How to waste half a billion dollars

Throughout the fiasco of the Pentagon’s $500 million effort to train and equip a force of Syrian rebels to take on the Islamic State, one small group endured.
The New Syrian Army completed the U.S. training course in Jordan, infiltrated into Syria and then, in March, without fanfare or publicity, seized a pinprick of territory from the militants at the remote Tanaf border crossing with Iraq in the far southeast corner of the Syrian province of Deir al-Zour.
There they have remained, holding their ground without deserting, defecting or getting kidnapped, unlike many of the other similarly trained rebels whose mishaps prompted the temporary suspension of the program last year.
Even this modest success is now in jeopardy, however, following an Islamic State suicide attack earlier this month. An armored vehicle barreled into the rebel base shortly before dawn on May 7, killing a number of them and wounding several more, said Lt. Col. Mohammed Tallaa, a Syrian officer who had defected and is the group’s commander.

Hillary didn't use a password

As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton never used a password to protect her computer emails, and she was clueless about how regular emails work on a conventional computer, according to a deposition of a foreign service officer at the State Department....
Lukens also said Clinton did not use a password to protect her stand-alone computer from unwanted intruders such as hackers. During the deposition, Lukens volunteered that the stand-alone computer adjacent to her suite did not have a password for protection “She wouldn’t have had a password.”

Bekesha asked, astonished, “So the computer would have just been open and be able to use without going through any security features?”

“Correct,” Lukens replied.

He added that to the best of his knowledge, Clinton never received a waiver to use the Blackberry in the State Department headquarters.

Iraqi protesters not listening

Security forces fired tear gas as thousands of protesters gathered in central Baghdad on Friday and attempted to head to the Green Zone, a fortified area they have breached twice.
Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi called on the demonstrators, most of them supporters of cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, to stay home and security forces deployed to block their way to the Green Zone, but the protesters were undeterred.
Demonstrators pushed past security forces at Tahrir Square, breached a barbed wire barrier and attempted to pull down slabs of heavy concrete blast wall blocking Jumhuriyah Bridge, which leads toward the Gree Zone, where Iraq's main government institutions are located.

Destroy Iraq to save it

The problem is that the combat-effective Iraqi security forces are limited in number, amounting to two brigades or 5,000 soldiers by one account in addition to two divisions in the regular army. But many of these units have to be held back in Baghdad or elsewhere in the long front line and cannot be committed to the assault on Fallujah which may therefore take a long time even with Coalition air strikes. The assault force that finally took Ramadi numbered only 750 Iraqi special forces, which acted as a mopping force after Isis fighters had been targeted from the air.
The strategy of using a limited number of highly skilled ground forces – in which US specialists are intermingled – able to call in air attacks against any point of resistance makes sense militarily. It is also noticeable that that there are no international protests as the Sunni cities and population centres of Iraq are systematically destroyed. The notorious remark of a US officer about the town of Ben Tre in Vietnam 50 years ago – that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it” – could equally be applied to Ramadi.
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The US would like to recapture the city this year. Mr Karim believes that President Obama “is desperately trying to get Isis out of Mosul before the end of his term”. This is scarcely surprising since its loss and the rise of Isis was perhaps the greatest miscalculation of his eight years in office. But, even if it does fall, the war will not end because the five million Sunni Arabs in Iraq are being given no alternative to Isis other than submission to Shia and Kurdish rule.

No one was worse than Yemen last year

the International Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has recently reported, Yemen had more people displaced last year due to conflict than any other country on earth. Thus, 2.2 million people were displaced by the armed conflict in Yemen in 2015, a figure which accounts for over 25% of the 8.6 million people displaced around the globe due to conflict last year. In addition to Yemen’s refugee crisis, the IDMC also notes that over 14 million Yemenis are on the verge of starvation as a result of the current conflict.

potential disaster in Syria

More than 100,000 Syrians are trapped near the Turkish border in Aleppo province, as fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS) group advance in rebel-held territory.
"We are terribly concerned about the fate of our hospital and our patients, and about the estimated 100,000 people trapped between the Turkish border and active frontlines," Pablo Marco, MSF operations manager for the Middle East, said in a statement.
"For some months, the frontline has been around seven kilometres away from the hospital. Now it is only three kilometres from al-Salamah town. There is nowhere for people to flee to as the fighting gets closer."

Turkey is not amused

Turkey has hit out at the US over images said to show US special forces in Syria wearing insignia of Kurdish militia, during joint operations against so-called Islamic State (IS).
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu called the US "two-faced" and said the practice was "unacceptable".
The images appear to show a US special forces soldier wearing the patch of the YPG, a Kurdish militia group.

pension funds in trouble