Tunisia to Impose Curfew amid Protests

A nationwide curfew will enter effect at 8 PM tonight in Tunisia and last through the night. The emergency measure was declared in response to escalating unemployment protests. In some cases, the protests have become riots. At least one police officer has been killed over the past three days and last night police responded with tear gas when police stations were assaulted by crowds throwing stones and Molotov cocktails.

Protests began last Sunday when a man who lost a government job was electrocuted when he climbed a transmission tower in protest. Unemployment remains a challenge in Tunisia: national unemployment has grown from 12 percent to 15 percent since 2010, and is 30 percent among youth. On Wednesday, Tunisian officials said they would hire 6,000 young people from Kasserine, a center of the protests, for construction work. Prime Minister Habib Essid is returning early from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and will visit Kasserine on Saturday.

Three Journalists Kidnapped in Yemen

Three Al-Jazeera journalists who disappeared on Monday in Taiz, Yemen, are believed to have been kidnapped, the television station said yesterday. A statement from Al-Jazeera did not specify who might have abducted Hamid al-Bokari, Abdulaziz al-Sabri, and Moneer al-Sabai, but said that the organization is working with “related parties in Taiz” to secure their release.

Headlines

• Nine people, including six police officers, were killed when police raided a home rigged with explosives in Cairo on Thursday; the Islamic State has claimed credit for the attack.

• A senior diplomat for the Syrian opposition said that rebel groups will not participate in talks with the Assad regime, including indirect talks, until the regime halts Russian airstrikes and lifts blockades of populated areas.

• Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi told CNN that Iraqi troops are working with local police forces to prepare to retake Mosul and that he thinks “Daesh is losing the momentum.”

• Israeli troops forcibly evicted a group of Israeli settlers from homes they say they purchased legally from Palestinians in the West Bank near Hebron; Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon said that the settlers had not received necessary permits from the Ministry of Defense.

• Sheikh Abdulaziz al-Sheikh, grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declared on his television program that playing chess is forbidden under Islam, saying that it violates rules on gambling and is “a waste of time and money and a cause for hatred and enmity between players.”

Arguments and Analysis

“How can war-torn Yemen find peace?” (Farea al-Muslimi, Al-Jazeera)

“What Yemen needs now is a dealer who can “redistribute the cards” and convince the various players to invest in peace. The UN tried this, but its approach has been weak and too easily mired in technicalities. In a recent meeting at UN headquarters in New York, just before the latest round of negotiations, a high-level UN official was asked privately whether the organisation had seriously attempted to assess the lessons learned from the past four years. The response was a flat no. Regionally, the West can play a role in ending the conflict in Yemen by pushing for reconciliation between Saudi and Iran, and by halting their arms deals in the region. They cannot believably call for peace in Yemen while turning a blind eye to the destruction being wrought with their weapons, now in the hands of their regional clients.”

“Al Qaeda and ISIS: Existential Threats to the U.S. and Europe” (Frederick W. Kagan, Kimberly Kagan, Jennifer Cafarella, Harleen Gambhir, and Kathrine Zimmerman, American Enterprise Institute and Institute for the Study of War)

“Defensive and internal measures will not adequately protect Americans at home, however. Passivity abroad will facilitate the continued collapse of the international order, including the global economy on which American prosperity and the American way of life depend. More states will fail; more conflict will displace refugees; adversaries will revise borders by force and will contest the freedom of the seas; others will test weapons of mass destruction. The symptoms of the collapsing world order have appeared already: the promises of the Arab Spring have largely failed states; ISIS has overrun the borders of Iraq and Syria; Russia has annexed border provinces in Ukraine; refugees and migrants have overwhelmed Europe and collapsed the Schengen Zone; Iran has fired missiles in the Straits of Hormuz; China has built islands to allow it to project power; and North Korea has tested a nuclear weapon. The collapse of world order creates the vacuums that allow Salafi-jihadi military organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS to amass resources to plan and conduct attacks on scales that could overwhelm any defenses the United States might raise. Even a marginal increase in such attacks could provoke Western societies to impose severe controls on the freedoms and civil liberties of their populations that would damage the very ideals that must most be defended. Sound strategy against these enemies requires effective action against their bases as well appropriate domestic efforts.”

-J. Dana Stuster

MOHAMED KHALIL/AFP/Getty Images