CARACAS, Venezuela — Colombia’s main rebel group on Monday released four soldiers and six police officers it had held hostage for as long as 14 years. The 10 men were thought to be the last remaining noncivilian captives held by the group, which has used kidnapping and drug trafficking to help finance its nearly five-decade war against the Colombian government.
International Crisis Group
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Turkey shifts tone on Islamic State. Will it join US-led coalition? (+video) | Dominique Soguel
ISTANBUL, TURKEY — When President Recep Tayyip Erdogan returned home from the United Nations last week, he said Turkey was ready to play a more active role in the US-led anti-Islamic State coalition that has drawn new members both from across the West as well as the Arab world.
Just how active may become clearer Thursday when the Turkish parliament meets to take the “necessary steps” cited by President Erdogan, who was lobbied intensively by US leaders while in New York.
The Turkish lawmakers are expected to decide whether to expand the scope of two existing mandates authorizing the government to take military action in Iraq and Syria, where the jihadist Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS, has sought to create the seed of an Islamic caliphate.
Turkey shares a 206-mile-long border with Iraq and a 544-mile-long border with Syria, where IS thrived unchecked for months. Already a temporary home for more than a million refugees fleeing the 3-½-year civil war in Syria, Turkey has just opened its borders to a fresh wave of more than 200,000 mostly Kurdish refugees fleeing the latest IS offensive in Syria.
FULL ARTICLE (The Christian Science Monitor)
Photo: UN/Eskinder Debebe/flickr
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Why Turkey is reluctant to join U.S-led coalition against ISIS | Mark Gollom
The launch of airstrikes in Syria by a U.S.-led coalition as part of the fight against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria has placed Turkey in a delicate position of needing to thwart the militant group’s growing threat while not wanting to raise its ire and face retribution.
“It`s obviously very careful on how it handles ISIS,” said Didem Ackyel Collinsworth, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for Turkey. “In terms of signing on to the coalition and taking part in airstrikes and so on, [it] would be very cautious about that.”
On Tuesday, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said he was considering expanding support for Western and Arab operations against the Islamic State group to include everything, “both military and political.”
The remarks signalled a possible shift by Erdogan, who has so far not committed to a U.S.-led coalition to take on the militants.
FULL ARTICLE (CBC News)
Photo: Eboni Everson-Myart, U.S. Army/DOD/flickr
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Hostage crisis shatters Algeria’s image as a safe place to do business | Agence France-Presse via The National
Last week’s hostage-taking has rocked the image of Algeria’s powerful security apparatus, raising questions about how gunmen could have overrun the key Ain Amenas gasfield, with alarming implications for the energy sector.
As foreign governments continued to count the human cost of the attack, in which 37 foreign workers were killed, Algiers has scrambled to contain the fallout from its inability to stop the world’s deadliest hostage crisis in almost a decade.
FULL ARTICLE (AFP via The National)
Photo: looking4poetry/Flickr
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The emotional release of the hostages was sure to feed hopes for peace talks between the government and the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC. But many analysts said the two sides were still far from achieving the mutual trust that would allow meaningful progress toward ending the conflict.
President Juan Manuel Santos of Colombia, in a brief television appearance, said the release was an important — but not a sufficient — step for peace talks, and he demanded that the FARC release all civilian hostages it is still holding for ransom. The group pledged in February to renounce kidnapping altogether, although it has not renounced violence. Eleven government soldiers were killed in a FARC attack last month.
The freed men were picked up from a secret rendezvous site by helicopters provided by the Brazilian government. They were led off the helicopters by medical personnel, after touching down at an airstrip in Villavicencio, southeast of Bogotá, the capital, at 5:43 p.m.
“Freedom took a long time, but now it is yours,” Mr. Santos told the men, one of whom led a peccary, a small piglike animal that appeared to be a pet. Another, smiling widely, wrapped himself in a Colombian flag.
Phtoto: DEA Public Affairs/Wikimedia Commons
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Javier Ciurlizza, International Crisis Group’s Latin America Program Director, discusses the FARC’s recent decision to release hostages on Al Jazeera.
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CSM: Hostage rescue - Will US intervene more in Somalia?
Scott Baldauf
Now that the US Navy Seals have successfully rescued two hostages – an American and a Dane – from Somali criminal gangs, will the US military begin to increase its presence in the ongoing Somali civil war?
Not likely.
For starters, the US has largely delegated regional security to others. The fight to control Somalia, led by a shaky transitional Somali government and supported by an African Union peacekeeping force, as well as Kenyan and Ethiopian military forces, is primarily an East African affair. In this fight against the radical Al Shabab Islamist militia, the US military plays only a sporadic and peripheral role. Even in the ongoing foreign naval patrols aimed at controlling Somali piracies in the Indian Ocean, the US Navy is just one of many participants in an operation under European Union naval command.
Yet President Obama praised the Special Operations Forces (members of the famed Navy Seal Team 6), and said that commando operations sent a strong message to kidnappers like Somali pirates.
“The United States will not tolerate the abduction of our people, and will spare no effort to secure the safety of our citizens and to bring their captors to justice,” Mr. Obama said. “This is yet another message to the world that then United States of America will stand strongly against any threats to our people.”
But even as a tool to combat kidnapping in Somalia, the military option has its drawbacks. While it has proven effective in some individual cases, going in with guns has tended to increase the militancy of the Somali pirates and kidnap gangs, and merely displaced rather than dispersed them.
“The rise in kidnapping on land in Somalia is in part due to the fact that the operations against piracy on the sea have increased,” says E.J. Hogendoorn, director of the Horn of Africa program for the International Crisis Group. “The pirate gangs are not trying to take the ships, they are kidnapping the crews and holding them for ransom from the shipping companies, much as the gangs are now kidnapping foreigners on land and holding them for ransom.”