Assad’s feeling cocky; Car bomb in Istanbul; Aircraft carrier deployments spike; Chinese spy plane crashes; and a bit more.
A car bombing in Istanbul has killed nearly a dozen people, including seven police officers, and wounded nearly three dozen others in the fourth major bombing to hit the city this year. “The blast hit the Vezneciler district, between the headquarters of the local municipality and the campus of Istanbul University, not far from the city’s historic heart,” Reuters reports. “It shattered windows in shops and a mosque and scattered debris over nearby streets...The police bus that appeared to have borne the brunt of the explosion was tipped onto its roof on the side of the road. A second police bus was also damaged.”
No one has yet claimed responsibility, but suspicions are turning to Kurdish militants since they’ve been behind similar attacks across Turkey in recent months, including two car bombings in the capital, Ankara, and “a May 12 car bomb attack in Istanbul that wounded seven people. In that attack, a parked car was also blown up as a bus carrying security force personnel passed by.” More here.
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is feeling pretty cocky, telling his newly-elected parliament this morning that he has “vowed to ‘liberate’ every inch of the country in the same way his troops recaptured the historic town of Palmyra from the Islamic State group,” the Associated Press reports. His government, he said, “has no alternative but to be victorious.” So there’s your latest on negotiating any peaceful transition away from power, as U.S. State Secretary John Kerry was shooting for by August 1.
Here’s one reason why Assad may have a bit more pep in his step today: Russia has paved the way for escalation in Syria’s northwest, Business Insider reported Monday after Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov “What is happening in and around Aleppo now is what we had warned the Americans about beforehand — and they know it: that we will in the most active way support the Syrian army from the air not to allow the seizure of this territory by terrorists.” Lavrov’s comments follow recent similar remarks from the deputy defense minister and a former chief of the general staff for Russia’s military.
On top of the rhetoric, “The rate and breadth of Russian airstrikes in Aleppo and opposition-held territory in Idlib province tripled over the course of three days last week,” marking “a dangerous shift in the Russian airstrike pattern to levels only seen prior to the brokering of the cessation of hostilities agreement in late February 2016,” write analysts from the Institute for the Study of War.
Syrian troops are as close as 15 miles from Tabqa, where an airbase rests some 50 miles west of the Islamic State’s de facto HQ of Raqqa. U.S.-backed rebels, meanwhile, have advanced to within 2 km of their immediate goal of Manbij, according to information passed along to Reuters from activists with the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Surprise, surprise: ISIS fighters from the West want help fleeing Syria, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing “diplomats and a Syrian network that aids defectors… Some have turned up at diplomatic missions in Turkey, and others have sent furtive messages to their governments seeking assistance in escaping from territory the extremist group controls in neighboring Syria, according to the diplomats, who represent six Western missions in Turkey. The calls for help from Westerners come as Islamic State loses ground and faces fresh assaults on its Raqqa stronghold and on Fallujah, Iraq, where it has ruled for more than two years.”
Take a peek inside ISIS-made tunnels near Mosul, thanks to Telegraph photographer Sam Tarling. He and reporter Josie Ensor traveled to the village of Mufti, a 2,000-year-old Christian village in the Kurdistan region of Iraq, “liberated” last week by Peshmerga troops with the help of coalition airstrikes.
And here’s a look at the security dynamics in and around cities held by ISIS, courtesy of the analysts at the Soufan Group.
Wow: the U.S. Navy has four of its 10 active aircraft carriers deployed, plus another two at sea for workups, and a seventh getting ready to go. It’s been four years since the service had that many carriers out on missions, and it’s an unusually high percentage in any case. Defense News’ Chris Cavas does the math, here.
As for ground troops, here’s one big ICYMI on what they’re doing against ISIS, from Buzzfeed.
From Defense One
Three days and a wakeup: Join us at the Newseum or online for Defense One’s first-ever Tech Summit this Friday, June 10. Keynoted by SecDef Ash Carter, the agenda includes speakers from Silicon Valley to Crystal City, including DOD, NSA, DARPA, USAF, and more. Get the full schedule, registration page, livestream link, here.
Drone-helicopter teams performing ‘very well’ against ISIS, the Army says. The unmanned half of future unmanned-human teaming looks a lot like the Predator's little cousin. Tech Editor Patrick Tucker reports, here.
U.S. spies are building software to spot your suspicious behavior in live video. The program is called Deep Intermodal Video Analytics—or DIVA—and it seeks to locate shooters and terrorists before they strike. From NextGov, here.
Trump was for invading Libya (and Iraq) before he was against it. The presumptive Republican nominee tries to draw a contrast between himself and Hillary Clinton, but both of them supported U.S. involvement in both Libya and Iraq. From The Atlantic, here.
Welcome to Tuesday’s edition of The D Brief, by Ben Watson and Bradley Peniston. On this day in 1981, Israeli warplanes destroyed Iraq’s almost-completed Osirak nuclear reactor 10 miles southeast of Baghdad. Send your friends this link: http://get.defenseone.com/d-brief/. And let us know your news: the-d-brief@defenseone.com.
The U.S., Japanese and Indian navies will conduct a major joint exercise in the Western Pacific “close to a Japanese island chain, part of which China claims,” Reuters reports. Last year, the exercise was held off the Indian coast, near the Bay of Bengal. “The drill, dubbed Malabar, is an annual event between the U.S. and India, and Japan is joining it this year for the first time since 2007.”
What’s Japan bringing to the show? “Among the Japanese warships, which will practice submarine hunting and anti-aircraft defense, will be the Hyuga, one of the country's three new helicopter carriers.”
About the nearby area: “Japan’s southwestern island chain, which hosts the biggest concentration of U.S. military personnel in Asia, blocks China's east coast access to the Western Pacific. Japan's military is reinforcing the islands with radar stations and anti-ship missile batteries. Lying around 220 km (137 miles) west of Taiwan are a group of uninhabited isles, known as the Senkaku in Japan and the Diaoyu in China, which are controlled by Tokyo and claimed by Beijing.” More here.
Also this morning, a Chinese spy plane has reportedly crashed after going missing over East China’s Zhoushan sea, Chinese CCTV News reported this morning after the surveillance aircraft was “found crashed at Zhujiajian Island in east China’s Zhejiang Province.”
Why did Ash Carter’s point man on personnel reform suddenly resign? The tangled story just got a bit clearer; Military Times reports that Brad Carson resigned after Carter refused to sign off on his final reform recommendations. Carson had worked for months to forge a compromise on, among other things, an end to the lockstep up-or-out promotion system. Now what? The MilTimes writes that the ongoing kerfuffle is “leaving the controversial reform effort unlikely to succeed during the Obama administration’s final months.” Read, here.
Finally today: Some fiction to get you thinking about the wars of tomorrow (and no, we’re not talking about “Ghost Fleet”). “Splayed across a red cover illustrated with tanks and exploding warheads, the title reads: ‘2017: War with Russia — An Urgent Warning from Senior Military Command,’” Politico reports off a new work by General Sir Richard Shirreff, a retired British Army officer and former NATO deputy supreme commander for Europe. The book is “a blend of genres: part spy novel, part think-tank paper, and part satirical memoir,” and it’s “heavily influenced by John Le Carré and the films of Peter Sellers. (“Dr. Strangelove,” in which the world charges madly towards nuclear conflict, comes to mind.)”
No spoilers, but “the story is set post British exit from the European Union. The U.S. has just elected a new president (a vague mash-up of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton). Emboldened by signs of frailty and disunity in the West, the Russian president — a crafty, callous adrenaline addict and Shakespeare enthusiast — re-engages in the war in Ukraine and activates a plan to invade the Baltics. Russia claims to want to protect Russian-speakers living in the region, but what the Kremlin really wants, it turns out, is to discredit an already flailing NATO Alliance. Russia deploys a variety of non-conventional war tactics — cyberattacks and disinformation designed to confuse and delay NATO’s response — while it presses ahead with a full scale attack.”
The alliance, “meanwhile, is bogged down in a series of painful deliberations over whether to invoke its Article 5 on common defense. Here, Shirreff reveals his own longstanding exasperation with the interminable squabbling of Brussels diplomats at NATO headquarters. If the story has a moral, it is this: Hollow out defense spending at your peril, because NATO will take too long to react to a serious threat and the nuclear option is not a credible one.”
U.K. Foreign Minister Philip Hammond’s review: “Inflammatory… [with] quite irresponsible language.” Read the full review, here.