Turkey and Australia Approve Military Action Against Islamic State Militants

Turkey’s parliament Thursday authorized the government to order military action against Islamic State militants including cross border military operations in Iraq and Syria and allowing foreign troops to use bases in Turkish territory. However a Turkish official said he didn’t believe there would be any imminent action. Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu vowed to prevent the mainly Kurdish town of Kobani (Ayn al-Arab), in Syria near the Turkish border, from falling to Islamic State militants, however failed to commit to military action, suggesting such a move could lead to a much wider involvement in the conflict. Islamic State militants advanced toward Kobani on Thursday, coming within a mile of the town according to some reports, and fierce clashes continued on Friday. Islamic State fighters have reportedly overtaken the Iraqi town of Hit, in Anbar province, despite efforts from a coalition of Sunni tribes fighting alongside government troops to halt the advance. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced special forces troops will be deployed to Iraq and fighter jets will join U.S.-led airstrikes within days. Abbott said the troops would be there to "advise and assist" the Iraqi army, though he noted it is a combat deployment. He said there was no immediate plan for the mission to extend to Syria.

Headlines  

• Double suicide car bombings at an army checkpoint and clashes killed at least 29 soldiers allied with former Gen. Khalifa Heftar in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi Thursday.
• An Egyptian top appeals court has removed Judge Said Youssef, who oversaw mass death sentence cases against supporters of ousted President Mohamed Morsi.

Arguments and Analysis

‘Contesting Welfare State Politics in Kuwait‘ (Rivka Azoulay and Madeleine Wells, MERIP)

"Although Kuwait will have to undertake major economic reforms in the future, the immediate crisis is not fiscal insolvency, but opposition to an increasingly dysfunctional rentier regime. The expanded social spending program since 2011 — about $3,572 in cash per person and over a year’s worth of free food  — has not quieted popular demands for political change. Kuwait’s history of active semi-democratic institutions, long-term demographic trends and local echoes of the Arab revolts have emboldened less privileged strata of Kuwaiti society — youth, tribesmen (badu) and the stateless (bidun) — to demand equal political and social rights. Focusing public conversation on declining state resources is an attempt to divert attention from issues of inequality and the regime’s bind: It cannot meet these demands without compromising the privileges of the political and merchant elite, thus violating its political compact and threatening its power."

‘Confronting the Islamic State: Lebanon’s tenuous success amidst growing threats‘ (Nicholas Noe, European Council on Foreign Relations)

"Yet, even as IS has found success elsewhere, Lebanon was able to quickly repel the threat – due in large part to a shift in trajectory predating IS’s surge into Iraq away from political confrontation between domestic parties to unprecedented co-operation geared towards combating the threat of extremism. In a region where security arrangements and political structures are both widely and violently breaking down, Lebanon can now be described, especially after the battle for Arsal, as one of the few states moving in the opposite direction.

The reasons for this almost unique trajectory in the Middle East and North Africa – one that has, at least momentarily, reversed the decades-old formula of Lebanon as a drop-box for regional and international score-settling – are fourfold and of relatively recent origin. First, we are witnessing an unprecedented intelligence co-operation between the US and some European states together with all Lebanese security agencies, a dynamic that works symbiotically with the military actions of the Shia Lebanese political party, Hezbollah, along the Lebanese-Syrian border. Second, a shared sense of grave, impending danger vis-à-vis IS and violent Sunni extremists has grown among rival parties, namely the Hezbollah- led March 8 movement and the Future Movement, which leads the March 14 movement, an alliance against the Syrian regime and the March 8 movement. This temporary alignment was incubated more than one year ago when IS and JAN ramped up their attacks in Lebanon. Third, these main actors have found a way to effectively share key levers of power, with the Sunni elite exclusively delegated the task of containing their domestic co-religionists. And fourth, there is a regional and international desire – especially on the part of the US, Saudi Arabia, and Iran – to stabilise Lebanon in an arena of growing unrest and negative contingency."

— Mary Casey