On April 13 Syria will hold parliamentary election, but who is going to vote?

Homs has been completely destroyed
The city of Homs

While the civil war continues with no possible solution ahead, the Syrian government has scheduled parliamentary  election for April 13. I found it pretty surreal. Citizens are asked to choose 250 members of the People’s Council  from 15 multi-member constituencies but nearly half of those are not under the government control.

As we well know Raqqa is occupied by the Islamic State which recently partly lost control of Deir ez-Zor. Homs is completely destroyed, and in Aleppo the ongoing fight makes it almost impossible to vote. Latakia is also partly controlled by the Syrian Army. The Kurds who established an autonomous region, known as Rojava, will not hold the elections.

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Women who join ISIS, are they really just victims?

The teenager who joined ISIS

Marlin was 15 years-old when she decided to travel to Syria last May.  She grew up in Boras,  Sweden. She wanted to join the Islamic State with her boyfriend and be part of the jihad. According  to Swedish press, when she traveled to the Islamic State, she was also pregnant. Allegedly she got “mislead” by an ISIS recruiter in Sweden who convinced her to make the journey.

On February 17 she got rescued by Kurdish anti-terrorist force, CTD, during a raid in Mosul. The girl, who is now 16,  is in Kurdistan and she will be hand over to Swedish authority. Her boyfriend, most probably at this point husband, got killed by a Russian airstrike. It is unclear what the girl was doing in Mosul, and why she was moved there.

A statement from the Kurdistan Region Security Council (KRSC) said the family was informed of the human rescue mission.

Most of the articles that have been published so far emphasis the “misleading” part, treating this girl as a victim. There is a sense of pity around them, as if we are unable to process their choice, so we tend to believe someone else forced them into the jihad. Some girls maybe so, but not all of them.

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How far from reality is the TV show Okkupert? Maybe not that much

okkupert

In a near future, Norway will elect a Green Party Prime Minister who wants to cut off all fossil fuel production, and replace it with a Thorium-based nuclear energy. When Jasper Berg announces it his plans, he couldn’t imagine the EU reaction: they have him kidnapped and forced him to sign an agreement for maximum capabilities of the oil production. To make sure Norway will honor this agreement, the EU asked Russia to operate a velvet glove invasion of the country and overlook the productivity.

From that moment on the TV show Occupied — or Okkupert — plays off an intriguing plot. The Russia and the EU representatives are bad guys, who show no remorse on misleading, cheating and try to manoeuvre the Norwegian PM on their advantage, while occupying the country. Berg tries to be positive and believes that his allies such as the US will eventually help him out. He could not be more mistaken.

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Why the US needs the Kurds in Syria

Since 2012 the U.S. has tried to put their feet in Syria. The CIA and the State Department had different ideas on how to approach the escalating conflict, and they pursued different paths. Nonetheless as the situation  evolved from a failed revolution to civil war, the U.S. didn’t have a reliable partner on the ground.

In 2014 the program “train and equip” was officialized by Congress and financed with $500 millions. The idea was to bring to Turkey some Free Syrian Army soldiers to train them and then bring them back to Syria. Each candidate, before entering the program, had to pass through a screening process. Most of the applicants were rejected because their ties with Islamic extremism or terrorism.

The American and Turkish trained rebels were defeated, kidnapped, and defected to more radical groups on the ground such as Al Nusra. None of the over 100 fighters trained was able to gain back territory from ISIS.

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Benedetta Argentieri

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