ISIS driven from Palmyra; Taliban bring carnage to Lahore; DoD wants to add U.S. troops in Iraq; Bad parts sideline a Navy sub; and a bit more.
The Syrian army has retaken the ancient city of Palmyra after a three-week offensive to dislodge Islamic State fighters from the city they’ve held since May, the New York Times reported Sunday. As it retreated, ISIS sent multiple car bombs and suicide bombers at Syrian troops, but could not overcome an offense bolstered by hundreds of Russian airstrikes.
The victory by forces loyal to embattled Syrian President Bashar al-Assad adds uncertainty to the slow-rolling peace talks. Damascus is looking stronger and its president more confident than at any point in months, perhaps even years.
As Syrian state television aired celebratory footage of troops in Palmyra on Sunday, the Times writes, “Mr. Assad, in a statement carried by the state news agency, said the victory was ‘an important achievement and new evidence of the effectiveness of the strategy followed by the Syrian Army and its allies in the war against terrorism.’”
With Palmyra now ripped from ISIS’s grasp, that makes four cities in Iraq (Ramadi and Tikrit) and Syria (al-Shadadi) that the group has lost in recent months, Reuters notes.
ISIS’s foreign fighters are causing problems for the group and the territory the group holds, the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend from Baghdad. “With time, and because of the financial and management differences between them, the locals started to complain” about the foreign fighters, said one Mosul resident. “We all hope to see the day when this division among the fighters ends them.” There are also reports that ISIS is increasingly looking upon its foreign ranks as possible spies; foreigners are also reportedly drawing a higher salary than local fighters ($200 per month compared to $120, according to the WSJ). These developments, if true, should come as no surprise considering the group’s mounting losses across Iraq and Syria.
But ISIS can still carry out deadly bombings near Iraq’s capital. On Friday evening, an attack at a soccer match south of Baghdad killed more than 40 and injured more than 100 others.
Still, after (likely) killing the Islamic State group’s second-in-command last week, the Pentagon wants to send more U.S. troops to Iraq. A perceived “momentum shift” in the U.S.-led coalition’s war against ISIS has Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford eyeing a troop request they plan to pitch to the White House in the coming weeks, Dunford told reporters Friday at the Pentagon. That, here.
Meanwhile: Pentagon-backed rebels are fighting CIA-backed rebels in northwest Syria, near the border with Turkey, the Los Angeles Times reported Sunday. “In mid-February, a CIA-armed militia called Fursan al Haq, or Knights of Righteousness, was run out of the town of Marea, about 20 miles north of Aleppo, by Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces moving in from Kurdish-controlled areas to the east… Rebel fighters described similar clashes in the town of Azaz, a key transit point for fighters and supplies between Aleppo and the Turkish border, and on March 3 in the Aleppo neighborhood of Sheikh Maqsud.”
Said one anonymous U.S. official: “This is a complicated, multi-sided war where our options are severely limited.” Indeed, the region where the two groups are fighting “features not only a war between the Assad government and its opponents, but also periodic battles against Islamic State militants, who control much of eastern Syria and also some territory to the northwest of the city, and long-standing tensions among the ethnic groups that inhabit the area, Arabs, Kurds and Turkmen.”
How could this have happened? In a word, Russia. “At first, the two different sets of fighters were primarily operating in widely separated areas of Syria — the Pentagon-backed Syrian Democratic Forces in the northeastern part of the country and the CIA-backed groups farther west,” LAT reported. “But over the last several months, Russian airstrikes against anti-Assad fighters in northwestern Syria have weakened them. That created an opening which allowed the Kurdish-led groups to expand their zone of control to the outskirts of Aleppo, bringing them into more frequent conflict with the CIA-backed outfits.”
The tensions have U.S. and Turkish officials at “loggerheads,” said Nicholas A. Heras, Syrian expert from the Center for a New American Security. “After diplomatic pressure from the U.S., the militia withdrew to the outskirts of the town as a sign of good faith, he said,” LAT reported. Not much more by way of closure to this story, but you can read the rest, here.
And speaking of Turkey, U.S. President Barack Obama just gave his NATO ally in Ankara a very cold shoulder. This after news Obama “turned down [Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s] request to join him for the inauguration of a Turkish-funded mosque in Maryland,” the WSJ reported Sunday evening. Adding to the snub, “the U.S. president has no plans for a formal one-on-one meeting with his Turkish counterpart, who is a vital ally in the fight against Islamic State.” Instead, VP Joe Biden will pinch-hit. That, here.
Deadly bombing in Pakistan claimed by Taliban splinter group, Jamaat ul-Ahrar. The attack, which hit a park in the NW city of Lahore, killed nearly 70 people, many of them women and children, the Washington Post reported from Islamabad. “A suicide blast claimed by Islamist militants ripped through crowds of families celebrating Easter at a park in the city of Lahore on Sunday, killing at least 60 people and injuring an additional 300 in an attack the jihadists said had deliberately targeted Christians.”
Said the group’s spokesman, Ehsanullah Ehsan: “It was our people who attacked the Christians in Lahore, celebrating Easter… It’s our message to the government that we will carry out such attacks again until sharia [Islamic law] is imposed in the country.”
Initial forensics revealed “the suicide bomber had packed more than 20 pounds of explosives in his vest. Ball bearings, typically used in bomb attacks to maximize casualties, were found at the scene,” the Post reports.
A brief note about Jamaat aul-Ahrar: they “broke away from the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehreek-e-Taliban, in 2014, as a result of infighting between top commanders. Jamaat ul-Ahrar rejoined the Taliban in March 2015, but it still maintains its own faction within the group.” More, here.
From Defense One
The Dark Web is too slow and annoying for terrorists. For all the fears about terrorists hiding in parts of the Internet that don’t show up in Google, it turns out — not so much. For starters, a site on the dark web doesn’t do what jihadis need it to do: get their message out. From Quartz, here.
Carter watches PBS on Fridays, and other bombshells from his email. Think U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s personal emails are going to create the same furor as those by a certain former secretary of state? Think again. SecDef’s redacted private messages reveal — gasp! — Washington insiders asking about jobs for friends and challenge coins for their kids. Defense One’s Marcus Weisgerber guides us through an unusual behind-the-scenes look, here.
Welcome to Monday’s D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1814 during the War of 1812, the Royal Navy captured an American frigate in Valparaiso, Chile. Help someone seize the D Brief with this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. Got news? Let us know: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
Brussels probe expands to Italy. “Italian police arrested a new suspect thought to have provided false documents to the Islamic State militants behind recent attacks [in Brussels] and in Paris,” WaPo reported Sunday. “The man captured by Italian authorities Saturday was an Algerian suspected of providing several Islamic State supporters with false identification documents, allowing them to evade authorities while plotting attacks in Belgium and France.”
Italian news named the man as 40-year-old Djamal Eddine Ouali, “suspected of having given falsified papers to Salah Abdeslam, a suspected member of the cell that carried out the Nov. 13 Paris attacks who is now in Belgian custody. Ouali is also believed to have furnished documents to Najim Laachraoui, suspected to have been one of the suicide bombers at Brussels Airport, and to a man killed by Belgian authorities in a raid this month before the attacks.”
Dutch counterterrorism police also arrested a man at France’s request on Sunday, in addition to three others, Reuters reported.
The wide-angle take, courtesy of the WSJ: “The string of arrests, which come on top of multiple other detentions in recent months, suggests the terror networks being pursued by European authorities spread beyond Paris and Brussels.” Much more, here.
A window into the possible fate of the Chibook girls. Two young females—and would-be suicide bombers—stumbled into the relative safety of Cameroon troops this weekend after claiming to be among the 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram nearly two years ago. Nigerian officials claimed to be looking into how to verify the girls’ identities—but one spokesman for the Nigerian president said they might be too young (possibly only 10 years old) to have been from Chibook. More from WSJ, here.
Elsewhere in Africa, Mali just arrested men believed to have links to the al-Qaeda group responsible for the deadly attack on a tourist resort in Ivory Coast in early March. For its part, “Ivory Coast announced last week it had detained 15 people in connection with the attack, which was claimed by al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.” More here.
How to stop an American nuclear-powered sub: It’s easy, just use unauthorized parts, none costing more than $10,000. That’s all it takes to keep the $2.7 billion attack sub Minnesota—along with two more of the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-class nuclear-powered subs—“languishing in an overhaul for two years,” Navy Times’ David Larter reports.
“At the center of the debacle is pipe-maker Nuflo Inc., a Jacksonville, Florida-based manufacturer that is the focus of the investigation into quality control issues, according to two Navy sources familiar with the inquiry. The investigation has delayed the repairs so that agents can recover evidence,” he writes.
“News of the lousy parts first emerged in August, a month after the Minnesota was to have finished its overhaul. Since then, a Justice Department-led investigation is examining the quality control issues that led the shoddy part to be installed in the $2.7-billion sub. The same shoddy elbow joints were installed aboard attack subs North Dakota and John Warner, forcing the Navy to spend millions of dollars and many more months to repair them. If these pipes ruptured, they would leak steam and force the submarine to take emergency measures that would impair its combat effectiveness.”
At least one of the three is scheduled to be up and running soon. That’s the Minnesota, whose “repairs should be completed sometime this summer, according to Naval Sea Systems Command.” But, as Larter writes, “for many of the officers and crew that may be too late.” More here.
North Korea released a video Saturday that animates a nuclear attack on the U.S. capitol, “along with a warning to ‘American imperialists’ not to provoke the North,” NYTs reported. “The new video mostly chronicles what it calls “humiliating defeats” suffered by the United States at North Korea’s hands over the years, including the North’s capture in 1968 of an American ship, the Pueblo, and the shooting down of an American helicopter in 1994. It goes on to depict a barrage of artillery, rockets and missiles — including a submarine-launched ballistic missile, which North Korea recently claimed to have successfully tested — and it ends with the American flag in flames.” That, here.
Japan’s military dusted off the cobwebs from an old radar station near the South China Sea, and they’re taking it live today. In addition to being a listening post,” Reuters reports, “the facility could be used a base for military operations in the region.”
About the location: “The new Self Defence Force base on Yonaguni is at the western extreme of a string of Japanese islands in the East China Sea, 150 km (93 miles) south of the disputed islands known as the Senkaku islands in Japan and the Diaoyu in China.”
Worth noting: “Over the next five years, Japan will increase its Self-Defense Forces in the East China Sea by about a fifth to almost 10,000 personnel, including missile batteries that will help Japan draw a defensive curtain along the island chain. Chinese ships sailing from their eastern seaboard must pass through this barrier to reach the Western Pacific, access to which Beijing needs both as a supply line to the rest of the world's oceans and for naval power projection.” More, here.
ICYMI: F-35s are headed to Japan next year. They’ll head to Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni in January, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Sean Stackley announced at a House Armed Service Committee hearing last week. For what it’s worth, Japan says it plans to acquire 42 of the aircraft, with the first one due off the assembly line in November. Stars and Stripes has that short hit, here.
Lastly today, “The Donald” has a foreign policy wonk deficit, and he’s having a hard time snagging advisors for the task who aren’t signed to pundit gigs at major U.S. TV news channels, he told The New York Times this weekend. He also gave his interviewers, Maggie Haberman and David Sanger, a peek into his tenuous handle on a number of major national security issues—from Russia-Ukraine tensions to cyber to U.S.-Iran relations.
But one of the biggest waves from his Q-and-A came from his threat to “halt purchases of oil from Saudi Arabia and other Arab allies unless they commit ground troops to the fight against the Islamic State or ‘substantially reimburse’ the United States for combating the militant group, which threatens their stability.” There really is too much in the exchange to spell out here; so dive into the summary here, or check the transcript for yourself, over here.