U.S., allies marshaling African proxies for fight against terrorism

"A quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing."

That was how British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain saw the Nazi threat against the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, a sentiment freshly evoked among war-weary citizens as the United States and its allies ponder moves to oust Islamic extremists from northern Mali, a country most Americans couldn't find on a map.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and diplomatic counterparts from France have been shopping around a plan to train and equip West African troops to drive out the Al Qaeda-aligned militants who hold sway over a swath of northern Mali the size of Texas. Ultraorthodox Muslims this year hijacked a long-simmering rebellion by ethnic Tuaregs and began imposing an extreme version of Islamic law once in power. In July, they took axes to "idolatrous" cultural treasures in Timbuktu, provoking worldwide horror at the destruction.

Like Afghanistan before 9/11, when Taliban collusion with Al Qaeda made the country a training ground for terrorism, Mali left in the grip of militant Islamists runs the risk of becoming the next launch pad for attacks on the United States and its allies.

U.S. interest in rooting out Ansar Dine and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb from northern Mali has intensified in the seven weeks since a suspected terrorist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans. The Al Qaeda affiliates in Mali are believed to have played at least a supportive role in the Benghazi attack.

"The Benghazi event, with the murder of Chris Stevens, has really precipitated American intervention. It's turned the tables in the region," said Ghislaine Lydon, a history professor at UCLA and expert on precolonial Northwest Africa.

Calls to protest movie mocking Muhammad spread to Algeria, Iran

The day after outraged Egyptians scaled the walls of the American Embassy in Cairo and Libyan militants attacked and burned the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, protests and denunciations against an amateur movie mocking the Islamic prophet spread across the region, spurring warnings for Americans abroad.

Dozens of people turned out to protest in Gaza, chanting anti-American slogans and calling for the death of the  filmmaker behind it. In Tunisia, scores of protesters reportedly burned American flags outside the U.S. Embassy in Tunis; Reuters reported that police scattered the protesters using tear gas and firing rubber bullets into the air.

In Algeria, the U.S. Embassy cautioned Americans to avoid its building and other official government buildings Wednesday afternoon, sending an emergency message to U.S. citizens after calls for protests went out on social media.

Iranians angered by the film planned to protest Thursday in front of the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, which represents U.S. diplomatic interests in the country. As calls to protest went out Wednesday, an Iranian official faulted the U.S. for not stopping insults to Islam.

“The U.S. government’s systematic and continued silence on such repulsive acts is the fundamental reason that they keep happening,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast was quoted as saying by state media. Mehmanparast made no mention of the attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in his remarks.

Iran's isolation lifts for gathering of anachronistic alliance

In another time and place, next week’s summit of the Nonaligned Movement in Tehran would draw no more attention than deserved for a directionless alliance that has outlived its Cold War-era purpose.

But the rotating leadership of the 120-nation club, now united mostly by grievances over how bigger world powers wield their clout, is passing to Iran, providing a stage and possible legitimacy boost for what the United States and its allies view as a rogue regime bent on acquiring a nuclear weapon and annihilating Israel.

U.S. and Israeli leaders waged a belated and unsuccessful campaign for a boycott of the summit, warning that attendance could undermine the international community’s efforts to isolate Iran diplomatically and pressure it through sanctions to abandon any nuclear-bomb-building ambitions.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon dealt a death blow to the efforts to organize a collective snub when he accepted Tehran’s invitation Wednesday. Ban’s spokesman, Martin Nesirky, told reporters at U.N. headquarters that Ban would use his visit to raise U.N. concerns about Iran’s nuclear developments, its role in the raging civil war in Syria, human rights issues and Iranian leaders’ threats against Israel.

INTERACTIVE: Who's who at the conference

Political analysts say Ban could hardly skip the meeting of such a huge part of the global constituency: India, Pakistan, South Africa, Egypt, Indonesia and dozens of states in Latin America and the Middle East are nonaligned members. That the membership also lists what Western countries consider pariah states -- North Korea, Belarus, Zimbabwe and host Iran, to name a few -- only makes Ban’s involvement the more necessary, the experts say, as it provides a rare opportunity to engage behind the scenes with often-reclusive or unapproachable leaders.

What worries Washington and some of its allies is the potential public relations boost Iran could get from the gathering. Hosting Ban, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, Afghan President Hamid Karzai and heads of state and government from at least four dozen other nations provides a high-profile platform for Iran to make its case for what Tehran claims is a purely civilian nuclear program.

"A lot of members of the Non-Aligned Movement see an inherent double standard in the nuclear nonproliferation regime and are unhappy with the failure of the nuclear powers, including the United States, to make significant movements toward nuclear disarmament," said Stewart Patrick, director of the Council on Foreign Relations' program on international institutions and global governance. Western powers have raised an international outcry over Iran's enrichment of uranium for fear it could be accelerated and used to make a nuclear weapon, but Israel has encountered little censure for its having acquired nuclear bombs, Patrick said.

Still, "it would be erroneous to see all of the nonaligned nations as moving in lock step with Iran," Patrick said. He pointed out that the widely divergent development and political agendas of the member states are no longer united by any single ideology or objective.

The Non-Aligned Movement emerged 51 years ago at the initiative of five developing-nation leaders seeking an alternative to joining rival alliances led by the United States and the Soviet Union. When the bipolar world ended with the breakup of the Soviet Union two decades ago, the Non-Aligned Movement lost its reason to exist, said Abbas Milani, director of Iranian studies at Stanford University and co-director of the Hoover Institution's Iran Democracy Project.

Milani sees little chance that the Tehran summit will produce any significant gestures of support for the Iranian regime from among its disparate members. And whatever symbolic benefit Tehran derives from hosting a huge international confab will be expensive, short-lived and the result of an ill-conceived strategy on the part of U.S. officials, he said.

"The United States and the West never really had much leverage" to persuade allies to boycott the summit, said Milani, who taught law and political science at Tehran University before leaving his homeland in the late 1980s. "Iran was put in a win-win situation: If it got people like Ban Ki-moon and developing nations' presidents to come, it would be a win for them. If they had boycotted, the regime could say the West interfered to prevent them from coming."

Western states are also misguided in defining their policies on engagement with Iran in either-or terms, Milani said, instead of applying a strategy of negotiating in areas where there is potential for resolving differences.

"The problem is that some people want to portray engagement as legitimizing the regime. But Ronald Reagan engaged with the 'evil empire,' and his purpose wasn't to afford it legitimacy; it was to solve issues and help Soviet dissidents get some breathing space," Milani said.

Even if the nonaligned summit puts Iran in the world spotlight for a few days, he concluded, it will end with nothing more significant than group photos and Iranians plunged back into the daily misery of life under the outside world's withering sanctions.

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Photo: Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, left, will represent host country Iran at next week's summit of the Non-Aligned Movement, a forum that Western nations worry could undermine the diplomatic isolation of Iran over its nuclear programs. Khamenei drew Western ire last week when he said Israel would cease to exist, echoing threats made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, at right in this official photo issued Thursday. Credit: Khamenei.ir

Locusts menace already hunger-stricken Mali and Niger

Mali is already bedeviled by the messy aftermath of a military coup, Tuareg rebels who’ve declared their own state, Islamists trying to impose strict religious law in the north, and waves of hunger.

Now Mali and neighboring Niger are facing swarms of locusts, which were left uncontrolled while Libya and Algeria, which normally keep local locusts from moving south, grappled with conflicts and insecurity of their own.

The swarming desert locusts, which can eat their own weight in fresh food every day, threaten to devastate crops in a region where millions of people are already menaced by food shortages. In some stretches of northern Mali and Niger, some people have resorted to eating plant leaves, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the World Food Program have said.

Locusts are usually managed by spraying chemicals that stop the swarms from spreading. Algeria and Libya ordinarily attack the swarms, preventing them from hitting Mali or Niger.

But in the last year, as Libya was wracked by fighting between rival militias in the aftermath of the ouster of Moammar Kadafi and Algeria suffered insecurity along its border, local teams and international experts have been blocked from stopping the swarms, the U.N.  Food and Agriculture Organization  said.

Teams trying to combat the locusts had treated more than 200 square miles of infested land in Algeria and Libya as of the end of May. More than $700,000 has been dedicated to the problem, the FAO said.

But locusts have reportedly already been spotted in the northern Mali region of Kidal, as well as neighboring northern Niger. “How many locusts there are and how far they move will depend on two major factors:   the effectiveness of current control efforts in Algeria and Libya and upcoming rainfall in the Sahel of West Africa,” FAO senior locust forecasting officer Keith Cressman said Tuesday.

The onslaught is especially alarming in Mali because the unrest has crippled its ability to fight them off. Bloomberg News reported Thursday that the equipment Mali needs to stop the swarms was destroyed during the Tuareg rebellion, quoting an interview with a locust control official broadcast on state radio.

Even before it was threatened by locusts, Mali has been facing its worst crisis in 50 years, Amnesty International said  last month. Rebels and soldiers alike have violated human rights with executions and rapes. Tens of thousands of people have fled the region.

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Photo: Malian refugees arrive at the Imbaidou refugee camp in Niger on May 29, 2012. Credit: Issouf Sanogo / AFP/Getty Images

Global military spending flattens as U.S. cuts back, Russia adds

The United States and much of Western Europe trimmed their military spending because of budget constraints, according to new data from by a Stockholm-based think tank.

The slight drop in the United States, the biggest military spender worldwide, helped break a 13-year trend of surging spending on armies around the world, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a new report. Global military spending was basically flat in 2011, growing only 0.3%.

“It seems likely that the rapid increases of the last decade are over for now,” the think tank wrote. It estimated that countries around the world spent $1.738 trillion on their militaries last year.

The drop in American military spending -- the first since 1998 -- was partly because of the long delays in crafting a budget as the Obama administration and Republican lawmakers clashed over cuts, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in a report this week.

European countries tightening their belts in the name of austerity have also spent less on their militaries, with Greece, Spain, Italy and Ireland paring back over the last three years, it said.

Yet more is being spent on the military elsewhere. Russia increased its spending by 9.3%, putting it third in the world behind the U.S. and China. It expects to spend even more in the future, aspiring to replace weapons that date to the Soviet era.

China's growing military might has worried its neighbors and spurred the U.S. to pay more attention to Asia, though Chinese military technology still lags behind that of the U.S.

All in all, military spending was up in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia and down in Latin America, North America and the rest of Europe, with worldwide spending staying all but level. Researchers warned that data for much of the Middle East were spotty, making them less reliable.

The new estimates included some striking findings about spending in specific countries:

-- Azerbaijan, wedged between Russia, Georgia, Armenia and Iran in the Caucasus region, increased its military budget by 89% in a single year, the biggest increase worldwide, the report found. The dramatic growth came in the middle of increasing warnings of renewed conflict with Armenia over a disputed territory.

-- The increase in African military spending can be chalked up entirely to Algeria, the report said. It spent 44% more than the year before, fueled by worries about the Libyan conflict spilling onto its territory.

-- Declining military spending in Latin America (down 3.3%) is largely due to Brazil cutting back on equipment and other discretionary purchases for its military, an attempt to reduce inflation.

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Photo: U.S. Marines participate in an annual military exercise in Pohang, South Korea, in March. Credit: Jeon Heon-Kyun / European Pressphoto Agency

Gunman buried in France after Algeria reportedly rejects remains

The gunman who boasted of committing  a series of killings of French soldiers, Jewish schoolchildren and a rabbi was buried in France on Thursday, one week after he was killed following a marathon standoff with police.

Mayor Pierre Cohen of Toulouse had reportedly objected to Mohamed Merah, 23, being buried in the southwestern France city where he lived and two of the attacks were carried out. Merah's father said he would be buried instead in a family plot in Algeria, according to several news reports, but Algerian authorities reportedly refused.

The idea of burying Merah in Algeria had upset Algerians who felt their country was being unfairly tied to the attacks carried out by the young French man of Algerian descent.

“We allowed this country to be a dumping ground for French nuclear waste,” an Algerian paper wrote in an editorial that referred to the time of French colonial rule of the North African country, according to France 24. “We will not allow it to become a dumping ground for French terrorist waste.”

Merah's body was interred in a cemetery in the Cornebarrieu neighborhood on the outskirts of Toulouse after President Nicolas Sarkozy pressed for the burial, saying the country should get it over with.

“It's all over. We aren't talking about it anymore. He is in his grave,” Abdallah Zekri of the French Muslim Council told the Associated Press after the funeral.

French authorities are still investigating whether more people were involved in the attacks that took seven lives in Toulouse and nearby Montauban. The victims included three children, ages 3, 6 and 10, and a rabbi at a Jewish school, as well as three French paratroopers. The brother of the dead gunman, Abdelkader Merah, was indicted Sunday on charges of complicity in the killings, Bloomberg News reported.

Merah was killed March 22 after a 32-hour siege that police say ended when they stormed his apartment and Merah burst out of a bathroom, guns blazing. He jumped out a window, still firing. One of the hundreds of officers and sharpshooters ringing the building shot him in the head, authorities said

Merah's father, Benanel,  has threatened to sue France for killing his son, telling France 24 in a televised interview that the police “could have used sleep-inducing gas and taken him like a baby.”

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Photo: Relatives bury Mohamed Merah on Thursday in a cemetery near Toulouse, France. Credit: Marthial Roland / Associated Press

French police in standoff with suspect in Jewish school slayings

REPORTING FROM PARIS -- Two French police officers were shot and injured Wednesday in a standoff with a man claiming to be a member of Al Qaeda and suspected of killing seven people, including a rabbi and three children at a Jewish school.

Officials said the standoff at an apartment in Toulouse began at 3 a.m. local time when police from an elite armed unit surrounded a building in a residential area of the city less than 48 hours after a gunman attacked the school, killing four people.

An explosion was heard from the apartment building early Wednesday morning.

PHOTOS: Shooting at French school

French Interior Minister Claude Guéant said officers were under instructions to take the 24-year-old suspect alive. The man is of French nationality and Algerian origin, officials said. Multiple news agencies identified him as Mohammed Merah.

The suspect's Algerian mother was reported to be at the scene helping with negotiations, and his brother has been taken into police custody. The man has reportedly surrendered a .45 Colt pistol, but is believed to have an Uzi machine gun and a Kalashnikov assault rifle still in his possession.

The injuries of the two police officers wounded in the ongoing standoff were not considered life-threatening, officials said.

In addition to the attack on the school, the suspect is believed to be linked to the deaths of three French paratroopers of North African origin in two separate shootings in and around Toulouse in the last 10 days.

Kadafi's daughter reportedly eyeing asylum in Israel

REPORTING FROM JERUSALEM -- Is Aisha Kadafi, daughter of the slain Libyan ruler Moammar Kadafi, considering seeking asylum in Israel? Unlikely as it seems, this may be the case.

The Israeli news website Walla, quoted a report published in Intelligence Online that said Aisha indicated to confidants from Europe that only in Israel would she feel safe and that she hoped to be allowed to live there. In August, she fled Libya for Algeria with her mother, two of her brothers and several other family members. Recently she expressed concern that her Algerian hosts may not be able to resist pressure from Libya's new government to extradite her to stand trial along with her brother, Saif al-Islam.

Aisha Kadafi already has at least one Israeli connection -- her attorney. Until recently, Nick Kaufman was a senior prosecutor with the Israeli Ministry of Justice. A former prosecutor at the United Nation's International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, the Israeli lawyer was recently hired by Aisha and her brother Saadi to advance a probe into the killing of their father and another brother with the ICC, the International Criminal Court.

The family may have an indirect Israeli tie. Two years ago, Saif al-Islam reportedly negotiated with Israel through a mediator for a peaceful compromise concerning an aid ship he sent toward Gaza, where a naval blockade keeps vessels from docking. 

Aisha Kadafi's friends reportedly discouraged her from making an official request for asylum in Israel, which would probably balk at harboring the daughter of a slain Arab dictator.

But she might actually qualify for the automatic right to immigrate to the Jewish state. Rumors have persisted among Libyan Jews in Israel for years that Kadafi himself is Jewish.

Several elderly Israelis of the Jewish community that once lived in Libya have come forth in recent years with stories about the dictator's purported Jewish heritage. One of them is Gita Buaron, an Israeli woman approaching 80. She says Kadafi's mother was her great-aunt. As for his children, being half-Jewish may not cut it if it's the wrong half -- Judaism is acquired through matrilineal heritage (or conversion) -- but it's often sufficient for immigration under Israel's Law of Return legislation. 

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Photo: Aisha Kadafi waves a flag at a pro-regime demonstration in March in Tripoli's Bab Azizia compound, where the Libyan leader was to speak. Credit: Mohamed Messara / European Pressphoto Agency

North Korea set to hold funeral for 'Dear Leader' Kim Jong Il

REPORTING FROM SEOUL -- Hundreds of thousands of mourners are expected to attend the funeral in Pyongyang for North Korean leader Kim Jong Il on Wednesday, as the secretive state bids farewell to its “Dear Leader” and ushers in the era of his chosen successor and youngest son.

At midmorning, North Korea’s state-run television began airing video of weeping mourners who had paid their respects to Kim, whose body lay in state at Pyongyang’s Kumsusan Memorial Palace.

Government-controlled media said his son, Kim Jong Un, accompanied by top military officials, had visited the palace to pay his respects five times since his father’s death of a heart attack on Dec. 17.

It remains unclear whether Kim Jong Il will be buried or embalmed for the ages as his father, North Korean founder Kim Il Sung, who died in 1994, was.

The elder Kim’s body was handed over to Russian embalmers, who spent nearly a year to prepare it, at a reported cost of $1 million. The upkeep of the body also reportedly costs hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.

The body lies in a glass casket next to the former leader’s limousine. Some reports say the remains are triggered to raise to viewing level when a visitor enters the room. 

In South Korea, television stations blitzed the airwaves with analysis of the funeral. The consensus among prognosticators was that it marked Kim Jong Un’s first true test as leader.

How the son handles himself will provide a signal of his capabilities to lead North Korea. His goal will be to show that order has been maintained and that the affairs of state go on.

At public observation towers along the demilitarized zone that separates North and South Korea, which have technically been at war since the 1950s, South Koreans gathered to get a glimpse of their northern counterparts.

South Korean television reporters said they had access to streaming video of the events. But South Korean security law prohibits any event taking place in North Korea from being broadcast live here.

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Photo: An image from North Korean TV shows Kim Jong Un as he pays respect to the body of his father at Kumsusan Memorial Palace in Pyongyang on Tuesday. Credit: Korean Central TV Broadcasting Station

Sudan says it has killed leader of Darfur's main rebel group

REPORTING FROM BEIRUT -- Sudan’s armed forces said Sunday that they had killed the leader of Darfur’s main rebel group, inflicting what could prove a severe blow to rebels who have waged a nearly decade-long war against  the Arab-led government in Khartoum.

In a statement carried on the official Sudan News Agency, the army said Khalil Ibrahim, leader of the rebel Justice and Equality Movement, was killed in fighting in Wad Banda in the North Kordofan region, which borders Darfur. A spokesman for JEM confirmed the death to the French news agency Agence France-Presse, but said Ibrahim was killed in an air strike rather than during clashes.

Ibrahim, a charismatic leader from one of Darfur’s largest tribes,  was considered one of the most powerful rebel commanders from the remote western region of Sudan, where the United Nations says as many as 300,000 people have died since fighting erupted in 2003.  

He had been based in Libya in recent years, but returned to Sudan when Moammar Kadafi was overthrown. JEM was once Darfur’s best-armed and most effective rebel groups, although it is reported to have suffered losses in the fighting in Libya this year.

In 2008, JEM staged a bold attack on the capital in which more than 200 people were killed. Its fighters were only a few miles from the presidential palace when government troops halted them.