Niger’s Interior Ministry has said that the US will submit a plan to “disengage” its troops from the West African nation, AFP reported.
Earlier this month, Niger’s military-led government, which took power after a July 2023 coup, said that it was ending its military agreement with the US and that the US military presence in the country was no longer legally justified.
Despite the order, the US is looking to stay in the country and has said it’s seeking clarification from the Nigerien government, known as the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (CNSP).
US Ambassador Kathleen FitzGibbon met with Nigerien Interior Minister General Mohamed Toumba on Wednesday to discuss the issue. Niger’s Interior Ministry said FitzGibbon said the US had “taken note of the decision” by Niger to withdraw from the military agreement and would be “coming back with a plan” on the “methods for disengaging” its troops in the country.
But when asked about Niger’s statement, the US State Department refused to comment. “I don’t want to get into what – from our perspective, at least – are private diplomatic conversations,” said State Department spokesman Matt Miller.
The US has about 1,000 military personnel in Niger, including 650 troops and a few hundred civilian contractors, and a major drone base that cost over $100 million to build, known as Air Base 201.
The US is also preparing for the possibility of getting kicked out, as The Wall Street Journalreported earlier this year that the US was in talks with other West African states to base drones on their territory, including Benin, the Ivory Coast, and Ghana.
Israel's war threatens the world's oldest Christian community. But Western powers who pay lip service to religious minorities are silent, writes Khalil Sayegh.
Gaza is home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, dating back to the first century, and the third oldest church in the world. Despite constant threats to survival, the community has persisted for two millennia.
But now, extinction may be unavoidable this time due to Israel’s indiscriminate war and imposed famine, which has killed more than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza. There are only about 800 Christians left in Gaza.
The Western world, which often champions the rights of the religious minorities in the region, is eerily silent.
Since the beginning of the Israeli attack on Gaza, the small Christian minority has been impacted in the same way as their fellow Palestinians. Most Christians have historically lived in Gaza City, an area, like other parts of north Gaza, that was systematically targeted at the very beginning of the war and is currently suffering from a lack of access to food and aid.
Although there is no reliable estimate on the number of Christian homes fully or partially destroyed, the Christians sheltering at the churches indicate to me that Israel has destroyed some 80% of their houses and killed more than 3% of the population.
"While all Palestinians in Gaza are facing a genocidal attack, the Christian community is particularly vulnerable due to its small size and the disproportionate number of casualties"
The displacement comes full circle
The experience of lost lives and livelihoods is reminiscent of our experience during the Nakba: the majority of Christians in Gaza are from families who survived ethnic cleansing in 1948. Those families, forced out of Lod, Jaffa, Majdal, among other places, eventually found shelter with those originally from Gaza City.
Like the rest of the Palestinians in Gaza, they had to experience forced displacement again during this war, sheltering in the only two churches, the Greek-Orthodox Saint Pyrophorus and the Catholic Holy Family, and attempting to find temporary sanctuary.
But even these historic churches were not able to protect them from Israel’s assaults. On 18 October, an Israeli airstrike targeted a building within Saint Pyrophorus Church compound, killing 18 Palestinian Christians, including women and children.
The strike killed the entire family of Abd and Treq Souri and the three kids of Ramiz Sori and others. It is considered one of the worst massacres of Christians in the region.
The Holy Family Church was equally not immune from the Israeli attacks. Although it did not witness as much damage as the Saint Pyrophorus, its Mother Teresa Convent was also partially destroyed.
Then, on 16 December, Israeli snipers shot and killed a mother and her daughter who were seeking shelter in the church, and shot eight more Christians who attempted to try to help the two women.
In addition to the direct killings by Israel at the churches, other Christians in Gaza have died from lack of access to health care and supplies, as Israel has imposed a complete blockade of humanitarian aid.
One of these is my father, who suffered a heart attack but was unable to access medical help due to the Israeli tanks surrounding the Holy Family Church where my family is sheltering.
In the West, people often ask me why the number of Christians in the Middle East is decreasing and why we are leaving. Usually, they were waiting for us to blame the Muslims for their “persecution of Christians.”
But this explanation is not only an oversimplification but also incorrect. No one can deny the occurrence of sectarian discrimination, in some cases, by the Muslim majority against the Christians minorities, but it is often not the primary cause of the mass exodus of indigenous Christians from the land.
Instead, the mass exodus of Christians is caused by scenarios similar to Gaza today: the brutality of wars that make it harder for Christians to survive.
In 1948, Palestinian Christians, like Muslims, were ethnically cleansed from Mandatory Palestine and never allowed back; this was the biggest hit for the number of Christians in Palestine.
Other Western-backed wars and the “War on Terror” have also significantly contributed to the exodus of Christians in the Middle East.
"The Christians of Gaza are facing imminent danger of famine and starvation, and if they survive, there will be very little left to stay for in Gaza"
Take, for example, Iraq, which had over 1.5 million Christians before the American invasion in 2003. The invasion and years of war harmed the Christians like Muslims, and it also created the conditions for the emergence of radical groups like the Islamic State that see religious minorities as a prime target. Today, Iraq has just 150,000 Christians left.
Today, we are witnessing the same episode of assault on Middle Eastern Christians in Gaza, where Israel has killed 3% and displaced another 3% from the Strip. All remaining Christians in Gaza have been forced to leave their homes and shelter at the churches for survival.
The Christians of Gaza steadfastly remain in their churches. They refused to obey the occupation orders to move south. When I was talking to those sheltering at the church, one said that they, “left in 1948 and were never allowed back” and refuse to “repeat the same mistake.”
But with Lent and Ramadan occurring at a similar time, the Christians of Gaza are facing imminent danger of famine and starvation, and if they survive, there will be very little left to stay for in Gaza.
Living under Israel's occupation
Since Israel’s inception, Palestinian Christians have experienced harsh treatment from the various occupation regimes.
In Bethlehem and the West Bank, Christians deal with the confiscation of their land under Israel’s settler-colonial policies. In Jerusalem, Christians wrestle with the policies of Judaisation of the city and the erasing of their presence.
Before the war, Christians in Gaza felt a sense of discrimination by the illiberal Hamas government. However, they have also suffered like all Gazans from the Israeli siege on the Gaza Strip.
They have struggled with the permit regime imposed on them by the Israeli occupation. Palestinian Christians are accustomed to visiting the holy sites on Easter and Christmas. However, such visits were always challenging due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Rarely did Israel grant them entry permits, and when it did, only half of the family could receive them.
Those permits became the only hope for Christians to escape the dire situation in Gaza to the West Bank. Yet, for Israel, they were used as more means to control the Christian population, as it believed that by making their lives unattainable, the Christian population would leave the country instead.
While all Palestinians in Gaza are facing a genocidal attack, the Christian community is particularly vulnerable due to its small size and the disproportionate number of casualties. It is not clear whether the Christians in Gaza have any future, even if they can survive the famine and the onslaught.
Many members are considering leaving Gaza City after 174 days of Israeli bombardment has made it uninhabitable.
Meanwhile, Western powers have failed to stop Israel from committing atrocities in Gaza and violating international humanitarian law. Worse yet, many are actively complicit in Israel’s genocide.
They have shown their indifference to the Christian minority in Gaza despite paying lip service to the rights of minorities in the region.
Khalil Sayegh is a political analyst focused on Palestinian politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He is also the co-founder of the Agora Initiative. Khalil holds a Master's degree in Political science from the American University in Washington, DC, where he researched democratization in the Middle East and Political Violence.https://www.newarab.com/opinion/easter-gazas-christian-community-faces-extinction
William J. Burns has published a long piece in Foreign Affairs under the title 'Spycraft and Statecraft.Transforming the CIA for an Age of Competition'. This is an essay likely to be read with great attention, maybe even parsed, not only by an American elite audience, but also abroad, in, say, Moscow, Beijing, and New Delhi, for several reasons. Burns is, of course, the head of the CIA as well as an acknowledged heavyweight of US geopolitics – in the state and deep-state versions.
Few publications rival Foreign Affairs’ cachet as a US establishment forum and mouthpiece. While Burns’ peg is a plea to appreciate the importance of human intelligence agents, his agenda is much broader: In effect, what he has released is a set of strategic policy recommendations, embedded in a global tour d’horizon. And, last but not least, Burns is, of course, not the sole author. Even if he should have penned every line himself, this is a programmatic declaration from a powerful faction of the American “siloviki,” the men (and women) wielding the still gargantuan hard power of the US empire.
By the way, whether he has noticed or not, Burns’ intervention cannot but bring to mind another intelligent spy chief loyally serving a declining empire. Yury Andropov, former head of the KGB (and then, for a brief period, the whole Soviet Union) would have agreed with his CIA counterpart on the importance of “human assets,” especially in an age of technological progress, and he would also have appreciated the expansive sweep of Burns’ vision. Indeed, with Burns putting himself so front-and-center, one cannot help but wonder if he is not also, tentatively, preparing the ground for reaching for the presidency one day. After all, in the US, George Bush senior famously went from head of the CIA to head of it all, too.
There is no doubt that this CIA director is a smart and experienced man principally capable of realism, unlike all too many others in the current American elite. Famously, he warned in 2008, when serving as ambassador to Moscow, that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” That makes the glaring flaws in this big-picture survey all the more remarkable.
Burns is, obviously, correct when he observes that the US – and the world as a whole – is facing a historically rare moment of “profound” change in the global order. And – with one exception which we will return to – it would be unproductive, perhaps even a little churlish, to quibble over his ideologically biased terminology. His mislabeling of Russia as “revanchist,” for instance, has a petty ring to it. “Resurgent” would be a more civil as well as more truthful term, capturing the fact that the country is simply returning to its normal international minimum status (for at least the last three hundred years), namely that of a second-to-none great power.
Yet Burns’ agenda is more important than his terminology. While it may be complex, parts of it are as clear as can be: He is eager (perhaps desperate) to prevent Washington from ending its massive aid for Ukraine – a battle he is likely to lose. In the Middle East, he wants to focus Western aggression on Iran. He may get his will there, but that won’t be a winning strategy because, in part thanks to multipolar trend setters, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS, Iran’s escape from the isolation that the US has long imposed on it is already inevitable.
Regarding China, Burns’ real target is a competing faction of American hawks, namely those who argue that, bluntly put, Washington should write off its losses in Ukraine and concentrate all its firepower on China. Burns wants to persuade his readers that the US can have both its big fight against China and its proxy war against Russia.
He is also engaged in a massive act of CIA boosterism, clearly aiming to increase the clout of the already inordinately powerful state-within-a-state he happens to run himself. And last but not least, the spy-in-chief has unearthed one of the oldest tricks in the subversion and destabilization playbook: Announcing loudly that his CIA is on a recruiting spree in Russia, he seeks to promote a little paranoia in Moscow. Good luck attempting to pull that one on the country that gave us the term “agentura.” Moreover, after the horrific terror attack on Crocus City Hall in Moscow, it is fair to assume that Burns regrets having boasted about the CIA expanding its “work” in Russia. Not a good look, not at all.
What matters more, though, than his verbal sallies and his intriguingly straightforward, even blunt aims, are three astonishingly crude errors: First, Burns insists on reading the emerging outcome of the war in Ukraine as a “failure on many levels,” for Russia, revealing its, as he believes, economic, political, and military weakness. Yet, as the acknowledged American economist James K. Galbraith has recently reiterated, the West’s economic war on Russia has backfired. The Russian economy is now stronger, more resilient, and independent of the West than never before.
As to the military, Burns for instance, gleefully counts the tanks that Russia has lost and fails to note the ones it is building at a rapid rate not matched anywhere inside NATO. In general, he fails to mention just how worried scores of Western experts have come to be, realizing that Moscow is overseeing a massive and effective expansion of military production. A curious oversight for an intelligence professional. He also seems to miss just how desperate Ukraine’s situation has become on the ground.
And politics – really? The man who serves Joe Biden, most likely soon to be replaced by Donald Trump, is spotting lack of popularity and fragility in Moscow, and his key piece of evidence is Prigozhin and his doomed mutiny? This part of Burns’ article is so detached from reality that one wonders if this is still the same person reporting on Russian red lines in 2008. The larger point he cannot grasp is that, historically, Russia has a pattern of starting wars on the wrong foot – to then learn, mobilize, focus, and win.
Burns’ second severe mistake is his argument that, ultimately, only China can pose a serious challenge to the US. This is staggeringly shortsighted for two reasons: First, Russia has just shown that it can defeat the West in a proxy war. Once that victory will be complete, a declining but still important part of the American empire, NATO/EU-Europe will have to deal with the after-effects (no, not Russian invasion, but political backlash, fracturing, and instability). If Burns thinks that blowback in Europe is no serious threat to US interests, one can only envy his nonchalance.
Secondly, his entire premise is perfectly misguided: It makes no sense to divide the Russian and the Chinese potentials analytically because the are now closely linked in reality. It is, among other things, exactly a US attempt to knock out Russia first to then deal with China that has just failed. Instead, their partnership has become more solid.
And error number three is, perhaps, even odder: As mentioned above, Burns’ language is a curious hybrid between an analytical and an intemperate idiom. A sophisticated reader can only wince in vicarious embarrassment at hearing a CIA director complain of others’ “brutish” behavior. What’s worse: the tub-thumping or the stones-and-glasshouse cringe? Mostly, though, this does not matter.
Yet there is one case where these fits of verbal coarseness betray something even worse than rhetorical bravado: Describing Hamas’ 7 October assault as “butchery,” Burns finds nothing but an “intense ground campaign” on Israel’s side. Let’s set aside that this expression is a despicable euphemism, when much of the world rightly sees a genocide taking place in Gaza, with US support. It also bespeaks an astounding failure of the strategic imagination: In the same essay, Burns notes correctly that the weight of the Global South is increasing, and that, in essence, the great powers will have to compete for allegiances that are no longer, as he puts is, “monogamous.” Good luck then putting America’s bizarre come-what-may loyalty to Israel first. A CIA director at least should still be able to distinguish between the national interests of his own country and the demands of Tel Aviv.
Burns’ multipronged strike in the realm of elite public debate leaves an unpleasant aftertaste. It is genuinely disappointing to see so much heavy-handed rhetoric and such basic errors of analysis from one of the less deluded members of the American establishment. It is also puzzling. Burns is not amateurish like Antony Blinken or a fanatic without self-possession, such as Victoria Nuland. Yet here he is, putting his name to a text that often seems sloppy and transparent in its simple and short-sighted motivations. Has the US establishment decayed so badly that even its best and brightest now come across as sadly unimpressive?
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
