In a briefing organized in Congress in July of 2007, Dr. Walid Phares submitted a plan to the U.S. House Caucus on Counter Terrorism called "Freedom lines" suggesting a second phase in the American military campaign in Iraq. This plan was suggested as of 2004. After having analyzed the long term goals of al Qaeda and the Iranian regime in Iraq and discussed them with CENTCOM officials and National Defense University professors, the proposed plan projected a rapid training and expansion of the Iraqi armed forces followed by a gradual redeployment of U.S. and Coalition forces out of the cities and urban zones. Today we see the first phase of withdrawal beginning to take place. It is in this redeployment stage, where Iraqi forces will be taking over from Americans and allies in all cities and most towns. Two crucial questions arise immediately: Will Iraqi forces be able to control their own urban zones? And as a corollary, what should be the next phase for U.S. and Coalition forces on Iraqi soil? According to Phares's suggested plan, the answer to the second question can determine the success or failure of the first. Indeed, for Iraqi forces to win the battle against their security challenges, it will depend on what kind of strategic mission U.S. armed forces will be tasked with in the next stage of their new deployment.
Iason Athanasiadis' ordeal began at the airport, shortly after he checked in for his flight to leave Tehran. "I was heading to the gate," the Greek-British journalist said. "This guy materialized on my right. He said 'are you Iason Fowden?' [Athanasiadis' passport name]. I said 'yeah that's me.' He said 'please step to the side ... you're not going to be flying tonight.'" It was an ominous introduction to Iran's security apparatus. Athanasiadis spent the next 21 harrowing days in Iranian prisons, accused of espionage, subjected to interrogations and, on several occasions, beatings. The journalist, a freelance writer and gifted photographer who had been on assignment for the Washington Times newspaper at the time of his arrest, spoke to CNN by phone from his parents' home in Athens Thursday, several days after an extraordinary international lobbying effort helped secure his release. The young freelance reporter realized he was in serious danger at the airport in Tehran on June 19, when a half dozen plain-clothed security officers arrived and began leading him out of the building. The reporter resisted, and began yelling to crowds of nearby passengers that he was a journalist. "I got kind of pulled kicking and screaming and getting punched behind an escalator," Athanasiadis recounted. While being dragged outside to an unmarked car, the journalist said he managed to get the attention of a Western-looking woman waiting in the airport. To this day, Athanasiadis says he does not know the woman's name. But he believes she was instrumental in helping spread the word of his detention. "She was the best thing that happened to me that day," Athanasiadis said. "I just said 'I'm a Greek reporter for the Washington Times. Please contact the Greek Embassy.' And she ran after me with a note pad and pen and asked me to spell my name." That night, Athanasiadis says security officers forced him to ride into Tehran from the airport, with his head buried in his lap. Later, when he tried to make a phone call from a police station in Tehran, Athanasiadis said security forces tackled him, threw him to the ground, beat him with a club and pepper-sprayed him. Eventually, they transferred him to Tehran's notorious Evin prison, where he witnessed new Iranian prisoners being delivered by the busload to the prison gates. That is where the interrogation began. Dressed in a prison-issue uniform, Athanasiadis endured hours of questioning over the next several weeks in sound-proofed rooms where he was never allowed to see his interrogator. According to the New York-based organization Committee to Protest Journalists, Iran is now the "world's top jailer of journalists," with at least 30 reporters and bloggers in prison. Unfortunately, few of these prisoners enjoyed the international support that was rallied on behalf of Athanasiadis, said Michalis Kosmides, a Greek journalist and vice president of the Foreign Press Association in London. After learning of his colleague's arrest, Kosmides launched a Facebook page titled "Free Iason." Meanwhile, the spiritual leader of the Eastern Orthodox Church, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Istanbul, also intervened. He sent a high-ranking cleric and a letter to the Iranian Consulate in Istanbul, to plead for Athanasiadis' release "on humanitarian grounds," said Father John Chryssavgis, an adviser to the patriarch. "Iran has separate nodes of power," Kosmides said. "The patriarch's statement appealed to one node with religious sentiments." Throughout his ordeal and the countless accusations of spying, Athanasiadis said he realized one thing about his captors: they had never bothered to read any of the articles he has published over the years about Iran. "I was shocked that they would arrest someone who had lived in Iran and had such a record of trying to introduce Iranian society to an outside audience."
Serbian police said two officers were injured Thursday in a grenade attack on their patrol car in southern Serbia near the border with Kosovo. The two officers of the special gendarmerie unit were injured by shell fragments when the grenade fired from a portable launcher exploded near their car shortly after midnight Thursday at Lucane, a village in the predominantly ethnic Albanian area, the Serbian news agency Tanjug reported. Lucane is near Bujanovac, 220 miles southeast of Belgrade. The two men, one injured in the neck and the other in the back, were flown to the Military Academy medical center in Belgrade where doctors said their injuries were not serious. Serbian Interior Minister Ivica Dacic in Belgrade said police and security forces will take action to contain any attempt to violate the territorial integrity of Serbia. Bujanovac is in the Presevo valley area inhabited mostly by ethnic Albanians. The area borders Kosovo, whose Albanian leaders declared independence from Serbia in February 2008. The Serbian government in Belgrade has refused to recognize Kosovo's independence.
The U.N. mediator seeking a compromise in the 18-year name row between Macedonia and Greece said Wednesday progress had been made after wrapping up a fresh round of talks on the matter. "I do think that there is desire in both countries to reach a solution," U.N. special envoy Matthew Nimetz told reporters after a meeting in Athens with Greek Foreign Minister Dora Bakoyannis. "We're closer now than we were in the past. I'm more optimistic than I was some time back," Nimetz said, the day after he also held talks with the Macedonian side in Skopje. The U.N. envoy said he put forward "minor changes" to proposals made in October, which have not yet been made public. Greece and Macedonia have been at loggerheads over the right to the name Macedonia since the former Yugoslav republic proclaimed independence in 1991. A northern Greek province has the same name. Athens worries it could imply a claim on its territory, and the Greeks also accuse Skopje of trying to usurp the heritage of the ancient Macedonians and stake a claim to Alexander the Great, one of antiquity's greatest warriors. Macedonia was recognized by the U.N., two years after gaining independence, under the name the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. Last year, Greece blocked a NATO membership invitation to Macedonia and insists on solving the name dispute with its northern neighbor before giving the green light to Skopje's further integration into the European Union. More than 120 nations, including Russia and the U.S., have recognised the landlocked Balkan country under its constitutional name the Republic of Macedonia.
Let other capitals go all weak-kneed when President Obama visits. Moscow has greeted Mr. Obama, who on Tuesday night concluded a two-day Russian-American summit meeting, as if he were just another dignitary passing through. Crowds did not clamor for a glimpse of him. Headlines offered only glancing or flippant notice of his activities. Television programming was uninterrupted; devotees of the Russian Judge Judy had nothing to fear. Even many students and alumni of the Western-oriented business school where Mr. Obama gave the graduation address on Tuesday seemed merely respectful, but hardly enthralled. “We don’t really understand why Obama is such a star,” said Kirill Zagorodnov, 25, one of the graduates. “It’s a question of trust, how he behaves, how he positions himself, that typical charisma, which in Russia is often parodied. Russians really are not accustomed to it. It is like he is trying to manipulate the public.” Others suggested that after decades of social turmoil, Russians were simply exhausted with politics, and had been so often disappointed by Western leaders that they were not inclined to get excited by the latest one. Asked by one Moscow newspaper what they expected to come out of Mr. Obama’s visit, most respondents had the same answer: traffic jams. Some Obama aides said they were struck by the low-key reception here, especially when compared with the outpouring on some of his other foreign trips. Sergei Brilev, a top television anchor at Rossiya, the state-owned national channel, said that Mr. Obama’s oratory might not translate well into Russian. Russians tend to view Mr. Obama not so much with hostility as with indifference. After relations with the United States curdled in the final years of President George W. Bush’s tenure, many people here were relieved by Mr. Obama’s election. But that does not necessarily mean they are overly optimistic about his pledge to improve ties.
American demand for handguns has fueled a 28 percent jump this decade in world exports of pistols, rifles, shotguns and other small arms, a global report said Thursday. The 2009 Small Arms Survey reported that the Untied States alone was responsible for about half of the worldwide increase in legal international gun sales between 2000 and 2006. The U.S. now accounts for over half of the world's imports of pistols and revolvers and 45 percent of shotguns, it said. "No other country imports more than 4 percent of the global total," the 344-page report found. It illustrated how U.S. purchases of hand guns — which averaged $173 million annually — have driven a sharp rise in exports from a number of countries. Austria remained the world's largest seller of pistols and revolvers with a 25 percent jump since 2000. Seventy-five percent of its exports go to the United States. Croatian exports soared almost 24 times in value since the start of the decade. The U.S. accounted for 98 percent of its 2006 sales of $27 million. Gunmakers in Brazil and Italy also have been helped by booming American demand for small arms. "A country can become a major global player just by developing an export market in the United States," the report said. The report, published by Geneva's Graduate Institute, uses customs data and other information supplied by 53 nations. It estimated legal trade in firearms at nearly $1.6 billion in 2006, with the actual value of all small arms, light weapons, parts, accessories and ammunition exceeding $4 billion. The report found that trade in light military weapons has decreased by almost 30 percent over the same period. In that category, the U.S. dominates as the world's major supplier, with $228.5 million in exports. That amounts to 54 percent of the world total. For some countries, accurate export information was particularly hard to obtain. The report said Switzerland, Britain, Germany, Netherlands, Serbia and the United States were among the more transparent nations. Iran, North Korea, South Africa, Russia, Israel and Taiwan were cited as the least transparent.
The silent halls and empty classrooms tended by elderly priests at a former Greek Orthodox seminary on an island off the Istanbul coast belie the crucible the school has become in Muslim Turkey’s quest to join the European Union. The EU has said re-opening Halki seminary, a centre of Orthodox scholarship for more than a century until Turkey closed it down in 1971, is crucial if Ankara is to prove a commitment to human rights and pluralism and advance its membership bid. The pro-Islamist government, despite introducing other sweeping reforms to bring Turkey closer to EU membership, has thus far refused to re-open the 165-year-old school located on a pretty wooded isle called Heybeliada in the Sea of Marmara. Now, senior Turkish officials have signalled a change in the government’s stance. Last week, Culture Minister Ertugrul Günay said he believed the seminary would re-open. Deputy Prime Minister Egemen Bagis, the chief EU negotiator, told the Greek newspaper Kathimerini in late June that the seminary should be opened to meet the needs of the country’s non-Muslim citizens. Then on Monday, after holding talks with Turkey’s top Muslim cleric, Russian Orthodox Church Patriarch Kirill said he had received information the seminary would open. The renewed debate follows U.S. President Barack Obama’s visit to Turkey in April, when he called on the government to re-open Halki to “send a important signal” that it upholds freedom of religion and expression. The reports have cheered Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, the Istanbul-based spiritual leader of the world’s 250 million Orthodox Christians. He told reporters on Saturday he believed the government was close to resolving the issue. For Bartholomew and the Greek Orthodox faithful, the school is key to the survival of their church in its historical seat of Constantinople, now Istanbul, a city of some 15 million mostly Muslim residents. The patriarchate is a vestige of the Greek Byzantine Empire’s 1,000-year reign from the banks of the Bosphorus Strait. Today, it has no means to train clergy, making it difficult to find a successor for Bartholomew, 69, himself a graduate of the school. Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a citizen of Turkey, but only about 2,500 ethnic Greeks remain in Istanbul, compared with some 125,000 a half-century ago. Opponents of the seminary say it violates the secular constitution and reopening it would prompt radical Islamists to demand their own schools. All of Turkey’s Islamic theology faculties are located at strictly regulated state universities. Some Turks also fear it would legitimise Bartholomew’s ecumenical, or universal, title. Unlike most countries, Turkey doesn’t recognise that designation, arguing Bartholomew is only the head of the country’s tiny flock of Greek Orthodox. The patriarchate is a vestige of the Greek Byzantine Empire’s 1,000-year reign from the banks of the Bosphorus Strait. Today, it has no means to train clergy, making it difficult to find a successor for Bartholomew, 69, himself a graduate of the school. Turkish law requires the patriarch to be a citizen of Turkey, but only about 2,500 ethnic Greeks remain in Istanbul, compared with some 125,000 a half-century ago. Opponents of the seminary say it violates the secular constitution and reopening it would prompt radical Islamists to demand their own schools. All of Turkey’s Islamic theology faculties are located at strictly regulated state universities. Some Turks also fear it would legitimise Bartholomew’s ecumenical, or universal, title. Unlike most countries, Turkey doesn’t recognise that designation, arguing Bartholomew is only the head of the country’s tiny flock of Greek Orthodox.