GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Iran test-fired 14 short-, medium- and long-range missiles Tuesday as part of its Great Prophet 6 military drills, Iran’s English language news agency Mehr says. It quotes Aerospace commander of Islamic Revolution Guard Corps Amir Ali Hajizadeh as saying that Iran’s missiles have the range of 2,000 km and can reach US bases in the region and also Israel, although both of these are well within previous missiles range from Iran.
Links to other sources: Fars news agency, Haaretz, Mehr, Xinhua
Two South Korean marines are reported to have died in one of the tensest clashes Tuesday between North and South Korea since their war in the 1950s, and 12 people are reported by South Korean media to be injured. The reaction from China has been muted, with foreign ministry officials saying they are verifying what has happened, while the US has tersely called on North Korea to stop its “belligerant” action. World leaders from other countries are underscoring the importance of not allowing tensions to increase. North Korea fired several missiles at an island near the border between the two, and the South says it has retaliated.
Links to other sites: Financial Times, NPR, Xinhua
Latest deaths come on heels of victims interviews report
A US drone missile attack on a house and vehicle in Ghulam Khan village in North Waziristan, Pakistan, early Tuesday 16 November killed 20 people, 16 of them in a house and four in a vehicle suspected of belonging to Taliban insurgents. Al Jazeera reports that 220 people have been killed by drones in Pakistan since early September, at a time when “publication of the results of a survey of opinion within the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan show overwhelming popular opposition to the drone strikes , who see it as a threat to sovereignty”, according to journalist Gareth Porter, writing in Al Jazeera. Porter notes that the drone campaign by US forces appears to have shifted from a focus in Pakistan on Al-Qaeda to the war in Afghanistan.
“The new report published by the Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (Civic) last week [end October 2010] offers the first glimpse of the drone strikes based on actual interviews with civilian victims of the strikes,” writes Porter.
The strike by an unmanned missile is the eighth in November and the 100th in 2010, according to MSNBC, although the US does not routinely confirm drone activity, making it difficult to quantify the number of strikes.
Geneva / Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – The Iranian Foreign Ministry confirmed Monday that its officials will be in Switzerland Thursday 1 October for a six-party meeting “to discuss ways to end a standoff between the two sides,” according to the official Fars news agency. The Swiss government last week announced that it had accepted a request from Iran and the European Union to host a second meeting between EU High Representative, Javier Solana, and the Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili. Solana represents the world’s major powers in the talks over Iran’s nuclear plans: Germany, France, the UK, China, Russia and the US. The first meeting took place in July 2008 in Geneva. But Iran today said the meeting might take place in Geneva, as the Swiss government announced, or they might agree to meet in Bern, instead.
According to Fars: “Iran is under three rounds of UN Security Council sanctions for turning down West’s illegitimate calls to give up its right of uranium enrichment, saying the western demand is politically tainted and illogical. Tehran has repeatedly stressed that it considers its nuclear case closed after it answered the UN agency’s questions about the history of its nuclear programe.”
Iran tests long-range missiles during two days of tests
Iran drew heavy attention from around the world Monday for testing long range missiles (2,000 km) that can reach Israel and US military bases in the Middle East, with France and the UK promptly expressing their dismay but Russia urging calm.
Links to other sites: Aljazeera, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, Sydney Morning Herald, Xinhua
and video, Russia Today
The US has put on hold a plan to deploy missiles in Poland and a radar tracking station in the Czech Republic as a defense against possible Iranian nuclear missiles. The Czech prime minister, Jan Fischer, announced this afternoon 17 September that US President Barack Obama had called him just past midnight to inform him that the US “had reconsidered its intention to build a radar facility in the Czech Republic as a part of the missile defense system.”
The US signed an agreement with the Czech Republic and Poland in August 2008 to deliver and install 10 missile interceptors in Poland and the tracking station in the Czech Republic by 2012. They were meant to defend European countries from Iran and other “rogue” states. The BBC says that Obama ordered a review earlier this year, and the Pentagon has said that shelving the missile defense plan was a “major adjustment”.
The missile defense plan was “vigourously opposed” by Russia which saw it as a threat to its own nuclear arsenal. It was held to be an obstacle to talks meant to replace the 1980s era strategic arms reduction treaty, or Start, which expires in three months. BBC, Moscow Times
North Korea continues to defy world opinion, launching two more short-range missiles from its east coast, according to South Korean media reports. In May 2009 the UN began sanctions against the country after it launched long-range missiles despite warnings not to do so. BBC
Late Monday the United Nations Security Council agreed to take steps to punish North Korea for its latest nuclear missile test, while US President Barack Obama and his counterparts in Japan and South Korea talked by telephone to ensure a coordinated response to the tests. The BBC reports North Korean leaders as saying, on their state television, “It is clear that nothing has changed in the US hostile policy against DPRK [North Korea]… even under the new US administration,” and that the government criticized recent US moves to relocate its fighter jets. Reuters says North Korea is ready to fire more test missiles. Unusually, North Korea’s allies, China and Russia, both condemned the nuclear tests. Reuters, Xinhua, Moscow Times, Voice of America
Four men have been arrested in New York, USA, after they agreed to buy missiles in an undercover operation. The men are being charged with conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States. The FBI (US Federal Bureau of Investigation) says the men were plotting to leave a bomb at the Riverdale Synagogue in the Bronx, then travel 85 km north of New York City to aim missiles at military planes. One of the men is the son of immigrants from Afghanistan. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a statement that their arrest shows that “homeland security threats against New York City [are] sadly all too real”. Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, New York Times, Xinhua
In related FBI news a Canadian citizen, originally from Somalia and resident in Minneapolis, Minnesota in the US, pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to Al Qaeda.
North Korea has announced to the International Maritime Organization, a member group for shipping companies, that it will launch a communications satellite missile 4-8 April. The missile launch has worried other governments, particularly in Europe and the US, because of fears that the country will test a nuclear missile. Reuters India, Xinhua and BBC background on North Korea’s missile arsenal
Geneva, Switzerland and Washington, DC (GenevaLunch) – Talks Friday between Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton could be a follow-up to what the New York Times calls a “secret letter” from US President Barack Obama to Russian Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev, hand-delivered in mid-February. The newspaper’s Tuesday 3 March edition says that the letter suggested the US would not need to continue building a defense shield in eastern Europe if Iran could be persuaded not to continue building nuclear warheads and missiles.
A US air force drone may have been responsible for the deaths of 31 people said by the US to be Taliban militants, on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border in the semi-autonomous Kurram tribal region, reports the International Herald Tribune. The IHT notes that “The strikes have greatly magnified anti-American sentiment in Pakistan,” since they began in August 2008.
