City College of New York, in NYC, on April 30, 2024. Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images

A lone Trash can lay on its side at the intersection of W. 139th St and Amsterdam Ave in Harlem, in front of the gates of the City College of New York.

At around 11 p.m. on Tuesday night, this was the extent of damaged property that I witnessed outside the college campus. At the same time, New York Police Department officers in riot regalia had amassed in their hundreds, including members of the Strategic Response Group — a unit dedicated to public unrest and “counterterrorism.”

More police had stormed through the school’s neo-Gothic gates less than an hour before, at the behest of the college’s president, to arrest protesting students en masse.

Twenty blocks south, police had locked down and barricaded all streets in a two-block radius of Columbia University, brutally arresting students inside the inaccessible campus.

Between Columbia and City College, over 200 protesters — almost all students — were arrested before the night was out.

It was a police response reminiscent of the repression that met protesters in the 2020 George Floyd uprisings . Nearly four years ago, police also responded with extraordinary violence to a mass protest . Then, the alleged provocation involved crucial acts of militant resistance, including low-level but widespread property damage, scattered looting, and the burning of several empty police vehicles.

Tuesday was different. In recent days on the campuses in Manhattan and across the country, massive police operations came in response to peaceful student encampments. Students gathered to share food, maintaining space to hold teach-ins and rallies, and demand their universities divest from Israel.

At Columbia, student protesters took over one university building: Hamilton Hall, the same building seized by students in 1968 in protest of the Vietnam War. At most, the latest building occupation saw a few broken windowpanes and some furniture moved around.

I have never witnessed, at the scene of a protest, the use of police power so disproportionate to the type of demonstration taking place.

The negligible acts of property damage were not, of course, what was being policed. Nor was the holding of campus space; students have done this before in recent decades without their university administrators inviting the force of militarized police.

Instead, it was the protesters’ message that was being handcuffed — the condemnation of Israel and the calls for a free Palestine — and young peoples’ commitment to it.

I have been reporting on political dissent and violent policing for 15 years, particularly in New York City. Compared to Tuesday night, I have never witnessed, at the scene of a protest, the use of police power so disproportionate to the type of demonstration taking place.

Make no mistake: This is an authoritarian escalation.

The “Outside Agitator” Myth

The crackdown on campuses offered a grim continuity: Police and other officials churned out all the same old excuses for quashing resistance. Most notably, their rhetoric relied on the predictable canard of the “outside agitator.”

New York Mayor Eric Adams trotted it out as grounds for sending in an army of baton-wielding cops against the city’s students. And Deputy Police Commissioner Tarik Sheppard went even further on MSNBC Wednesday morning, brandishing an unremarkable chain lock — the sort of which I’ve seen on bikes everywhere — as proof that “professionals,” not students themselves, had carried out the takeover of the Columbia building.

The bike-lock business quickly came in for rightly deserved mockery, but the “outside agitator” myth is no joking matter.

In this current moment, the “outside agitators” conjured are both the perennial anarchist bogeymen or Islamist terror groups sending funds to keep student encampments flush with the cheapest tents available online.

The “outside agitator” trope has a long, racist legacy, including use by the Ku Klux Klan. In the 1930s, the Klan issued flyers in Alabama claiming that “paid organizers for the communists are only trying” to get Black people “in trouble.” The allegation does double rhetorical harm by denying the agency and commitment of organizers themselves and suggesting that “outside” support from beyond a given locale or institution is somehow a bad thing.

More recently, the canard has been hauled out in defense of movement repression in Atlanta, against Stop Cop City protesters who had made a national call for backup . And it was a common refrain for politicians nationwide during the 2020 uprising, as well as discourse around the earlier Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson after police killed Mike Brown.

Blaming outside agitators or interests always was a propaganda ploy and remains so now. The idea that Palestinian liberation struggle is a mere proxy for Iranian interests repeats the delegitimizing logic of the past.

In fact, the Gaza solidarity encampments on campuses are student-organized and led, with Palestinian students at front and center, and a disproportionately large presence of Jewish students too. It is students, over 1,000 of them , who have faced arrest.

It also happens that millions of people have called for an end to Israel’s genocidal war, and support for Palestinian liberation is not and must not be limited to the mythic and maligned terrain of campus activism.

Authoritarian Americanism

Brutal policing and groundless excuses are nothing new, nor is bipartisan support for the crackdowns.

What is new, though, is a most pernicious constellation coming together: far-right attacks on education; white supremacist police repression, further escalated and enabled since 2020; a time of grasping U.S. hegemony abroad; Islamophobic and anti-Arab racism sanctioned in public since the war on terror; and, crucially, an enfeebled left, at least on the electoral level.

Antisemitism allegations are cynically deployed against anti-Zionist speech and twisted to permit every manner of authoritarian abuse — including a genocidal war.

These conditions set the backdrop for the one unassailable excuse, a claim beyond challenge and ripe for manipulation and weaponization: the charge of antisemitism .

Conscientious observers have become all too aware of how this allegation is cynically deployed against anti-Zionist speech and twisted to permit every manner of authoritarian abuse — including a genocidal war.

It is no accident that this indefensible police crackdown comes in service of an indefensible war. The very extremity of protest repression speaks to desperation on the part of institutions of the American establishment.

Israel’s decimation of Gaza has — at least for millions more people — given lie to the redemptive myths of the post-World War II political liberal order. Young people, even the children of the elite, even children of Zionists, are standing with Palestine. Their peaceful acts of protest count as disruptive because they count as un-American — which should be a badge of honor amid a U.S.-backed genocide.

City College President Vince Boudreau, in his letter inviting the NYPD to storm the campus, made specific note of the fact that protesters had refused to take down a Palestinian flag from a flagpole.

After the police had cleared the campus of the students who belong there and filled the space with cops instead, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Kaz Daughtry pulled down the Palestinian flag and raised the American one to full mast in its place.

Riot cops cheered below.

The post I’ve Covered Violent Crackdowns on Protests for 15 Years. This Police Overreaction Was Unhinged. appeared first on The Intercept .

Google and Amazon are both loath to discuss security aspects of the cloud services they provide through their joint contract with the Israeli government, known as Project Nimbus. Though both the Ministry of Defense and Israel Defense Forces are Nimbus customers, Google routinely downplays the military elements while Amazon says little at all.

According to a 63-page Israeli government procurement document, however, two of Israel’s leading state-owned weapons manufacturers are required to use Amazon and Google for cloud computing needs. Though details of Google and Amazon’s contractual work with the Israeli arms industry aren’t laid out in the tender document, which outlines how Israeli agencies will obtain software services through Nimbus, the firms are responsible for manufacturing drones, missiles, and other weapons Israel has used to bombard Gaza.

“If tech companies, including Google and Amazon, are engaged in business activities that could impact Palestinians in Gaza, or indeed Palestinians living under apartheid in general, they must abide by their responsibility to carry out heightened human rights due diligence along the entirety of the lifecycle of their products,” said Matt Mahmoudi, a researcher at Amnesty International working on tech issues. “This must include how they plan to prevent, mitigate, and provide redress for possible human rights violation, particularly in light of mandatory relationships with weapons manufacturers, which contribute to risk of genocide.”

Project Nimbus, which provides the Israeli government with cloud services ranging from mundane Google Meet video chats to a variety of sophisticated machine-learning tools, has already created a public uproar. Google and Amazon have faced backlash ranging from street protests to employee revolts .

The tender document consists largely of legal minutiae, rules, and regulations laying out how exactly the state will purchase cloud computing services from Amazon and Google, which won the $1.2 billion contract in 2021. The Israeli document was first published in 2021 but had been updated periodically, most recently in October 2023.

One of the document’s appendices includes a list of Israeli companies and government offices that are “required to purchase the services that are the subject of the tender from the winning bidder,” according to a translation of the Hebrew-language original.

The tender document doesn’t require any of the entities to purchase cloud services, but if they need these services — ubiquitous in any 21st-century enterprise — they must purchase them from the two American tech giants. A separate portion of the document notes that any office that wants to buy cloud computing services from other companies must petition two government committees that oversee procurement for an explicit exemption.

Some of the entities listed in the document have had relationships with other companies that provide cloud services. The status and future of those business ties is unclear.

Obligatory Customers

The list of obligatory cloud customers includes state entities like the Bank of Israel, the Israel Airports Authority, and the Settlement Division, a quasi-governmental body tasked with expanding Israel’s illegal colonies in the West Bank.

Also included on the list are two of Israel’s most prominent, state-owned arms manufacturers: Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. The Israeli military has widely fielded weapons and aircraft made by these companies and their subsidiaries to prosecute its war in Gaza, which since October 7 has killed over 30,000 Palestinians, including 13,000 children.

These relationships with Israeli arms manufacturers place Project Nimbus far closer to the bloodshed in Gaza than has been previously understood.

Asked how work with weapons manufacturers could be consistent with Google’s claim that Project Nimbus doesn’t involve weapons, spokesperson Anna Kowalczyk repeated the claim in a statement to The Intecept.

“We have been very clear that the Nimbus contract is for workloads running on our commercial cloud by Israeli government ministries, who agree to comply with our Terms of Service and Acceptable Use Policy. This work is not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services,” said Kowalczyk, who declined to answer specific questions. “Across Google, we’ve also been clear that we will not design or deploy AI applications as weapons or weapons systems, or for mass surveillance.”

(A spokesperson for Amazon Web Services declined to comment. Neither Rafael nor IAI responded to requests for comment.)

The Israeli document provides no information about exactly what cloud services these arms makers must purchase, or whether they are to purchase them from Google, Amazon, or both. Though the government’s transition to Google and Amazon’s bespoke cloud has hit lengthy delays , last June Rafael announced it had begun transitioning certain “unclassified” cloud needs to Amazon Web Services but did not elaborate.

Google has historically declined to explain whether its various human rights commitments and terms of service prohibiting its users from harming others apply to Israel. After an April 3 report by +972 Magazine found that the Israeli military was using Google Photos’ facial recognition to map, identify, and create a “hit list” of Palestinians in Gaza, Google would not say whether it allowed this use of its software.

“Without such deep and serious process, they can be seen as complicit in Israeli crimes.”

Both Google and Amazon say their work is guided by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which seeks to “to prevent or mitigate adverse human rights impacts that are directly linked to their operations, products or services by their business relationships, even if they have not contributed to those impacts.” The U.N. principles, which were endorsed by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2011, say companies must “identify and assess any actual or potential” rights abuses related to their business.

Michael Sfard, an Israeli human rights attorney, told The Intercept that these guidelines dictate that Google and Amazon should conduct human rights due diligence and vet the use of their technology by the Israeli government.

“Without such deep and serious process,” Sfard said, “they can be seen as complicit in Israeli crimes.”

“Spike” Missiles

Rafael, a state-owned arms contractor, is a titan of the Israeli defense sector. The company provides the Israeli military with broad variety of missiles, drones, and other weapons systems.

It sells the vaunted Iron Dome rocket-defense system and the “Trophy” anti-rocket countermeasure system that’s helped protect Israeli military tanks during the ground offensive in Gaza.

Israel also routinely fields Rafael’s “Spike” line of missiles, which can be fired from shoulder-carried launchers, jets, or drones. Effective against vehicles, buildings, and especially people, Spike missiles can be outfitted with a fragmentation option that creates a lethal spray of metal. Since 2009, analysts have attributed cube-shaped tungsten shrapnel wounds in civilians to Israel’s use of Spike missiles.

Use of these missiles in Gaza continue, with military analysts saying that Spike missiles were likely used in the April 1 drone killing of seven aid workers affiliated with World Central Kitchen.

The destroyed roof of a vehicle where World Central Kitchen aid workers were killed in an Israeli airstrike, in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip, on April 2, 2024. Photo: Yasser Qudihe/Middle East Images via AFP

Elta Systems, a subsidiary of Rafael, is also named in the document as an obligatory Nimbus customer. The firm deals mostly in electronic surveillance hardware but co-developed the Panda, a remote-controlled bulldozer Israeli military has used to demolish portions of Gaza.

Israel Aerospace Industries, commonly known as IAI, plays a similarly central role in the war, its weapons often deployed hand in glove with Rafael’s.

IAI’s Heron drone , for instance, is frequently armed with Spike missiles. The Heron provides the Israeli Air Force with the crucial capacity to persistently surveil the denizens of Gaza and launch airstrikes against them at will.

In November, IAI CEO Boaz Levy told the Jerusalem Post , “IAI’s HERON Unmanned Aerial Systems stand as a testament to our commitment to innovation and excellence in the ever-evolving landscape of warfare. In the Iron Swords War” — referring to Israel’s name for its military operation against Hamas — “the HERON UAS family played a pivotal role, showcasing Israel’s operational versatility and adaptability in diverse environments.”

Project Nimbus also establishes its own links between the Israeli security establishment and the American defense industry. While Nimbus is based on Google and Amazon’s provision of their own cloud services to Israel, the tender document says these companies will also establish “digital marketplaces,” essentially bespoke app stores for the Israeli government that allow them to access a library of cloud-hosted software from third parties.

According to a spreadsheet detailing these third-party cloud offerings, Google provides Nimbus users with access to Foundry, a data analysis tool made by the U.S. defense and intelligence contractor Palantir. (A spokesperson for Palantir declined to comment.)

Google began offering Foundry access to its cloud customers last year. While marketed primarily as civilian software, Foundry is used by military forces including U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.K. Royal Navy . In 2019, the Washington Post reported the U.S. Army would spend $110 million to use Foundry “to piece together thousands of complex data sets containing information on U.S. soldiers and the expansive military arsenal that supports them.”

The Israeli military extensively uses Palantir software for targeting in Gaza, veteran national security journalist James Bamford reported recently in The Nation.

Palantir has been an outspoken champion of the Israeli military’s invasion of Gaza. “Certain kinds of evil can only be fought with force,” the company posted on its social media during the first week of the conflict . “Palantir stands with Israel.”

War Abroad, Revolt at Home

That Project Nimbus includes a prominent military dimension has been known since the program’s inception.

In 2021, the Israeli Finance Ministry announced the contract as “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.” In 2022, training materials first reported by The Intercept confirmed that the Israeli Ministry of Defense would be a Google Cloud user.

Google’s public relations apparatus, however, has consistently downplayed the contracting work with the Israeli military. Google spokespeople have repeatedly told press outlets that Nimbus is “not directed at highly sensitive, classified, or military workloads relevant to weapons or intelligence services.” Amazon has tended to avoid discussing the contract at all.

The revelation that Google’s lucrative relationship with the Israeli state includes a mandated relationship with two weapons manufacturers undermines its claim that the contract doesn’t touch the arms trade.

“Warfighting operations narrowly defined can only proceed through the wider communications and data infrastructures on which they depend,” Lucy Suchman, professor emerita of anthropology of science and technology at Lancaster University, told The Intercept. “Providing those infrastructures to industries and organizations responsible for the production and deployment of weapon systems arguably implicates Google in the operations that its services support, however indirectly.”

Project Nimbus has proven deeply contentious within Google and Amazon, catalyzing a wave of employee dissent unseen since the controversy over Google’s now-defunct contract to bolster the U.S. military drone program.

“Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I’m any better than Raytheon?”

While workers from both companies have publicly protested the Nimbus contract, Google employees have been particularly vocal. Following anti-Nimbus sit-ins organized at the company’s New York and Sunnyvale, California, offices, Google fired 50 employees it said participated in the protests.

Emaan Haseem, a cloud computing engineer at Google until she was fired after participating in the Sunnyvale protest, told The Intercept she thinks the company needs to be frank with its employees about what their labor ends up building.

“A lot of us signed up or applied to work at Google because we were trying to avoid working at terrible unethical companies,” she said in an interview. Haseem graduated college in 2022 and said she consciously avoided working for weapons manufacturers like Raytheon or large energy companies.

“Then you just naively join, and you find out it’s all the same. And then you’re just kind of angry,” she said. “Why are we acting any different? Why are we pretending that because my logo is colorful and has round letters that I’m any better than Raytheon?”

The post Israeli Weapons Firms Required to Buy Cloud Services from Google and Amazon appeared first on The Intercept .

A Nigerian airstrike this month on a village in the country’s northwest killed 33 people, according to four residents and a local traditional leader. It is the latest in a long-running series of attacks on civilians by the government of Nigeria, one of the United States’ closest allies in Africa and the recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. weapons and military assistance.

The April 10 attack, the latest errant strike in a Nigerian counterterrorism campaign against militants and “bandits,” came as villagers prepared for Eid prayers marking the end of the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan.

“The pattern of Nigeria’s military operations resulting in civilian casualties is deeply troubling.”

“Arriving at the scene, I saw children, men and women … were killed and trapped inside the collapsed buildings that were hit by a bomb,” Lawali Ango, the traditional leader of Dogon Daji village, told Reuters . (A Nigerian military spokesperson, Maj. Gen. Edward Buba, denied that civilians were killed in the April 10 strike.)

“The pattern of Nigeria’s military operations resulting in civilian casualties is deeply troubling,” Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., told The Intercept. “One of the biggest factors contributing to violent extremism is security sector violence against you or someone you know — so we’ll likely see the reverberations of this civilian harm for years to come unless there’s justice and accountability.”

Between 2000 and 2022, the U.S. provided, facilitated, or approved more than $2 billion in security aid, including weapons and equipment sales, to Nigeria, according to report by Brown University’s Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies and the Security Assistance Monitor at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank. Over that time, the U.S. also carried out more than 41,000 training courses for Nigerian military personnel.

The U.S. has repeatedly raised the subject of civilian casualties with Nigeria’s government. Earlier this year, in the wake of an attack that killed more than 120 civilians, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken reportedly discussed the issue with Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu.

When pressed by The Intercept following Blinken’s visit on what actions the State Department would take if Nigeria’s military continued to kill civilians, Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs Molly Phee said, at the time, “I’m not going to get into hypotheticals.”

Since the April 10 attack that killed more than 30 civilians, requests for comment from or to speak with Phee, while acknowledged, have gone unanswered, and the State Department failed to respond to questions on the record.

“Of course, as we always do when we meet with our Nigerian partners, we talk about how to minimize harm to civilians,” Phee told The Intercept in January, asserting that the U.S. seeks “to support Nigeria’s wish to make sure that the country is safe and secure for all of its citizens.”

Since it ramped up its U.S.-backed counterterror campaign in 2017, however, Nigeria has regularly attacked its own people.

U.S. Weapons and Civilian Deaths

A January 17, 2017, airstrike on a displaced persons camp in Rann, Nigeria — revealed by The Intercept to involve the U.S. — killed more than 160 civilians and seriously wounded more than 120 people.

In September 2021, the Nigerian Air Force admitted that it attacked a village, killing 10 civilians and injuring another 20. That April, a Nigerian military helicopter reportedly launched indiscriminate attacks on homes , farms, and a school.

A reported Nigerian airstrike on a village in neighboring Niger in February 2022 killed at least 12 civilians . Another attack in August 2022 left at least eight civilians dead . Witnesses and local officials said a December 2022 strike killed at least 64 people , including civilians. An attack in January 2023 killed 39 civilians and injured at least six others.

And a December 2023 strike killed more than 120 villagers celebrating Maulud, the birthday of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, according to Amnesty International.

A 2023 Reuters analysis of data compiled by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, a U.S.-based armed violence monitoring group, found more than 2,600 people were killed in 248 airstrikes outside the most active war zones in Nigeria during the previous five years. Most victims were identified as “communal militia,” a catchall category that includes local self-defense forces, criminal gangs, and so-called bandits.

Nigeria’s government has frequently been accused of covering up civilian deaths , including running what a 2023 investigation by Nigeria’s Premium Times called “a systemic propaganda scheme to keep the atrocities of its troops under wraps.”

In 2021, the U.S. provided Nigeria 12 Super Tucano warplanes as part of a $593 million package that also included bombs and rockets. Last May, as part of the sale, the U.S. completed a $38 million project to construct new facilities for those aircraft.

The State Department also approved a 2022 sale to Nigeria of nearly $1 billion in AH-1Z attack helicopters and supporting munitions and equipment.

Last year, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., and Jacobs, the California Democrat, called on the Biden administration to scuttle the nearly $1 billion attack helicopter deal.

“We write to express our concern with current U.S. policy on and military support to Nigeria,” the lawmakers said, urging “a review of security assistance and cooperation programs in Nigeria, including a risk assessment of civilian casualties and abuses.”

Jacobs remains opposed to the sale and called for a thorough investigation of the April 10 strike, stressing the need for justice for the victims and survivors. “But more than that,” she said, “I will continue to push the United States to prioritize human rights and accountability in its relationship with the Nigerian military.”

The post Biden Says He Told Nigeria to Kill Fewer Civilians — but Nigeria Keeps Killing Lots of Civilians appeared first on The Intercept .

Civil liberties groups are raising alarms about a bill making its way through Congress that applies pressure for a ban on travel to Iran for Americans using U.S. passports. The rights groups see the bill as part of a growing attempt to control the travel of American citizens and bar Iranian Americans in particular from maintaining connections with friends and loved ones inside Iran.

“If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

“This bill is very concerning because it’s the beginning of a process of criminalizing something that is very normal for many people, which is traveling to Iran,” said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council. “If you’re an American citizen, the government should not be controlling where you can travel.”

Along with a flurry of other sanctions bills targeting Iran, the bill calling for the travel restrictions passed the U.S. House last week. The bill is now slated to come before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Introduced last fall, the No Paydays for Hostage-Takers Act languished until tensions between Iran and Israel escalated into a series of reciprocal attacks earlier this month.

Among other provisions, the bill seeks to bar U.S. passport holders from traveling to Iran by rendering their passports invalid for such travel. Though the prohibition would need to be enacted by the State Department, the legislative proposal effectively encourages the move and, as with other sanctions against Iran, waiving the authority to enact the ban could incur political costs.

If Donald Trump wins a second White House term, a distinct possibility according to polls, the invocation of the travel ban would be likely. In his first term, Trump imposed the so-called Muslim ban on travel to the U.S. for Iranians, among other nationalities, and has promised to reimpose it if elected again .

The idea of banning travel to Iran on American passports was raised last September by former Trump State Department official Elliott Abrams, a right-wing hawk with a controversial history that includes covering up a Central American massacre and involvement in the Iran–Contra scandal.

In practice, many Iranian Americans tend to travel to Iran on Iranian passports, but Americans of Iranian extraction who do not hold Islamic Republic travel documents would be unable to travel there under the ban. The measure is viewed as a potential signal of deeper isolation for the Iranian people and severing of people-to-people ties between Iran and the U.S.

Iran and North Korea?

The bill, originally proposed last October by Reps. Joe Wilson, R-S.C., and Jared Moskowitz, D-Fla., was promoted as a measure to restrict the Iranian government’s ability to take U.S. citizens hostage as bargaining chips for bilateral negotiations. Some dual-nationals have been arrested in Iran in the past amid tensions between the two countries.

Yet hundreds of thousands of dual-nationals are believed to travel regularly to Iran from across the West. Measures barring their ability to do so would represent an unprecedented step, making it difficult or impossible for people with ties in both countries to visit family or maintain personal and professional connections.

Invalidating U.S. passports for travel to Iran would put it on par with North Korea, which had a similar ban put in place in 2017 — during Trump’s first term — when an American citizen died after 17 months of detention there.

Despite being heavily sanctioned over foreign policy and human rights issues, Iran still has relations with much of the international community and large number of Iranians live throughout the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Middle East.

“North Korea and Iran are very different countries.”

“North Korea is really the model for this policy, as it is the only country where there is such a strict prohibition for travel on the books,” said Costello. “But North Korea and Iran are very different countries. The level of isolation of North Korea is far greater, and it doesn’t have the same diaspora that Iran does.”

This week, a delegation from North Korea traveled to Iran, with reported hopes of breaking North Korea’s total diplomatic isolation as conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine forge new geopolitics.

Costello said that NIAC is still hoping that the Senate will not approve the bill when it comes to its consideration. Still, the implications of it coming under consideration, alongside Trump’s promises to revive his “Muslim ban” policy, bode poorly for the future of U.S.–Iran relations.

“You are talking,” he said, “about a policy that could affect hundreds of thousands of people.”

The post House Responds to Israeli-Iranian Missile Exchange by Taking Rights Away from Americans appeared first on The Intercept .

Burkina Faso’s military summarily executed more than 220 civilians, including at least 56 children, in two villages in late February, according to a new report by Human Rights Watch.

“We saw the bloody corpses riddled with bullets. We were able to save a 2-year-old child whose mother was killed shielding him with her body,” a 19-year-old witness, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told The Intercept. “The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed with Kalashnikovs and heavy weapons.”

“The attackers were soldiers from our own army. They arrived on motorbikes and in vehicles, and they were armed.”

The mass killings came as the U.S. counterterrorism strategy in the West African Sahel crumbled, with U.S.-trained military officers launching a long string of coups , including in Burkina Faso itself. Despite the coups and massacres, the U.S. has not cut ties with Burkina Faso, and a contingent of U.S. personnel remain in-country to “engage” with the armed forces serving the ruling junta.

Burkinabè soldiers killed 44 people, including 20 children, in Nondin village, and 179 people, including 36 children and four pregnant women, in nearby Soro village in the north of the country on February 25, according to HRW. The mass killings are part of a long-running counterterrorism campaign aimed at civilians accused of collaborating with Islamist militants.

“The massacres in Nondin and Soro villages are just the latest mass killings of civilians by the Burkina Faso military in their counterinsurgency operations,” said Tirana Hassan, executive director at Human Rights Watch. “The repeated failure of the Burkinabè authorities to prevent and investigate such atrocities underlines why international assistance is critical to support a credible investigation into abuses that may amount to crimes against humanity.”

The West African Sahel was once touted as an American foreign-policy success story, but persistent violence over the last decade intensified as the U.S. implemented its counterterror strategy.

Putsches by U.S.-linked military officers, prompted by spiking militant attacks, have brought with them seismic geopolitical changes. Niger, for example, the site of the most recent coup by U.S.-trained officers in the Sahel, severed its lon-gstanding ties with the American military and welcomed in Russian trainers .

“They Showed No Mercy”

The February massacres followed several attacks by Islamist militants which killed scores of soldiers and civilians, including an assault on a military base almost 15 miles from Nondin.

Witnesses in Nondin told HRW that a military convoy with over 100 Burkinabè soldiers arrived on motorbikes, pickup trucks, and armored cars about 30 minutes after a group of Islamist fighters on motorcycles passed near the village yelling “Allah Akbar!” The eyewitnesses said the soldiers went door to door, rounding up locals before gunning them down. Villagers said a similar sequence played out in Soro.

“Before the soldiers started shooting at us, they accused us of being complicit with the jihadists,” a 32-year-old survivor from Soro, who was shot in the leg, told HRW. “They showed no mercy. They shot at everything that moved, they killed men, women, and children alike,” said a 60-year-old farmer who witnessed the murders.

The Burkinabè Embassy in Washington did not respond to repeated requests from The Intercept to speak with the defense attaché or other officials.

The United States has assisted Burkina Faso with counterterrorism aid since the 2000s, providing funds, weapons, equipment, and American advisers, as well as deploying commandos on low-profile combat missions .

In 2018 and 2019, alone, the U.S. pumped a total of $100 million in “security cooperation” funding into Burkina Faso, making it one of the largest recipients of U.S. military aid in West Africa. U.S.-trained Burkinabè military officers have also repeatedly overthrown their government, in 2014, 2015, and 2022 .

At the same time, militant Islamist violence skyrocketed. Across all of Africa, the State Department counted just 23 casualties from terrorist attacks in 2002 and 2003, combined. Burkina Faso alone suffered 7,762 fatalities from militant Islamist attacks last year, according to the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, a Pentagon research institution. That represents an almost 34,000 percent spike.

In 2020, Simon Compaoré, who previously served as Burkina Faso’s interior minister and was then president of the ruling political party, admitted to me that the Burkinabè government was conducting targeted executions of terrorist suspects. “We’re doing this, but we’re not shouting it from the rooftops,” he said.

The democratically elected government of that time was overthrown in 2022 by the U.S.-trained Lt. Col. Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba , who himself was ousted months later by Capt. Ibrahim Traoré. The extrajudicial killings continued.

“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of unlawful or arbitrary killings, including extrajudicial killings by security forces,” reads the most recent U.S. State Department report on human rights in Burkina Faso, adding that “impunity for human rights abuses and corruption remained widespread.”

Earlier this year, The Intercept reported on three 2023 drone strikes by Burkina Faso’s government — targeting Islamist militants in crowded marketplaces and at a funeral — that killed at least 60 civilians and left dozens more injured.

U.S. Risking Complicity

The “Leahy laws” prohibit U.S. funding for foreign security forces implicated in gross violations of human rights. U.S. law also generally restricts countries from receiving military aid following military coups. The United States, however, has continued to provide training to Burkinabè forces, Gen. Michael Langley , the chief of Africa Command, or AFRICOM, told the House Armed Services Committee last year.

The U.S. provided millions of dollars in counterterrorism assistance to Burkina Faso in 2023, according to State Department data. Last month, a State Department press release touted the fact that the U.S. has given Burkina Faso “hundreds of millions of dollars in development and humanitarian assistance, as well as counterterrorism support to civilian security and law enforcement actors.”

Burkinabè soldiers also took part in Flintlock 2023, an annual exercise sponsored by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa. (Past Flintlock attendees, including Damiba, have overthrown the government .)

“The United States should stop all military cooperation with Burkina Faso, otherwise they risk becoming complicit in the abuses,” a civil society activist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of government retaliation, told The Intercept.

Last October, senior White House, Pentagon, and State Department officials told Traoré, now Burkinabè president, that working with Russia-linked Wagner Group mercenaries would irreparably damage his relationship with the U.S. In January, Russia’s Africa Corps — described by Russian officials as the successor to the Wagner Group following the death of its founder Yevgeny Prigozhin — deployed troops to Burkina Faso to, according to their post on Telegram , protect Traoré and battle terrorists.

Even with the raft of atrocities, coups, and transgressions against the Russian red line, a small contingent of U.S. military personnel are nonetheless deployed to Burkina Faso to, according to AFRICOM spokesperson Kelly Cahalan, “engage and interact” with the Burkinabè military and “keep lines of communication and dialogue open.”

On March 1, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller called on the junta to conduct “complete investigations” of the massacres “with integrity and transparency and hold those responsible to account.” (The State Department failed to provide on-the-record responses to questions by The Intercept.)

The Burkinabè activist scoffed at the suggestion that the Burkinabè military could investigate itself and said that the junta would “erase” evidence of the massacres.

“The United States and the international community must demand concrete actions,” the activist told The Intercept. “Real repercussions are needed, such as sanctions against the perpetrators of the crimes, in order to deter them.”

The post U.S.-Trained Burkina Faso Military Executed 220 Civilians appeared first on The Intercept .

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer warned in a conversation with Pakistan’s ambassador to Washington that the safety of imprisoned former Prime Minister Imran Khan was a high priority of the United States, multiple sources familiar with the exchange told The Intercept.

The warning issued late last month by Schumer, the most powerful Democrat in Congress, to Pakistan came after intense activism by members of the Pakistani diaspora amid concerns that the Pakistani military may harm Khan, the former prime minister who was ousted from office in 2022.

“The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights.”

“Chuck Schumer speaking to the ambassador regarding the safety of Imran Khan is very constructive,” Mohammad Munir Khan, a Pakistani American political activist in the U.S., told The Intercept. “The Pakistani American diaspora has felt let down by Washington’s failure to engage power brokers in Pakistan and hold them accountable for blatant violations of human rights, and destruction of basic fundamentals of democracy.”

Imran Khan is currently incarcerated on corruption charges that are widely seen as politically motivated. Khan, who is regarded as the most popular politician in Pakistan, was removed from power in an April 2022 no-confidence vote orchestrated by the country’s powerful military establishment and encouraged by the U.S. Since then, Khan’s party, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, has faced a brutal repression that has raised international alarms and been denounced by human rights groups .

The concerns about Khan’s life that prompted Schumer’s call to the Pakistani Ambassador Masood Khan reflect a growing fear that the military may deal with Khan’s stubborn popularity by simply putting an end to his life behind bars. (Schumer’s office declined to comment for this story. The Pakistani Embassy in Washington did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

The outreach from Schumer, who represents a large, vocal Pakistani American community in New York, came as a new governing coalition in the South Asian country seeks to consolidate power despite public disaffection over a February election rife with fraud.

In addition to banning PTI, Pakistan engaged in heavy repression ahead of the February vote. A record turnout suggested PTI-aligned candidates had the upper hand. Ignoring widespread fraud, however, a coalition of parties supported by the Pakistani military successfully formed a government led by Shehbaz Sharif in the vote’s aftermath.

The international community, including the U.S., noted voting irregularities, and credible allegations arose of vote rigging and flagrant fraud in the election.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election,” Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas, told The Intercept in March. At the time, Casar and other members of Congress had just called on President Joe Biden to withhold recognition of the government, but Washington’s ambassador to Pakistan congratulated Sharif in early March.

“There is undeniable evidence, which the State Department agrees with, that there were problems with this election.”

Foreign policy experts in Washington said the Biden administration’s approach risked transgressing democratic principles in the name of security. Matt Duss, executive vice president of the Center for International Policy, said, “This appears to be an example where the administration is allowing its security relationship with a foreign government to crowd out other critical concerns like democratic backsliding and human rights.”

Imran Khan himself has reportedly been held in dire conditions at a prison in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Last month, his visitor privileges were abruptly suspended for two weeks, prompting fears from his supporters about his physical conditions in custody. Earlier this month, one of his lawyers claimed that his personal physician was not being allowed to see him in jail. Khan’s wife, who is imprisoned on politically motivated charges of an un-Islamic marriage and graft, has also reportedly suffered health problems due to conditions of her confinement, according to remarks from her lawyer this week.

In a statement given to reporters from prison and later shared on social media, Khan, who was wounded in an attempted assassination in November 2022 at a political rally, alleged that there had been a plot to kill him while behind bars. Khan suggested his fate was in the hands of Gen. Asim Munir, Pakistan’s powerful army chief.

“Let it be known that if anything happens to me or my wife, it’ll be him who will be responsible,” Khan said.

Schumer’s call to the Pakistani ambassador, however, may play into the military’s calculations about killing Khan. “A senior Democrat influential in the Biden administration is sending a warning, which is somewhat significant,” said Adam Weinstein, the deputy director of the Middle East program at the Quincy Institute, adding that he did not believe the military would will Khan in prison.

As extreme as a step it would be, the military harming or even killing a leader it ousted, even one as popular as Khan, would fit a pattern in Pakistani history. Several Pakistani leaders have died violently in the past few decades after falling out with the military, some under murky circumstances, while others, like former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, were executed by military rulers after being deposed from power.

Although nominally led by a civilian government today, Pakistan’s military is widely known to call the shots in the country politically and is currently led by Munir, whose clashes with Khan and his party have been the main political storyline in the country for over a year.

For Pakistani activists in the U.S., the American relationship with Pakistan creates leverage that can be used to ensure that Khan is not murdered behind bars. Mohammad Munir Khan, the Pakistani American activist, said, “The least Washington can do is to ensure Imran Khan is not harmed physically.”

Supporters of Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or PTI, party hold a March 10, 2024, protest in Peshawar against election fraud. Photo: Abdul Majeed/AFP via Getty Images

Capitol Hill Hearing

The U.S. has played an outsized role in Pakistan’s internal politics, especially over the past several years, including a pivotal role in Khan’s ouster from power.

In August 2023, The Intercept reported on and published a classified Pakistani diplomatic cable — a contentious document that had become a centerpiece of political drama, though its contents had remained unknown — showing that Khan’s removal from power had taken place following intense pressure placed on the Pakistani government by U.S. State Department officials.

In the cable, Assistant Secretary of State Donald Lu, whose office covers South Asia at the State Department, is quoted as telling the Pakistani ambassador to Washington that the countries’ relations would be seriously damaged if Khan were to remain in power.

“I think if the no-confidence vote against the Prime Minister succeeds, all will be forgiven in Washington,” Lu said, according to the Pakistani cable.

Since Khan’s removal from power, the U.S. has worked closely with the new military-backed Pakistani regime. Pakistan provided weapons to Ukraine in exchange for the U.S. brokering a favorable International Monetary Fund loan package, according to previous reporting from The Intercept .

Before being imprisoned, Khan made frequent reference to the classified cypher and even claimed to be brandishing a physical copy during a political rally. He is now facing a lengthy prison sentence on charges related to his handling of classified information, in addition to the raft of corruption charges that initially landed him in custody.

Coming in the context of a broader crackdown on his party — which has including killings, extrajudicial disappearances, and torture targeting supporters of PTI and members of the press — most observers believe Khan’s continued imprisonment is a politically motivated gambit to keep him and his movement out of power.

Following this year’s election, with Casar and others in Congress raising questions about Khan’s removal and the vote, the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee held a hearing featuring Lu, the assistant secretary of state.

The sole person testifying, Lu denied that he had been involved in a “regime change” in Pakistan — a reference to Khan’s comments about his role and the content of the cable reported by The Intercept.

On the election, Lu paid lip service to concerns about how the ballot was carried off, while failing to outline what consequences there would be for the vote rigging.

“You have seen actions by our ambassador and our embassy,” Lu said, alluding the congratulations extended by the U.S. to Pakistan’s new prime minister. He then quickly added: “We are in every interaction with this government stressing the importance of accountability for election irregularities.”

“In the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., raised the issue of Khan’s safety in detention at the hearing. Sherman urged Lu to meet directly with Khan in prison, earning applause from the mostly Pakistani audience in hand.

“Ensuring the safety of leaders, regardless of political differences, is paramount,” said Atif Khan, another Pakistan American diaspora activist. “Congressman Brad Sherman rightly advocated for accountability and protection, urging the US Ambassador to visit former Prime Minister Imran Khan and prioritize his well-being.”

While Khan’s fate hangs in the balance, members of Congress have warned that continued U.S. support for a government seen as illegitimate by most Pakistanis risks harming not just Pakistan, but also the U.S. position in a critical region.

“Promoting democracy is important in itself, but it’s in our interests as well,” Casar, the Texas Democrat, told The Intercept. “Regardless of the short-term military benefits, in the long term it has never worked out in the United States’ benefit to be seen as propping up illegitimate, military-led governments.”

The post Chuck Schumer Privately Warns Pakistan: Don’t Kill Imran Khan in Prison appeared first on The Intercept .

Planet Earth vanishes as ongoing conflicts constitute the real World War III that is all around. Image: Getty Images

Israel’s attack on Iran late Thursday night was met with a dangerously premature sigh of relief from both the news media and U.S. government, that somehow full-scale “war” was avoided.

Outlets like the New York Times were quick to characterize the attack as “subdued” and “limited” in scope, pointing to Iranian statements that the attack was launched from within Iranian borders and used small drones rather than fighter jets. Then it was further revealed that the Israeli attack included a stealth cruise missile launched from long range so as to not upset Israel’s new Arab partners .

But this, in fact, is what actual war looks like these days: Sometimes it’s a volley of 300 missiles and drones, and sometimes it is lean, targeted, and carried out covertly. Gone are the days of vast conquering armies and conventional military confrontations between two parties. So long as experts, the government, and the media worry only about a kind of war that is obsolete, it cannot see the war right in front of our faces.

The misconception has even infected the U.S. government.

“The downplaying of direct attacks on its soil may indicate the Islamic Republic lacks the desire, or capability, to match its bluster with professed military might,” a State Department communiqué produced after the attack and obtained by The Intercept says. “Over weeks of unprecedented military exchanges between Iran and Israel … Iranian officials appear keen to avoid further escalation.”

On Thursday, prior to the attack, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian vowed that if Israel strikes back, “the next response from us will be immediate and at a maximum level.” Now, Tehran has to adjust to the reality that a massive Israeli counterattack didn’t come and might never.

As the media and the world awaits full-scale war between Iran and Israel and even frets about nuclear escalation, a huge reality of modern warfare is being overlooked: We are already fighting World War III. No, it is not empires marching armies through countries, conquering continents. And no, it isn’t millions of young men (and now women) pressed in uniform on scales of nearly 100 years ago. And no, in most societies where war is a constant, the public doesn’t even have to feel the pain of war, except in that the military dominates everything and robs everything else of resources : programs to fight poverty, food, housing, health care, transportation, climate change .

World War III instead is all around, a planet that is aflame with armed conflict and awash in arms sales , an overlapping Venn diagram of killing that engulfs the globe, and a constant bonanza for national security “ experts ” and the military–industrial complex .

Let’s take a tour of the battlefield.

In the Middle East, the U.S., Turkey, Iraq, and even Iran all have footholds in Syria as their internal civil war continues unabated. And all of it goes unremarked most of the time as people look elsewhere for World War II-like battles. Iranian; Iranian-funded or backed or inspired; or independent militias in Syria and Iraq target U.S. troops in Syria, Iraq, and now Jordan. The United States bombs, but so does Israel, and Turkey, and other silent partners of Washington in the war against Iran, and Syria, and ISIS, and Hezbollah. The fight against ISIS, Operation Inherent Resolve, the U.S. says , involves 80-plus “partners” fighting not just in Syria and Iraq, but also in Afghanistan and Libya. A coalition of 80-plus countries — but the U.S. is loath to name them all, especially the allied “special” operators who are clandestinely working on the ground.

What we do know is that 10 countries have been involved in airstrikes on Houthi targets in Yemen, including the U.S., United Kingdom, Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, and South Korea. Like so many other conflicts, it’s not altogether clear who bombed who or from where, nor other members of the supporting cast. The U.S. bombs from aircraft carriers and from the Gulf states, and from Kuwait and Jordan, and possibly even from Saudi Arabia and Oman. But World War III is about keeping things secret, so who knows.

In the Red Sea, these same countries — plus France, Italy, Norway, Seychelles, Spain, Greece, Finland, Australia, and Sri Lanka — have joined to fend off Houthi attacks at sea . Even more countries are allegedly participating in the coalition in secret, given the sensitivities surrounding support for Israel during its war with Hamas. But then there’s also the war against pirates, and the war against nuclear proliferation, and the war against arms smuggling, and the Middle East war even against drugs, all carried out by a vast international maritime fleet involving dozens of countries.

While Israel’s war in Gaza, and its back and forth with Iran, is atop the Billboard charts for now, in Ukraine, a trench war and a standoff has now dragged on for more than two years. Here as well, all eyes have been on some kind of decisive victory or defeat, but World War III is more characterized by Ukraine or its proxies regularly attacking targets inside Mother Russia, attacks that Moscow downplays. Russians fighting on the Ukrainian side are now making regular incursions into Russia’s Belgorod and Kursk regions. Meanwhile, the real World War III is NATO already at war with Russia, increasing its activities adjacent to the enemy, expanding its ranks, building up its military, and supplying arms to Ukraine. The United States, meanwhile, is deployed from Norway to Bulgaria, and has in the past two years built up a major new base in Poland. Meanwhile, Iran and North Korea have played their part in shuttling drones, missiles, and artillery shells into the Russian war effort.

Though the blatant Russian invasion seems to embody the old-fashioned concept of occupying armies and World War II, the reality is that Ukraine never turned into “the largest tank battle” ever, as some predicted, nor did it “escalate” to nuclear war, nor has it even been decisive.

The war in Ukraine is certainly the world-altering event of the past five years, but even here, without more borders crossed, without escalation, and without Russia and NATO shooting at each other directly, some mighty lessons can be learned. Armies clashing is an illusion. World War III is thus not some conquering army sweeping its way across the continent. At no time have more than 300,000 soldiers been on the battlefield in Ukraine at any one time; in World War II, it was nearly 10 million facing each other on a daily basis (and some 125 million mobilized overall). Because of the greater lethality of weapons, military casualties in Ukraine have been enormous. But most of the ground engagements have taken place at the company or even platoon level; massing too many troops in one place is just too dangerous in today’s world. And this has all unfolded while neither Russia nor Ukraine have been able to harness airpower in the same way the United States has. Other than Vladimir Putin’s heartless offensive that used young Russian men as cannon fodder, few nations want to fight this way, preferring long-range air and missile (and now drone) attacks.

South of Ukraine, Azerbaijan and Armenia continue to simmer. Last year, Azerbaijan attacked the breakaway republic of Artsakh . With the backing of Turkey and Israeli weapons, Azerbaijan attempted to permanently squash the ethnic Armenian enclave, successfully driving tens of thousands of civilians into neighboring countries.

Past the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea is also brimming with maritime conflict. Constant Chinese naval passes around the borders of Taiwan are supplemented with close calls with South Korea, Japan and the Philippines (and the United States). Meanwhile, Myanmar’s civil war continues unabated.

On the Korean Peninsula, North Korea continues nuclear testing and the unannounced firing of ballistic missiles into the ocean, and tensions are a constant background noise of war games, military incursions, and cross-border incidents. Thousands of artillery batteries stare each other down across the Demilitarized Zone, as South Korea points the finger at North Korean technology used in Iranian missiles launched toward Israel. And, of course, the United States and other “partners” are active on the ground.

In a world of supposed “international order,” India and Pakistan continue to fight over their common border, as they have been doing for decades. And India and China face off, another flashpoint that could spell World War III to some but one that is already here in reality.

In Africa, military forces, terrorists, militants, mercenaries, militias, bandits, pirates, and separatists are active, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, in Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Sudan, and Sudan. China and Russia scramble for bases and influence (China already has a base in Djibouti). Russia’s Wagner Group is active in Africa and involved in combat, and in the past two months, Rwandan military forces have attacked targets in the DRC, and Morocco has conducted drone strikes on Polisario fighters near the Western Sahara border.

On the African continent, the U.S., France, and the U.K. have been engaged in expansive yet clandestine fighting, supposedly against Islamic terrorists , while all around the continent smolders and neither can claim any long-term wins on the dual fronts of counterterrorism and peacekeeping. American troops operating in Niger are stuck as the country’s U.S. government-trained junta claims America’s footprint is illegal. The United States has also been bombing targets in Somalia for years now, and the African Union mission in Somalia has been actively involved in combating al-Shabab.

U.S. forces continue to fan out across Latin America and the Caribbean, using missile cruisers to intercept drug smuggling submarines, sending marine anti-terrorism teams into a fully destabilized Haiti, and fast-tracking exports of helicopters, aircraft, and naval drones to Guyana as its neighbor Venezuela hungrily eyes its oil reserves. Senior Biden administration officials have floated sending U.S. troops into the treacherous swatch of jungle connecting South and Central America known as the Darién Gap to stem the flow of migrants and drugs across the U.S. southern border.

And what even happened to neutrality in the past few years? Switzerland and Austria have provided arms to Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have joined NATO. Only little Costa Rica, Iceland, Mauritius, Panama, and Vanuatu have no formal armed forces, but even there, Iceland is a very active member of NATO and Panama is a close military ally of the U.S. Speaking of small countries taking on big fights, Fiji and Luxembourg both count themselves as members of the global coalition to defeat ISIS .

Ubiquitous warfare, our World War III, paints a worldwide picture that is overwhelming, leaving little room to imagine that something can be done about it. And it’s hard not to conclude that the superpowers and the national security “community” aren’t somehow satisfied with the status quo. But as with addiction, the first step toward recovery is admitting you have a problem — or in this case, a global war.

The post Israel Attack on Iran Is What World War III Looks Like appeared first on The Intercept .

Once a well-respected public commentator and academic in his native Austria, Farid Hafez’s life slowly began to unravel after rumors spread that he was an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood — allegedly a sleeper agent promoting extremism in the country.

“I used to be published every month in newspapers from both the left and right. I had a high profile in Austria, and people took me seriously,” Hafez said. “But some years ago, people started calling me to tell me that there were rumors about me spreading behind closed doors. I felt there was a difference, and that something was changing.”

“Eventually,” he said, “I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”

“I was sidelined to such an extent that newspapers would not even publish me anymore.”

Hafez’s growing ostracism in Austria culminated in a controversial police operation in 2020 called Operation Luxor. Hafez and others were targeted with raids and asset seizures. Hafez ultimately left Austria for the United States, where he took up a visiting professorship at Williams College in Massachusetts.

Operation Luxor was later deemed unlawful by Austrian courts, and the police’s terrorism charges against Hafez were eventually dropped. Today, the case is widely viewed as a witch hunt that targeted Austrian Muslims. Despite his exoneration, the damage to Hafez’s life from the yearslong ordeal have been immense.

“A lot of this has basically been about destroying my reputation,” he said. “Everybody knew that I was affected by this, even far from Austria.”

Little did Hafez know at the time, but the rumors about him and others in Austria originated from a research center at George Washington University and a prominent U.S.-based terrorism analyst there named Lorenzo Vidino, according to a lawsuit filed late last month. Hafez’s suit alleges fraud and racketeering, asking for $10 million in damages from Vidino, along with George Washington University and its Program on Extremism, the research center that Vidino heads.

The lawsuit, according to a press release, alleges that Hafez and others were targets of an organized smear campaign, accusing Vidino of “participating in a criminal enterprise that deployed fake journalists, social media bots and pay-to-play reporters to destroy the careers of dozens of individuals by constructing and disseminating false narratives linking them to the Muslim Brotherhood.” (Vidino and George Washington University haven’t filed a response to the lawsuit, and neither replied to requests for comment.)

The campaign against Hafez exploited an environment of suspicion that can result in Muslim or Arab scholars being targeted, said an academic who works on anti-Islam bias, noting that such campaigns often fixate on people whose work touches on politically sensitive subjects.

Farid Hafez, now a professor at Williams University, at a panel on Islamophobia in Istanbul on Oct. 19, 2017. Photo: Emrah Yorulmaz/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

“Farid Hafez is not the first Muslim professor to be targeted by ideologues who seek to silence and censor scholarship on Islamophobia, or Palestine, or anti-Arab racism,” said Sahar Aziz , a national security expert and director of the Center for Security, Race, and Rights at Rutgers University. “In the U.S., individuals who are critical of U.S. policy in the Middle East are often slandered as un-American or disloyal. In direct contradiction of American principles of academic freedom and free speech, Islamophobic organizations and government officials seek to censor Arab and Muslim professors when they disagree with the substance of their scholarship.”

“Meanwhile,” Aziz added, “in Europe there is vilification of almost any Muslim individual or group that is politically active, such that their activities are conflated with support for terrorism.”

GWU’s Lorenzo Vidino

Vidino worked with a private investigation firm in Switzerland that covertly spread spurious allegations against various Muslims in Europe, accusing them of involvement in terrorism and extremism, according to a report last year in the New Yorker.

Many of the details in the New Yorker, which are repeated in part in Hafez’s lawsuit, became public when hackers leaked internal communications from the firm behind the campaign, known as Alp Services. The hackers sent the files from Alp, another defendant in Hafez’s suit, to one of its intended targets: an American citizen living in Italy named Hazem Nada, who alleged in a separate lawsuit that his company and personal reputation were tarnished by unfounded accusations of terrorist financing.

The leak suggested that the operation was being financed to the tune of millions of dollars by the United Arab Emirates government as part of a broader campaign to destroy perceived ideological enemies in Western countries, and particularly those it accused of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The UAE campaign reportedly targeted more than 1,000 people in 18 European countries.

Among those mentioned in the files as working with Alp was Vidino, who took a 3,000-euro consulting fee from the firm for “a series of gossipy reports about the Brotherhood’s reach,” according to a passage from the New Yorker quoted in Hafez’s lawsuit. The “gossipy reports,” which helped form the basis of the campaign on behalf of the UAE, appeared to consist of lists of suspected Islamists that Alp could then show it had discredited on behalf of its Emirati client. (Alp has neither responded to Hafez’s lawsuit nor a request for comment.)

In addition to his work with the Austrian government and George Washington University’s Program on Extremism, Vidino maintains public connections with think tanks based in the UAE, including the Abu Dhabi-based Hedayah, which is chaired by members of the royal family. Earlier in his career, he worked as a senior analyst at the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a think tank run by anti-Muslim activist Steve Emerson .

Lorenzo Vidino, of the George Washington University Program on Extremism, at a press conference following a meeting on radicalization with Italian officials in Rome on Jan. 5, 2017. Photo: Riccardo De Luca/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images

Nada filed his separate lawsuit against the government of the UAE, Vidino, Alp Services, and several others alleged to have been involved in the smear campaign against him. The UAE-sponsored campaign, the suit says, triggered a series of events that ultimately led Nada’s oil trading company, Lord Energy, to declare bankruptcy.

Nada is seeking $2.7 billion in damages and compensation. In addition to ideological reasons for the campaign against him, Nada’s lawsuit alleges that the UAE, a major oil and gas producer, had commercial motivations when it hired Alp Services to help shut his firm out of competing in the global energy market.

“The enterprise’s sham accusations that Hazim and Lord Energy were involved in terrorist financing were meant to — and did — eliminate a commercial competitor by causing banks and financial institutions to stop lending to Hazim and Lord Energy and causing other industry participants to stop doing business with Hazim and Lord Energy,” Nada’s lawsuit says.

The defendants in Nada’s case have not responded directly to the allegations against them, either in court or in the press.

Luxor’s Toll

Hafez would seem like an unlikely target for a smear campaign. A well-respected academic researcher in Austria, his work focused on documenting and combating anti-Muslim racism in Europe. He was a co-author of the European Islamophobia Report, a scholarly annual analysis of anti-Muslim discrimination on the continent, and was affiliated with a Islamophobia research center based out of Georgetown University.

Starting in 2015, Vidino began appearing as a public commentator and later working as a consultant with the Austrian government, focusing on issues of political Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hafez said his reputation began to suffer around the same time.

The Muslim Brotherhood is a political movement mostly based in the Arab states, which has often clashed with the conservative monarchies in the region. The movement has been suppressed in countries like Egypt but remains a bogeyman for local leaders as well as right-wing groups in Western countries who have frequently accused Muslim political opponents of association with the group.

Hafez felt himself gradually becoming the target of these attacks. The accusations were often put forward vaguely in public where individuals or organizations were accused of “affiliations” with the Muslim Brotherhood rather than holding any concrete roles or membership. The allegations were amorphous enough that they were impossible to refute, or even challenge, mostly disseminated as they were through whisper campaigns spread through the Austrian government and security establishment.

After the smears took hold, Operation Luxor came down on the night of November 9, 2020. Hundreds of armed police officers raided the homes of Hafez and dozens of others, along with institutions they were affiliated with.

The search warrant used to justify the raid was based on a report authored by Vidino about the Muslim Brotherhood in Austria. Vidino also served twice as a witness for the Austrian government against targets in the case.

The Austrian government at the time — led by right-wing Chancellor Sebastian Kurz — celebrated the raids as a blow to “political Islam.” Despite these claims, however, the operation ultimately failed to uncover evidence of terrorism or even generate any arrests and convictions.

Despite being eventually exonerated by Austrian courts, Hafez’s career and reputation suffered in Austria and his financial assets were frozen. He has suffered ongoing stress — along with his family, including his young children who remain traumatized by the armed raid on their house in 2020.

“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe.”

The lingering impact of the smear campaign and raid on his life have now led Hafez to seek relief from American courts against Vidino, George Washington University, and Alp Services. A press release about Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Vidino presented himself as a disinterested academic with an expertise on terrorist figures and groups, feeding the narrative to both legitimate reporters and pay-to-play journalists, fellow academics and think-tanks that Hafez was deeply connected to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Hafez knew that Vidino was antagonistic to his work on behalf of Muslim communities in Austria. The New Yorker article and Nada’s lawsuit, however, had raised more troubling questions. Vidino had, according to Hafez’s lawsuit, acknowledged that he strongly suspected the payment from Alp was coming from the Emirates. Hafez’s lawsuit said, “Alp and Dr. Lorenzo Vidino (‘Dr. Vidino’), with the assistance of the other co-defendants, targeted Dr. Hafez and others similarly situated because they saw him as a means of keeping their UAE gravy train rolling and veracity was simply beside the point.”

Hafez’s lawsuit, in other words, raises the possibility that Vidino’s advocacy may not have been merely ideological but driven by financial incentives from the UAE.

“In a way, what Vidino was enabling was the criminalization of critical scholarship about Islam and anti-Muslim racism in Europe,” Hafez said. “But when I first started looking into him, I was focused on his ideological ties to the far-right in the United States. I assumed that he was an ideologically inspired person. I had no clue whatsoever that the UAE was behind his work, and maybe even the main driver.”

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