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Erbil Demands Acquiring Air Defense System to Deter Attacks

A Kurdish man who was wounded after the bombing of the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish party near Erbil on November 14. (Reuters) 
A Kurdish man who was wounded after the bombing of the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish party near Erbil on November 14. (Reuters) 
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Erbil Demands Acquiring Air Defense System to Deter Attacks

A Kurdish man who was wounded after the bombing of the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish party near Erbil on November 14. (Reuters) 
A Kurdish man who was wounded after the bombing of the headquarters of an Iranian Kurdish party near Erbil on November 14. (Reuters) 

Masoud Haider, an advisor to Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdistan Democratic Party in Iraq, has called on the international community to supply Iraqi Kurdistan and Baghdad with an air defense system.  

Haider made his demand in wake of Iran bombing Kurdish areas in Iraq in recent days. 

“Missile and drone attacks are an infringement on the sovereignty of the Iraqi state and endanger the lives of civilians in Kurdistan. Condemnation does not prevent their recurrence. The international community should help and sell Erbil and Baghdad an air defense system to deter these attacks,” said Haider.  

“Missiles are deterred by missiles, not by condemnations,” he added. 

The Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) had issued a statement on Monday strongly condemning the new attacks carried out by Iran. 

“The repeated Iranian violations affecting the sovereignty of Iraq and the Kurdistan region of Iraq are unjustified and constitute a flagrant violation of international norms and good neighborly relations,” the KRG said in a statement.  

It also urged Iran to “stop its campaign against the Kurdistan region.”  

“The repeated attacks carried out by Iranian with missiles and drones on the Kurdistan region are a violation of Iraq's sovereignty and an act that contravenes international covenants and laws that regulate relations between countries,” the Iraqi Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement.  

The lands of Iraq “are not a base or a corridor to harm any of the neighboring countries,” it stressed. 

“Iraq is also not an arena for conflicts and settling scores for external parties,” the statement added.  

Also on Monday, the UN Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI) called for the cessation of the “repeated attacks violating Iraqi sovereignty.”  

“Whatever external score a neighboring country is seeking to settle, the use of established diplomatic instruments is the only way forward,” UNAMI said in a statement.  

On Sunday night, Iran launched new strikes targeting Iranian Kurdish opposition factions stationed in Iraqi Kurdistan, killing one of their members, less than a week after similar strikes targeting these factions.  

Tehran accuses Kurdish opposition factions of provoking demonstrations in Iran.  

The counter-terrorism department of Iraqi Kurdistan had earlier said Iran’s “Revolutionary Guard Corps have again bombarded Iranian Kurdish parties” late Sunday, without mentioning if there were casualties.

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Shining Light on Austin Tice who Went Missing in Syria

A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
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Shining Light on Austin Tice who Went Missing in Syria

A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot
A banner for journalist Austin Tice, who disappeared while reporting in Syria in 2012, hangs outside the National Press Club building in Washington, US, May 2, 2023. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File phot

In recent months, American officials have raised the fate of Austin Tice in talks with Syria’s new leadership, led by its interim president, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

The American citizen vanished in 2012 in a Damascus suburb.

According to Britain’s The Economist, the American side still insists that Tice may be alive and says there is no evidence of his death.

The magazine has spoken with an Assad-regime insider and gained one of the first authoritative public accounts of the abduction and an insight into one of the former Syrian regime’s darkest secrets.

The source is Safwan Bahloul, a high-ranking general in then Syrian president Bashar Assad’s security state. He has chosen to speak out and share details of Tice’s ordeal. He confirms that Tice was held not by opposition groups, but rather by the Syrian state, with Assad’s full knowledge, and was held for some time in a compound of the former president’s most trusted aide. The general also reveals his own culpability.

In the summer of 2012, Bassam al-Hassan, a shadowy adviser in Assad’s inner circle, learned that Tice was in the suburbs of Damascus. He set in motion a plan to seize him, according to General Bahloul. A freelance journalist contributing to the Washington Post, Tice was preparing to take a break in Lebanon after a grueling period reporting in opposition-held Syria. He sought a fixer to try to cross the border, and it turned out the fixer was working for Hassan, the general claims.

After he was captured, Tice was held in a garage inside Hassan’s compound, not far from the presidential palace, says the general. The site lay outside the regime’s formal prison system—off the books and under direct control of Assad loyalists. Was Assad aware of the abduction? “He knew, absolutely, he was happy with the capture,” the general says.

Bahloul was ordered to interrogate Tice. The journalist “had a satellite communications device...an iPhone and another small phone. I started going through his phone book, you know, trying to have a clue who he is.”

Bahloul confirms that Tice managed to escape his cell for 24 hours (this was originally reported by Reuters). The general himself was suspected of aiding the escape attempt (something he denies), though he was later cleared.

“He rubbed his body with the soap in order to lubricate his chest when getting through the window, and he used the towel...There was broken glass, cemented broken glass on top of a fence. So, he put it upon it, and then he climbed it and threw himself to the other side,” said the general. Tice was recaptured.

Bahloul has settled his affairs with Syria’s new rulers and is one of a handful of senior officers not to have fled the country. He says he did not see Tice again after his fourth and final interrogation. The last confirmed information on the reporter was a video uploaded to YouTube in September 2012 in which he is seen blindfolded and surrounded by masked men shouting “Allahu Akbar.”

American officials believe the video was staged to make it look like Tice had been captured by militants and not the regime. The video was masterminded by Hassan and shot in the countryside north of Damascus, says Bahloul.

In December, as the Assad regime crumbled, thousands of desperate prisoners were broken out of Syria’s sprawling torture-and-detention network after Assad fled to Moscow, raising hopes that Tice might be among them. He was not.

Today the Trump administration and Tice’s family continue to ask questions. One possibility is that he is alive and still in Syria, perhaps hidden somewhere in the remote farmland of the country’s Alawite coastal heartland, parts of which remain outside the control of Sharaa’s security forces. Another is that he was spirited out of the country to Iran, or Hezbollah-controlled parts of Lebanon. Or he may have been abandoned in a hidden prison, or killed amid the chaos of the revolution, another victim of Assad’s reign of terror. One man may have the answer: Hassan, the shadowy adviser, who is believed to have fled to Iran and may now be in Beirut.