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Nusra Front Sets Demands For Releasing U.N. Peacekeepers

Nusra Front Sets Demands For Releasing U.N. Peacekeepers

By Joel Greenberg, McClatchy Washington Bureau

JERUSALEM — The al-Qaida-linked rebels who captured dozens of Fijian United Nations peacekeepers on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights last week have set demands for their release, including removal of the Islamist group from a U.N. terrorist list and compensation for the deaths of its comrades in fighting with members of the international force, the commander of the Fijian army said Tuesday.

Militants from the Nusra Front seized the 45 Fijian peacekeepers last Thursday in a buffer zone where more than 1,200 U.N. observers are stationed between Israeli and Syrian lines.

Fighters from the Islamist group also surrounded and attacked two positions of Filipino peacekeepers, some of whom were extricated by U.N. forces while others escaped.

Fighting in the buffer zone has intensified between Syrian forces and anti-government rebels, including members of the Nusra Front. Last week the rebels seized the Quneitra crossing to the Israeli-held sector of the Golan Heights, a strategic plateau mostly captured by the Israelis in the 1967 Six-Day War.

Speaking in the Fijian capital of Suva, the army commander, Brig. Gen. Mosese Tikoitoga, said the Nusra Front had made three demands for the release of the peacekeepers: removal from the U.N. list of terrorist groups, delivery of humanitarian aid to Ruta, a suburb of Damascus that’s a stronghold of the group, and payment for the killings of three of its combatants in exchanges of fire with U.N. peacekeepers.

The Nusra Front also accused the U.N. of failing to help Syrians under attack by government forces during the country’s civil war, and it alleged that the peacekeeping force was assisting the Syrian army in its movements through the buffer zone.

“Negotiations have moved up to another level with the professional negotiators now in place,” Tikoitoga said, referring to hostage negotiators the U.N. sent to Syria. “The rebels are not telling us where the troops are, but they continue to reassure us they are being well looked after. They also told us they are ensuring that they are taken out of battle areas.”

“We’ve been assured by U.N. headquarters that the U.N. will bring all its resources to bear to ensure the safe return of our soldiers,” the general said.

Greenberg is a McClatchy special correspondent.

AFP Photo

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Family Credits Qatar For Negotiating U.S. Journalist’s Release

Family Credits Qatar For Negotiating U.S. Journalist’s Release

By Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau

EDGARTOWN, Mass. — An American journalist and author who spent almost two years in the hands of al-Qaida-linked captors in Syria was released Sunday after a successful negotiation for which his family credits the Qatari ruling family.

Exactly what, if anything, was promised to the group was not disclosed. Both the Obama administration and the family said they did not pay a ransom, although their careful language appeared to leave room for the possibility that someone else did.

Peter Theo Curtis was turned over to U.N. peacekeepers on Sunday morning in a Syrian village in the Golan Heights. After a medical checkup, he was delivered into the hands of the U.S. military on a journey that will eventually lead back home to Massachusetts.

As rumors of his release were followed by an official announcement, Curtis’ mother thanked the U.S. and Qatari governments along with what she said were “many individuals” who helped to negotiate the release of the 45-year-old, who was held for 22 months.

“While the family is not privy to the exact terms that were negotiated, we were repeatedly told by representatives of the Qatari government that they were mediating for Theo’s release on a humanitarian basis without the payment of money,” Nancy Curtis said in a statement issued from her home in Cambridge, Mass.

In announcing the release, the State Department and White House hinted at a long and complex effort to bring Curtis home.

“Over these last two years, the United States reached out to more than two dozen countries asking for urgent help from anyone who might have tools, influence, or leverage to help secure Theo’s release and the release of any Americans held hostage in Syria,” said Secretary of State John F. Kerry, a native of Massachusetts who said he knew Nancy Curtis from back home.

There was a breakthrough this week, though U.S. officials did not say what prompted it.

Family members said Curtis was overcome with joy. But the day was tinged with sadness, too, they said, as the family of slain American journalist James Foley gathered for a Mass of remembrance in his hometown of Rochester, N.H., grieving the son who was killed by a different and more radical group in the same region.

The Curtis family and the Foley family have become close, sharing uncertainty and worry. Before retreating into her home and asking to be left alone, Nancy Curtis urged the captors of other hostages in Syria and Iraq to “release them in the same humanitarian spirit that prompted Theo’s release.”

Foley was slain by the Islamic State, which has emerged as the strongest and most militant extremist group in Syria and Iraq. Curtis was held by Al Nusra Front or a splinter group allied with it. Al Nusra Front is a Syria-based al-Qaida affiliate that has been active in the civil war against Syrian President Bashar Assad.

It has been designated as a terrorist organization by the Obama administration, although it does not have the same reputation for brutality as the Islamic State, which has terrorized a wide swath of Syria and Iraq with tactics that include crucifixion and, as in the case of Foley, beheading.

President Barack Obama monitored the delicate negotiations for Curtis’ release while spending the final weekend of his vacation on Martha’s Vineyard, surrounded by national security staffers who were also monitoring a series of airstrikes in Iraq as well as intelligence efforts to track down the identity of Foley’s killer.

As intent as Obama was on garnering Curtis’ release, advisers said, the administration still refused to pay ransoms or make any other concessions to terrorists.

“We did not do so in this case,” said Caitlin Hayden, spokeswoman for Obama’s national security staff, when asked about making payments. “We also do not support any third party paying ransom, and did not do so in this case.”

Extremist groups in the region frequently use ransom as a major source of income.

The son of Nancy Curtis and Michael Padnos, who lives in Paris, Theo Curtis adopted his mother’s name but writes under the name Theo Padnos. His path to Syria started with an interest in disaffected young men that he developed while teaching in the Vermont prison system. His first book was about such men, said one of his cousins.

Curtis, who holds a doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Massachusetts, later traveled to Yemen to learn Arabic and to delve into the culture enough to understand the disenfranchised men around him there. In an effort to do so, he told one interviewer from Middle East Quarterly, he converted to Islam. The story of his experience was published in the book “Undercover Muslim” in 2011.

He wrote several pieces for the New Republic magazine in 2011 and 2012.

“Theo has a deep concern and regard for the people of Syria, which is why he returned during the war. He wanted to help others and to give meaning and to bear witness to their struggles,” Nancy Curtis said Sunday.

She hadn’t had any direct communication with her son since he emailed her from Antakya, Turkey, in mid-October 2012.

The family believes that he was captured shortly after he crossed into Syria that month, and that he had been held since by Al Nusra Front.

At one point during his captivity, his family saw a video of Curtis in which he begged for his life but said that the people holding him had treated him well.

But a photojournalist who was held in the same cell with Curtis managed to escape, and he described starvation and other harsh treatment at the hands of the captors in an interview a year ago with The New York Times.

Rumors about Curtis’ pending release began to surface Sunday morning. By midday, Obama’s top national security advisers confirmed that the American was free.

“Theo is now safe outside of Syria, and we expect he will be reunited with his family shortly,” national security advisor Susan Rice announced shortly after noon.

United Nations peacekeepers in Al Rafid village in the Golan Heights took custody of Curtis at 6:40 p.m., the U.N. said. Doctors examined him before he was turned over to the U.S. government.

“After a week marked by unspeakable tragedy,” Kerry said, “we are all relieved and grateful.”

As of Sunday afternoon, Curtis’ family didn’t know when he would return to the United States or when his mother would see him, said Betsy Sullivan, Curtis’ cousin.

AFP Photo

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Islamic State’s Momentum Complicates The Fight In Syria

Islamic State’s Momentum Complicates The Fight In Syria

By Raja Abdulrahim, Los Angeles Times

AKHTARIN, Syria — The rebel fighters peered through small holes in the wall of the abandoned poultry plant and across the farm fields where forces of the Islamic State had massed.

Hidden here, breathing the rank air, the rebels could see evidence of their foes’ recent victories: U.S.-made Humvees captured from the army in neighboring Iraq and driven almost all the way across Syria, as if the borders between the countries no longer existed.

More than a military advantage, the American vehicles serve as a psychological tool against more moderate Syrian rebels.

In Akhtarin, one village on a 30-mile front line that extends from the Turkish border to Aleppo, rebels buoyed by the arrival of hundreds of reinforcements from neighboring provinces have held off several attacks by Islamic State fighters. But they fear they are outmatched by the extremist group, which is enjoying momentum and the spoils of the Iraq war.

The rebels may soon face another complication. They could find themselves squeezed between the Islamic State, which broke away from al-Qaida, and al-Qaida’s affiliate in Syria, Al Nusra Front, as the two battle for dominance in the global Islamist militant movement.

The Islamic State, emboldened by its swift advance in Iraq — along with allied Sunni Muslim groups it now controls an estimated one-third of that country — and flush with new cash and oil wealth, hopes to push westward in Aleppo province.

As recently as January, several rebel groups had united to expel fighters of the Islamic State — then known as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS — from parts of northern Syria. But the group’s lightning advance in Iraq and declaration of a caliphate encompassing Iraq and Syria have given it enormous momentum, said Badee Muhammed, a commander with the Islamic Front, a rebel faction that opposes it.

“We were expecting them to return, because we know that their goal is not just Aleppo … their ultimate goal is the entire region,” he said.

Since June, when Islamic State leader Abu Bakr Baghdadi announced the establishment of an Islamic caliphate, the group has consolidated its control over much of the oil-rich eastern province of Dair Alzour. It continues to make gains in Hasakah province in northeastern Syria.

It recently began clashing with President Bashar Assad’s forces. The two sides had so far mostly avoided confrontation, leading many to conclude there was collusion between them to weaken Syria’s various rebel groups.

But last month Islamic State fighters seized two military bases in the north, beheading some government soldiers and displaying their bodies and heads at a busy roundabout. They also captured and briefly held an important gas field in central Homs province.

The Islamic State now controls about a third of Syria, according to the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

In Aleppo, rebel groups see themselves as the last line of defense against the territory-hungry Islamic State. Since its resurgence in the province, Islamic State fighters have seized control of only three villages, but rebels doubt they can stem the advance given the imbalance in weaponry.

Even nonlethal equipment gives the extremists an edge. Many of the clashes take place at night, and Islamic State fighters appear to have night-vision goggles. In contrast, their foes say they often are forced to fire blindly at night, wasting ammunition.

“If we don’t get more military aid soon, it is impossible for us to hold them off. I go to the front lines and try to lift the fighters’ spirits, but in the end we have no idea how we’re going to resist,” said Muhammed, the Islamic Front commander, adding that they have received only $200,000 from the Western-backed Supreme Military Council.

“It is fear and a lack of ammunition,” said Abu Hussein Debo, a local commander in Akhtarin. “Because they are coming and slaughtering with no mercy.”

Fighters here have direct knowledge of the public executions and other brutal tactics that Islamic State forces used before they were expelled from the area earlier. And they’ve heard of the recent beheadings elsewhere.

Soon after the Islamic State began seizing territory in Iraq, a map purporting to show the group’s five-year plan was released. It showed the Middle East, South Asia, and the northern half of Africa under the group’s black flag.

“The map keeps getting bigger and their goals keep getting more extensive,” Muhammed said. “And if we can’t stand in their way and push them back, that could happen.”

Al Nusra Front might stand in the way as well. The al-Qaida affiliate is an ally of more moderate rebel groups fighting Assad, but it is starting to replicate some of the Islamic State’s strategies in an effort to avoid becoming irrelevant in the global militant movement.

A month after the Islamic State declared a transnational caliphate, Al Nusra said it would eventually announce its own governing entity, an emirate in Syria.

Humam Halabi of Manara Al Bayda, Al Nusra’s media channel, said that could happen within a month, and that in the meantime the group was undergoing an internal restructuring.

The Syrian al-Qaida branch, much like al-Qaida’s central command itself, has been overshadowed by the rapid rise of the Islamic State, which espouses more extreme views and is more social media savvy. Al-Qaida renounced the Islamic State this year after it repeatedly failed to heed orders from Ayman al-Zawahri, al-Qaida’s leader.

“Obviously, Syria has become a battleground between al-Qaida and IS,” Halabi said.

So far, Al Nusra has engaged in heavy clashes with Islamic State fighters only in eastern Syria, where battles have raged over control of oil fields. Many Al Nusra fighters are unwilling to kill fellow Sunni Muslims, but now leaders are taking drastic measures.

Al-Qaida-linked religious leaders have traveled from Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Saudi Arabia to persuade them that there is proof that Islamic State fighters are “khawarij” — Muslims who have turned against a rightful leader — and must be fought, Halabi said.

In announcing plans for an emirate, Al Nusra hopes to lure back some of the groups that have pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, as well as attract the foreign fighters who have been drawn to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq.

“The foreign fighters want either an emirate or a caliphate,” Halabi said.

Al Nusra also is feeling the effects of the Islamic State’s momentum. It has suffered a drop in revenue because it has lost control of the oil wells it once held in eastern Syria as some of its groups have withdrawn and others have joined the Islamic State.

“They are trying to regroup and reestablish their financial support,” said Mustafa Sultan, a rebel with the Islamic Front.

Al Nusra also is distancing itself from mainstream rebels, especially those allied with Western backers, in an attempt to regain credibility. It recently withdrew from the Sharia Committee, a legal authority in Aleppo it helped establish, and has formed its own version, Halabi said.

The al-Qaida group might soon also withdraw from a joint operations room, which has coordinated all the opposition battles in Aleppo province in recent months, he said.

But first, Al Nusra plans to form its own army, Halabi said. “An emirate without an army won’t do.”

AFP Photo

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10 Lebanese Soldiers Killed In Battle With Syrian Islamist Fighters

10 Lebanese Soldiers Killed In Battle With Syrian Islamist Fighters

By Patrick J. McDonnell and Nabih Bulos, Los Angeles Times

BEIRUT — Clashes raging between Syrian Islamist rebels and Lebanese security forces in a town close to the Syrian border killed 10 soldiers, the Lebanese army said Sunday.

An additional 25 were wounded in one of the most serious cross-border incidents since the Syrian civil war erupted more than three years ago. The army had also lost contact with 13 soldiers who may be “held captive,” the official Lebanese news service said, quoting Gen. Jean Kahwagi, who heads the Lebanese armed forces.

Fighting began Saturday in the town of Arsal after Lebanese authorities detained a member of Al Nusra Front, the al-Qaida affiliate fighting in Syria. Rebels were demanding his release.

The Syrian conflict has severely aggravated sectarian and political tensions in Lebanon, where a fragile democracy has taken hold since the end of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war in 1990.

Militants attempted to storm an army post in Arsal on Sunday, the Lebanese news agency reported, as many civilians tried to flee the town amid heavy gunfire and plumes of smoke rising from the battles.

There were no precise figures on the number of civilian and Syrian rebel casualties in the fighting in and around Arsal, situated in the Bekaa Valley, about 60 miles northeast of Beirut, the capital.

Witnesses said parts of Arsal came under shelling as government forces fought to evict Islamist guerrillas.

“The situation is going from bad to worse,” the mayor of Arsal, Ali Hujeiri, said in a brief telephone interview Sunday. “We have shells here that are falling right in front of the civilians, and the people are totally surrounded.”

In an unverified video posted on the Internet, Nusra fighters alleged that a number of Lebanese security officers had defected to their cause.

The Arsal area is home to tens of thousands of Syrian refugees and has long been a transit point for rebels and arms headed for Syria. Many residents in the largely Sunni Muslim town sympathize with the Sunni-led rebellion against the government of Syrian President Bashar Assad, a member of the minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam.

But Arsal is also adjacent to areas of Lebanon where the population supports Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that is a major military and political force in Lebanon. Hezbollah has dispatched thousands of militiamen into Syria to fight on behalf of Assad’s government. Hezbollah leaders view Al Nusra Front and all al-Qaida-style Sunni militants as mortal enemies.

The U.S. government regards both Hezbollah and Al Nusra Front as terrorist groups.

In a statement Saturday, the State Department said it “strongly condemns the Nusra Front’s attack today on the Lebanese armed forces.”

Lebanon is officially neutral in the conflict that has devastated Syria. But many Lebanese back one side or the other, often based on sectarian allegiances. Sunni and Shiite volunteers from Lebanon have fought and died in Syria.

Since the Syrian war began in 2011, more than 1 million refugees have poured into Lebanon, straining social and political cohesion in the nation of 5 million. Lebanon has experienced car bombings, assassinations, gunbattles, kidnappings, and other violence linked to the Syrian conflict.

Bulos is a special correspondent.

AFP Photo

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