Tag: military weapons

Hospitals under attack as fighting grips Sudanese capital for third day | CNN

CNN
—

Intense fighting has gripped Sudan for a third day and hospitals are under attack from missiles as they battle to save lives, amid a bloody tussle for power that has left close to 100 people dead and injured hundreds more.

Clashes first erupted Saturday between the country’s military and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, who told CNN on Sunday the army had broken a UN-brokered temporary humanitarian ceasefire.

On Monday, residents in the capital Khartoum endured sounds of artillery and bombardment by warplanes with eyewitnesses telling CNN they heard mortars in the early hours. The fighting intensifying after dawn prayers in the direction of Khartoum International Airport and Sudanese Army garrison sites.

Hospitals in the country – which are short of blood supplies and life-saving equipment – are being targeted with military strikes by both the Army and the RSF, according to eyewitness accounts to CNN and two doctors’ organizations, leaving medical personnel unable to reach the wounded and to bury the dead.

One doctor at a Khartoum hospital – whom CNN is not naming for security reasons – said his facility has been targeted since Saturday. “A direct strike hit the maternity ward. We could hear heavy weaponry and lay on the floor, along with our patients. The hospital itself was under attack.”

CNN has reached out to the Sudanese military and the RSF for comment.

Another doctor at the same al-Moallem Hospital told CNN that hospital staff stayed on site under bombardment from the RSF for two days, before being evacuated by the Sudanese military. “We were living in a real battle,” the doctor said. “Can you believe that we left the hospital and left behind children in incubators and patients in intensive care without any medical personnel? I can’t believe that I survived dying at the hospital, where the smell of death is everywhere.”

Hemedti said Monday his group will pursue the leader of Sudan’s Armed Forces Abdel Fattah al-Burhan “and bring him to justice,” while Sudan’s army called on paramilitary fighters to defect and join the armed forces.

Verified video footage shows military jets and helicopters hitting the airport; other clips show the charred remains of the army’s General Command building nearby after it was engulfed in fire on Sunday.

Residents in neighborhoods east of the airport told CNN they saw warplanes bombing sites east of the command. “We saw explosions and smoke rising from Obaid Khatim Street, and immediately after that, anti-aircraft artillery fired massively towards the planes,” one eyewitness said.

Amid the chaos, both parties to the fighting are working to portray a sense of control in the capital. The armed forces said Monday the Rapid Support Forces are circulating “lies to mislead the public,” reiterating the army have “full control of all of their headquarters” in the capital Khartoum.

Sudan’s national state television channel came back on air on Monday, a day after going dark, and is broadcasting messages in support of the army.

A banner on the channel said “the armed forces were able to regain control of the national broadcaster after repeated attempts by the militias to destroy its infrastructure.” Although the armed forces appear to have control of the television signal, CNN cannot independently verify that the army is in physical control of the Sudan TV premises.

A banner on the channel said “the armed forces were able to regain control of the national broadcaster after repeated attempts by the militias to destroy its infrastructure.”

In the Kafouri area, north of Khartoum, clashes and street fights broke out at dawn Monday, prompting residents to begin evacuating women and children from the area, Sudanese journalist Fathi Al-Ardi wrote on Facebook. In the Kalakla area, south of the capital, residents reported the walls of their houses shaking from explosions.

Reports also emerged of battles hundreds of miles away in the eastern city of Port Sudan and the western Darfur region over the weekend.

As of Monday, at least 97 people have been killed, according to the Preliminary Committee of Sudanese Doctors trade union. Earlier on Sunday, the World Health Organization estimated more than 1,126 were injured.

The WHO has warned that doctors and nurses are struggling to reach people in need of urgent care, and are lacking essential supplies.

“Supplies distributed by WHO to health facilities prior to this recent escalation of conflict are now exhausted, and many of the nine hospitals in Khartoum receiving injured civilians are reporting shortages of blood, transfusion equipment, intravenous fluids, medical supplies, and other life-saving commodities,” the organization said on Sunday.

Water and power cuts are affecting the functionality of health facilities, and shortages of fuel for hospital generators are also being reported,” the WHO added.

In the CNN interview, Dagalo blamed the military for starting the conflict and claimed RSF “had to keep fighting to defend ourselves.”

He speculated that the army chief and his rival, al-Burhan, had lost control of the military. When asked if his endgame was to rule Sudan, Dagalo said he had “no such intentions,” and that there should be a civilian government.

Amid the fighting, civilians have been warned to stay indoors. One local resident tweeted that they were “trapped inside our own homes with little to no protection at all.”

“All we can hear is continuous blast after blast. What exactly is happening and where we don’t know, but it feels like it’s directly over our heads,” they wrote.

Access to information is also limited, with the government-owned national TV channel now off the air. Television employees told CNN that it is in the hands of the RSF.

The conflict has put other countries and organizations on high alert, with the United Nations’ World Food Program temporarily halting all operations in Sudan after three employees were killed in clashes on Saturday.

UN and other humanitarian facilities in Darfur have been looted, while a WFP-managed aircraft was seriously damaged by gunfire in Khartoum, impeding the WFP’s ability to transport aid and workers within the country, the international aid agency said.

Qatar Airways announced Sunday it was temporarily suspending flights to and from Khartoum due to the closure of its airport and airspace.

On Sunday, Dagalo told CNN the RSF was in control of the airport, as well as several other government buildings in the capital.

Meanwhile, Mexico is working to evacuate its citizens from Sudan, with the country’s foreign minister saying Sunday it is looking to “expedite” their exit.

The United States embassy in Sudan said Sunday there were no plans for a government-coordinated evacuation yet for Americans in the country, citing the closure of the Khartoum airport. It advised US citizens to stay indoors and shelter in place, adding that it would make an announcement “if evacuation of private US citizens becomes necessary.”

The fresh clashes have prompted widespread calls for peace and negotiations. The head of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki, is scheduled to arrive in Khartoum on Monday, in an attempt to stop the fighting.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and UK Foreign Secretary James Cleverly also for an immediate ceasefire.

“People in Sudan want the military back in the barracks, they want democracy, they want a civilian-led government. Sudan needs to return to that path,” Blinken said, speaking on the sidelines of the G7 foreign minister talks in Japan on Monday.

The UN’s political mission in Sudan has said the country’s two warring factions have agreed to a “proposal” although it is not yet clear what that entails.

At the heart of the clashes is a power struggle between the two military leaders, Dagalo and Burhan.

The pair had worked together to topple ousted Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2019, and played a pivotal role in the military coup in 2021, which ended a power-sharing agreement between the military and civilian groups.

The military has been in charge of Sudan since then, with Burhan and Dagalo at the helm.

But recent talks led to cracks in the alliance between the two men. The negotiations have sought to integrate the RSF into the country’s military, as part of the effort to transition to civilian rule.

Sources in Sudan’s civilian movement and Sudanese military sources told CNN the main points of contention included the timeline for the merger of the forces, the status given to RSF officers in the future hierarchy, and whether RSF forces should be under the command of the army chief, rather than Sudan’s commander-in-chief, who is currently Burhan.

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April 17, 2023
A weapons stockpile and asymmetric warfare: how Taiwan could thwart an invasion by China — with America’s help | CNN

Taipei, Taiwan
CNN
—

When Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen defied warnings from China to meet with US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in California earlier this month, Beijing’s aggressive military response reverberated around the world.

In actions that only fueled fears that communist-ruled China may be preparing to invade its democratically ruled neighbor, the People’s Liberation Army simulated a blockade of the island, sending an aircraft carrier and 12 naval ships to encircle it, and flying over a hundred warplanes into its air defense identification zone during a three-day military drill.

China’s ruling Communist Party, which claims Taiwan as part of its territory despite never having controlled it, described the drills as “joint precision strikes” that should serve as a “serious warning against the Taiwan separatist forces.”

The message, in Taipei’s mind, seemed clear. China appeared “to be trying to get ready to launch a war against Taiwan,” the island’s Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

That blunt assessment will likely have raised doubts in some quarters over whether the island’s military preparations for such a scenario are sufficient.

Taipei recently – and very publicly – announced an extension to mandatory military service periods from four months to a year and accelerated the development of its indigenous weapons program to boost its combat readiness.

But analysts say a recent announcement – one that has perhaps gone less remarked upon in the global media – could prove a game-changer: talks between Taipei and the United States to establish a “contingency stockpile” of munitions on Taiwan’s soil.

In remarks that were not widely picked up at the time, Defense Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng told Taiwan’s parliament in March that Taipei was in discussions with the US over a potential plan to set up a war reserve stock on the island – a measure made possible by a provision in the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), signed into law by US President Joe Biden last December.

And while Taiwan has long been a purchaser of weapons from the US, military experts say the creation of such a stockpile could be vital to the island’s defense because – as China’s recently simulated blockade showed – it could be incredibly difficult to supply the island with additional weapons if war does break out.

Unlike Ukraine, Taiwan has no land borders so any supplies would have to go in by air or sea – delivery methods that would be highly vulnerable to interceptions by the Chinese military.

It is therefore vital for Taiwan to stock up ammunition on the island before any conflict begins, said Admiral Lee Hsi-min, who served as Chief of the General Staff for the Taiwanese military between 2017 and 2019.

“Having a war reserve stockpile is crucial and meaningful for Taiwan,” he said. “Even if the United States does not want to intervene directly with military force, those kinds of stockpiles can still be very effective for our defense.”

Taiwan has also repeatedly raised concerns about delays in US weapon deliveries amid the war in Ukraine. Following his meeting with Tsai, Speaker McCarthy tweeted: “Based on today’s conversations, it’s clear several actions are necessary: We must continue arms sales to Taiwan and make sure such sales reach Taiwan on time.”

The talks over the possible stockpile beg the question: What exactly does Taiwan need for its defense?

For decades, the Taiwanese military has been purchasing fighter jets and missiles from the United States, which continues to be the single biggest guarantor of the island’s safety despite not having an “official” diplomatic relationship.

Last month, the Biden administration made headlines with its approval of potential arms sales to Taiwan worth an estimated $619 million, including hundreds of missiles for its fleet of F-16 fighter jets.

But Admiral Lee said Taiwan urgently needed to stock up on smaller and more mobile weapons that would have a higher chance of surviving the first wave of a Chinese attack in an all-out conflict – which would likely include long-range joint missile strikes on Taiwanese infrastructure and military targets.

In a high-profile book published last year, titled “Overall Defense Concept,” Lee argued that Taiwan should shift away from investing heavily in fighter jets and destroyers, as its military assets were already vastly outnumbered by China’s and could easily be paralyzed by long-range missiles.

Last year, China’s defense budget was $230 billion, more than 13 times the size of Taiwan’s spending of $16.89 billion.

So instead of matching ship for ship or plane for plane, Lee argued, Taiwan should embrace an asymmetric warfare model focused on the procurement of smaller weapons – such as portable missiles and mines – that are hard to detect but effective in halting enemy advances.

“In Ukraine, their military has used Neptune anti-ship missiles to sink Moscow’s battleships,” he said. “Asymmetric weapon systems will allow us to maintain our combat capabilities. That is because if our enemies want to destroy them, they will need to get closer to us, which makes them vulnerable to our attack.”

“If we can establish good enough asymmetrical capability, I believe China won’t be able to take over Taiwan by force, even without United States’ intervention,” he added.

Though the US maintains close unofficial ties with Taiwan, and is bound by law to sell arms to the island for its self-defense, it remains deliberately vague on whether it would intervene in the event of a Chinese invasion, a policy known as “strategic ambiguity.”

Under this year’s National Defense Authorization Act, passed by the US Congress and signed by US President Joe Biden, Taiwan will be eligible to receive up to $1 billion in weapons and munitions from the United States to counter China’s growing military threat.

The act also allows for the creation of a regional contingency stockpile, which would enable the Pentagon to store weapons in Taiwan for use if a military conflict with China arises.

In a response to CNN for this article, a spokesman at Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense confirmed it is in discussions with the United States on the definition of a “contingency”, the types of munition that can be operated immediately by its armed forces, and the timeline for shipping the items.

The ministry added that the move is aimed only at meeting Taiwan’s defensive needs, as opposed to “pre-stocking” munitions on the island.

The US Indo-Pacific Command declined to provide details about the progress of talks on creating the stockpile but said it would continue to enable Taiwan to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability.

Meanwhile, China’s Foreign Ministry told CNN that it “resolutely opposes” any military exchanges between the United States and Taiwan, adding that Beijing will take “all necessary measures” to defend its sovereignty and security interests.

Lin Ying-yu, an assistant professor from Tamkang University who specializes in military affairs, said that if a contingency stockpile were to be created, it should focus on amassing munitions already in use by Taiwan’s military to ensure operational effectiveness.

“I think some of the weapons that the US might be willing to provide include the Stinger and the Patriot missiles,” he said. The Stinger is a surface-to-air missile that can be fired by a single soldier, while the Patriot missile defense system is capable of intercepting enemy missiles and aircraft.

Admiral Lee said another weapon that could be stockpiled was the Javelin, a US-made portable anti-tank weapon system that has been widely used by the Ukrainian military to target Russian tanks.

The National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile System, or NASAMS, could also be useful for targeting Chinese warplanes, he said, as it was capable of firing the medium-range AIM-120 missile from ground level.

Other weapons that should be considered included the loitering munition drone – a so-called “suicide drone” that can be carried by a single soldier and is capable of destroying high-value targets – as well as other anti-armor and anti-ship weaponry, he added.

“If you have a high enough number of these kinds of asymmetrical weapon systems that survive the initial attack, you can keep most of your fighting capabilities intact and stop the enemy from conducting a landing operation,” Lee said.

Another question that arises is how many weapons or missiles Taiwan would need to defend itself against China.

Experts said providing a concrete number was difficult because the possible combat scenarios were so varied.

In his book, Admiral Lee wrote that the Chinese military could resort to different options in attempting to bring Taiwan under its control.

In an all-out war, China could fire long-range missiles to destroy Taiwanese infrastructure and military targets before attempting to send its ground troops across the Taiwan Strait.

Other scenarios with limited military action could include an aerial and naval blockade around Taiwan, or the seizure of Taiwan’s small outlying islands that are close to the Chinese coast.

However, Lin suggested the number of missiles that Taiwan likely needs would be in the “tens of thousands.”

He said one relatively simple way of calculating the number of missiles required involves estimating the total number of offensive military assets owned by the enemy, and the effectiveness of Taiwan’s defensive weapons. “For example, if our enemy has 1,000 missiles and we have a success rate of 25%, then we will need about 4,000 anti-ballistic missiles.”

In addition to weapons, Taiwan’s military could benefit from mobile radar systems that would enable it to receive military signals from the US, Lin added. These would be useful in conducting electronic warfare, as the US military would be able to help identify potential enemy targets even if ground radar systems had been destroyed.

“Even though the United States does not have troops on the ground in Ukraine, it has been able to tell the Ukrainian military where to fire their weapons by sending signals from its electronic warfare aircraft,” Lin said. “We need to make sure we have the necessary equipment to link with US military systems at times of war.”

There were other reasons the discussions with the US over the possible stockpile were important, Admiral Lee said, and they went beyond issues of storing up ammunition and spare parts.

“(Having a contingency stockpile) is very crucial, because it sends a signal to China that the United States is determined to assist in our defense,” he said.

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April 16, 2023
North Korea says it tested a new solid-fuel ICBM | CNN

CNN
—

North Korea said it launched a new solid-fueled Hwasong-18 Intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) on Thursday (local time), according to state media KCNA on Friday.

North Korean leader Kim Jong Un guided the “first test launch of the new ICBM” and the launch had no “negative impact” to the safety of the neighboring countries, per KCNA. The missile also did a stage separation, it said.

Solid-fueled ICBMs are the state-of-the-art world standard, and can be moved more easily and launched quicker than a liquid-fueled rocket. The United States’ main ICBM, the Minuteman III, is powered by three solid-fueled rocket motors.

The Hwasong-18 will “defend North Korea, suppress invasions, and protect the safety of the nation,” KCNA said, saying Kim expressed “great satisfaction” over the achievement of the test launch.

Jeffrey Lewis, an analyst at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, said on Twitter that it was “no surprise” a solid-fueled ICBM wasted tested by North Korea, saying “it’s just easier to use solid-fuel missiles.

“North Korea was always going to follow the same technical path as the US, Soviet Union, France, China, Israel and India,” he added. “Given that North Korea has been testing large diameter solid rocket motors for … several years, it’s been clear (to me at least) that since 2020 a test like this could have come at any time.”

The Thursday launch by North Korea sparked momentary panic on the Japanese northern island of Hokkaido after the government’s emergency alert system warned residents to take cover.

Soon after, fear turned into anger and confusion as the evacuation order was lifted amid reports that it had been sent in error, with local officials saying there was no possibility of the missile hitting the island and Tokyo later confirming it had fallen outside Japanese territory, in waters off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula.

The South Korean military said at the time that it believed Pyongyang was testing a new ballistic missile, which it had showcased in a military parade, according to a military official.

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April 13, 2023
Japan to develop long-range missiles as tensions with China rise | CNN

CNN
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Japan on Tuesday announced plans to develop and build an array of advanced long-range missiles as it bolsters its defenses amid increasing tensions with neighboring China.

The Japanese Defense Ministry said it had signed contracts with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI) to develop and mass produce the weapons under a plan extending to 2027.

The deals, worth more than $2.8 billion, follow Prime Minister Fumio Kishida’s announcement in December that he planned to boost defense spending and enable Japan to possess “counterstrike capabilities,” the ability to directly attack another country’s territory in the event of an emergency and under specific circumstances.

In taking the new defense initiatives, Japan is bending the interpretation of its post-World War II constitution, which put constraints on its Self-Defense Forces in that they can only be used for what their name implies, defending the Japanese homeland.

Under the deals, MHI will begin mass production this year on two types of already developed missiles – ground-launched Type 12 guided missiles designed to target ships at sea and hypersonic glide missiles designed for island defense, the ministry said. Deployment of those weapons is scheduled for 2026 and 2027, it said.

The Defense Ministry news release did not say how many of each missile would be acquired.

Meanwhile, MHI will this year begin development of advanced versions of the Type 12 that can also be launched by aircraft and ships. Defense industry news site Janes reported that the updgraded Type 12 will have a range of up to 1,000 kilometers (620 miles), five times the reach of the current version.

At the same time, MHI will begin development of submarine-launched missiles that could be fired by the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force’s fleet of conventionally powered boats.

In December, Kishida instructed his defense and finance ministers to secure funds to increase Japan’s defense budget to 2% of current GDP in 2027.

Along with the development of Japan’s own missiles, Kishida said in February the country planned to buy as many as 400 Tomahawk cruise missiles from the United States. Tomahawks can hit targets as far as 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away.

Japan’s military buildup comes amid increasing tensions with China, which has been growing its naval and air forces in areas near Japan while claiming the Senkaku Islands, an uninhabited Japanese-controlled chain in the East China Sea, as its sovereign territory.

Meanwhile, China has been upping its military pressure on Taiwan, the self-ruled island whose security Japanese leaders have said is vital to that of Japan.

Just this week, Japan scrambled fighter jets as a Chinese aircraft carrier group came within 230 kilometers (143 miles) of the southern Japanese island of Miyako while it simulated strikes on Taiwan.

Chinese military exercises around Taiwan last August including the launching of ballistic missiles, some of which landed in Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone.

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April 12, 2023
Elderly Ukrainians and their pets stay put in the abandoned east | CNN

Konstantinivka
CNN
—

“God protects me,” says 73-year-old Tamara. She’s one of the few people who have stayed in the town of Konstantinivka, eastern Ukraine.

“If there is a need, God will save me. If not,” she adds with a shrug, “it is what it is.”

Tamara has lived in the same flat for the past 40 years. Her son, a drug addict she says nonchalantly, is in Russia. Her husband died long ago. Now, it’s just her and her cat.

Konstantinivka is 22 kilometres, about 13.5 miles west of the city of Bakhmut, scene of some of the most intense fighting in the war.

Tamara is waiting for a bus home, sitting on a broken wooden bench in the square which also serves as the town’s main taxi stand.

On this day there is only one taxi with a sign on the windshield offering rides to Dnipro, a four-hour drive to the west, far away from the frontlines. There are no takers.

Occasionally the air shakes with distant explosions.

Stray dogs prowl the center of the square, on the lookout for scraps. In January when I was last here, they hung around sandwich and kebab shops. The shops are now all shuttered.

On the ground next to Tamara is a shopping bag containing her purse and a few groceries. She says she can’t survive on her monthly pension, amounting to about fifty dollars. She supplements it with food shared by soldiers passing through town. When all else fails, she says, she begs.

Tamara wears scuffed and dirty white running shoes, the laces untied. Her feet don’t reach the ground.

Earlier this week missiles struck an apartment building in Konstantinivka, killing six people.

As she waits for the bus, Tamara quickly crosses herself.

The towns and villages close to the fighting are largely abandoned. As the fighting in Bakhmut rages on – the battle has been going on for more than seven months – Russian shells and missiles land in communities well away from the front lines.

What passes for normal life is a thing of the past here. Many of the windows in houses and apartment buildings in Konstantinivka have been blown out. Remaining residents nail plastic sheeting to the window frames to keep out the cold.

Running water and electricity are intermittent at best.

In the courtyard of a crumbling Soviet-era apartment block, Nina, 72, surveys the wreckage around her. An incoming missile hit a shed, shredding trees, throwing mangled sheets of metal in all directions, splattering shrapnel on surrounding walls.

“I’m on the last breath of survival,” she sighs. “I’m on the verge of needing a psychiatrist.”

What keeps her sane, she tells us, are her flat mates – five dogs and two cats.

“In the market they tell me I should feed myself, not my cats and dogs,” she says, a smile creeping onto her wrinkled face.

As we speak another old woman in a stained winter coat trudges by, dragging a bundle of twigs to heat her home.

An eerie metallic squeak echoes across the courtyard as a young girl, perhaps 10 or 11 years-old, sways on a rusty swing. Her face is blank. For more than half an hour she goes back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.

Since shortly after the war began more than a year ago Ukrainian officials have urged the residents of communities near the worst of the fighting to evacuate to safer ground.

Many have heeded the call but often the elderly, the infirm and the impoverished insist on staying put. And try as they might to persuade the hesitant, the government hasn’t the manpower and resources to forcibly evict them.

In the town of Siversk, northeast of Bakhmut, barely a structure has been left undamaged. On the main road, incoming artillery shells have left gaping holes, now full of water.

At the entrance to an apartment building, Valentina and her neighbour, also named Nina, are getting a bit of fresh air. They pay no mind to the Soviet-era armoured personnel carrier parked next to the building opposite them.

Every night, and often almost every day, Nina and Valentina must huddle in their basement, which doubles as a bomb shelter. Nina’s husband is disabled and never leaves the basement.

Here, there is no running water, no electricity, no internet, so mobile signal. I only found one small store open.

Valentina struggles to look on the bright side. “It’s fine” she responds in a loud, confident voice when I ask how she is. “We put up with everything!”

“What do we feel?” responds Nina in a quivering voice. “Pain. Pain. When you see something destroyed you tear up. We cry. We cry.”

Valentina’s mask drops, she nods, and her eyes fill with tears.

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April 9, 2023
Inside the international sting operation to catch North Korean crypto hackers | CNN Politics

Watch Alex Marquardt’s report on the sting operation on Erin Burnett OutFront on Monday, April 10, at 7 p.m. ET.

CNN
—

A team of South Korean spies and American private investigators quietly gathered at the South Korean intelligence service in January, just days after North Korea fired three ballistic missiles into the sea.

For months, they’d been tracking $100 million stolen from a California cryptocurrency firm named Harmony, waiting for North Korean hackers to move the stolen crypto into accounts that could eventually be converted to dollars or Chinese yuan, hard currency that could fund the country’s illegal missile program.

When the moment came, the spies and sleuths — working out of a government office in a city, Pangyo, known as South Korea’s Silicon Valley — would have only a few minutes to help seize the money before it could be laundered to safety through a series of accounts and rendered untouchable.

Finally, in late January, the hackers moved a fraction of their loot to a cryptocurrency account pegged to the dollar, temporarily relinquishing control of it. The spies and investigators pounced, flagging the transaction to US law enforcement officials standing by to freeze the money.

The team in Pangyo helped seize a little more than $1 million that day. Though analysts tell CNN that most of the stolen $100 million remains out of reach in cryptocurrency and other assets controlled by North Korea, it was the type of seizure that the US and its allies will need to prevent big paydays for Pyongyang.

The sting operation, described to CNN by private investigators at Chainalysis, a New York-based blockchain-tracking firm, and confirmed by the South Korean National Intelligence Service, offers a rare window into the murky world of cryptocurrency espionage — and the burgeoning effort to shut down what has become a multibillion-dollar business for North Korea’s authoritarian regime.

Over the last several years, North Korean hackers have stolen billions of dollars from banks and cryptocurrency firms, according to reports from the United Nations and private firms. As investigators and regulators have wised up, the North Korean regime has been trying increasingly elaborate ways to launder that stolen digital money into hard currency, US officials and private experts tell CNN.

Cutting off North Korea’s cryptocurrency pipeline has quickly become a national security imperative for the US and South Korea. The regime’s ability to use the stolen digital money — or remittances from North Korean IT workers abroad — to fund its weapons programs is part of the regular set of intelligence products presented to senior US officials, including, sometimes, President Joe Biden, a senior US official said.

The North Koreans “need money, so they’re going to keep being creative,” the official told CNN. “I don’t think [they] are ever going to stop looking for illicit ways to glean funds because it’s an authoritarian regime under heavy sanctions.”

North Korea’s cryptocurrency hacking was top of mind at an April 7 meeting in Seoul, where US, Japanese and South Korean diplomats released a joint statement lamenting that Kim Jong Un’s regime continues to “pour its scarce resources into its WMD [weapons of mass destruction] and ballistic missile programs.”

Here’s how to keep your passwords safe, according to a hacker

“We are also deeply concerned about how the DPRK supports these programs by stealing and laundering funds as well as gathering information through malicious cyber activities,” the trilateral statement said, using an acronym for the North Korean government.

North Korea has previously denied similar allegations. CNN has emailed and called the North Korean Embassy in London seeking comment.

Starting in the late 2000s, US officials and their allies scoured international waters for signs that North Korea was evading sanctions by trafficking in weapons, coal or other precious cargo, a practice that continues. Now, a very modern twist on that contest is unfolding between hackers and money launderers in Pyongyang, and intelligence agencies and law enforcement officials from Washington to Seoul.

The FBI and Secret Service have spearheaded that work in the US (both agencies declined to comment when CNN asked how they track North Korean money-laundering.) The FBI announced in January that it had frozen an unspecified portion of the $100 million stolen from Harmony.

The succession of Kim family members who have ruled North Korea for the last 70 years have all used state-owned companies to enrich the family and ensure the regime’s survival, according to experts.

It’s a family business that scholar John Park calls “North Korea Incorporated.”

Kim Jong Un, North Korea’s current dictator, has “doubled down on cyber capabilities and crypto theft as a revenue generator for his family regime,” said Park, who directs the Korea Project at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center. “North Korea Incorporated has gone virtual.”

Compared to the coal trade North Korea has relied on for revenue in the past, stealing cryptocurrency is much less labor and capital-intensive, Park said. And the profits are astronomical.

Last year, a record $3.8 billion in cryptocurrency was stolen from around the world, according to Chainalysis. Nearly half of that, or $1.7 billion, was the work of North Korean-linked hackers, the firm said.

It’s unclear how much of its billions in stolen cryptocurrency North Korea has been able to convert to hard cash. In an interview, a US Treasury official focused on North Korea declined to give an estimate. The public record of blockchain transactions helps US officials track suspected North Korean operatives’ efforts to move cryptocurrency, the Treasury official said.

But when North Korea gets help from other countries in laundering that money it is “incredibly concerning,” the official said. (They declined to name a particular country, but the US in 2020 indicted two Chinese men for allegedly laundering over $100 million for North Korea.)

Pyongyang’s hackers have also combed the networks of various foreign governments and companies for key technical information that might be useful for its nuclear program, according to a private United Nations report in February reviewed by CNN.

A spokesperson for South Korea’s National Intelligence Service told CNN it has developed a “rapid intelligence sharing” scheme with allies and private companies to respond to the threat and is looking for new ways to stop stolen cryptocurrency from being smuggled into North Korea.

Recent efforts have focused on North Korea’s use of what are known as mixing services, publicly available tools used to obscure the source of cryptocurrency.

On March 15, the Justice Department and European law enforcement agencies announced the shutdown of a mixing service known as ChipMixer, which the North Koreans allegedly used to launder an unspecified amount of the roughly $700 million stolen by hackers in three different crypto heists — including the $100 million robbery of Harmony, the California cryptocurrency firm.

Private investigators use blockchain-tracking software — and their own eyes when the software alerts them — to pinpoint the moment when stolen funds leave the hands of the North Koreans and can be seized. But those investigators need trusted relationships with law enforcement and crypto firms to move quickly enough to snatch back the funds.

One of the biggest US counter moves to date came in August when the Treasury Department sanctioned a cryptocurrency “mixing” service known as Tornado Cash that allegedly laundered $455 million for North Korean hackers.

Tornado Cash was particularly valuable because it had more liquidity than other services, allowing North Korean money to hide more easily among other sources of funds. Tornado Cash is now processing fewer transactions after the Treasury sanctions forced the North Koreans to look to other mixing services.

Suspected North Korean operatives sent $24 million in December and January through a new mixing service, Sinbad, according to Chainalysis, but there are no signs yet that Sinbad will be as effective at moving money as Tornado Cash.

The people behind mixing services, like Tornado Cash developer Roman Semenov, often describe themselves as privacy advocates who argue that their cryptocurrency tools can be used for good or ill like any technology. But that hasn’t stopped law enforcement agencies from cracking down. Dutch police in August arrested another suspected developer of Tornado Cash, whom they did not name, for alleged money laundering.

Private crypto-tracking firms like Chainalysis are increasingly staffed with former US and European law enforcement agents who are applying what they learned in the classified world to track Pyongyang’s money laundering.

Elliptic, a London-based firm with ex-law enforcement agents on staff, claims it helped seize $1.4 million in North Korean money stolen in the Harmony hack. Elliptic analysts tell CNN they were able to follow the money in real-time in February as it briefly moved to two popular cryptocurrency exchanges, Huobi and Binance. The analysts say they quickly notified the exchanges, which froze the money.

“It’s a bit like large-scale drug importations,” Tom Robinson, Elliptic’s co-founder, told CNN. “[The North Koreans] are prepared to lose some of it, but a majority of it probably goes through just by virtue of volume and the speed at which they do it and they’re quite sophisticated at it.”

The North Koreans are not just trying to steal from cryptocurrency firms, but also directly from other crypto thieves.

Should you invest in crypto? One expert weighs in after FTX’s collapse

After an unknown hacker stole $200 million from British firm Euler Finance in March, suspected North Korean operatives tried to set a trap: They sent the hacker a message on the blockchain laced with a vulnerability that may have been an attempt to gain access to the funds, according to Elliptic. (The ruse didn’t work.)

Nick Carlsen, who was an FBI intelligence analyst focused on North Korea until 2021, estimates that North Korea may only have a couple hundred people focused on the task of exploiting cryptocurrency to evade sanctions.

With an international effort to sanction rogue cryptocurrency exchanges and seize stolen money, Carlsen worries that North Korea could turn to less conspicuous forms of fraud. Rather than steal half a billion dollars from a cryptocurrency exchange, he suggested, Pyongyang’s operatives could set up a Ponzi scheme that attracts much less attention.

Yet even at reduced profit margins, cryptocurrency theft is still “wildly profitable,” said Carlsen, who now works at fraud-investigating firm TRM Labs. “So, they have no reason to stop.”

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April 9, 2023
China military rehearses ‘encircling’ Taiwan after US Speaker visit | CNN

Taipei
CNN
—

China has started three days of military exercises around Taiwan after the island’s president met the US House Speaker in defiance of repeated threats by Beijing.

The exercises, dubbed “United Sharp Sword,” have been denounced by Taiwan. China sees Taiwan as its own territory and has not ruled out using force to bring it under its control.

The Chinese military’s Eastern Theater Command announced the drills Saturday, describing them as “a serious warning against the Taiwan separatist forces’ collusion with external forces, and a necessary move to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“The task force simultaneously organized patrols around the island to create an all-round encirclement and deterrent situation,” the Eastern Theater Command said.

Soon after the announcement by China, Taiwan’s defense ministry said it had detected a total of 42 Chinese warplanes over the Taiwan Strait, which separates the island from the Chinese mainland. It said 29 Chinese warplanes had crossed the median line in the strait into its air defense identification zone. It added that eight PLA vessels had been spotted in the strait.

The drills come a day after Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen returned from a 10-day visit to Central America and the United States where she met US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

Beijing had repeatedly warned against the trip and had previously threatened to take “strong and resolute measures” if it went ahead.

China claims the self-governing democracy of Taiwan despite never having ruled it, and has spent decades trying to isolate it diplomatically.

Incursions by Chinese warplanes into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, a self-declared buffer zone beyond its territorial airspace, occur on an almost daily basis.

Taiwan’s defense ministry said on Saturday it was closely monitoring the situation and would make every effort to defend national security and sovereignty.

“The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is deliberately creating tensions on the Taiwan Strait. Besides damaging peace and stability, it also creates negative impact on regional safety and development,” the ministry said.

The ministry had said earlier on Saturday it would respond to the drills in a calm, rational and serious way, and not seek to escalate conflict.

China reacted in a similar fashion when then US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, launching a series of military drills that surrounded the island and firing missiles over it.

Those drills were the first time China had fired missiles over the island, and many experts saw them as representing a major escalation of China’s military intimidation against Taiwan.

Some of those missiles also fell into Japan’s Exclusive Economic Zone near Japanese islands to the north of Taiwan, a move which heightened tensions between Beijing and Tokyo.

The August exercises also involved dozens of Chinese warplanes crossing into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone as well as PLA Navy warships in maneuvers in waters around Taiwan.

Beijing said at the time it was simulating an air and sea “blockade” of the island, but offered little solid evidence to back up the claim.

Officials in Taiwan had reportedly been expecting a less severe reaction to Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy because it took place on US soil.

To avoid provoking Beijing and triggering another military crisis, American and Taiwan officials had tried to portray Tsai’s visit as nothing out of the ordinary, citing an abundance of precedents for a Taiwan leader to transit through the US.

But the political significance of Tsai’s meeting with McCarthy is undeniable. It was the highest-level audience a sitting Taiwan president had received on American soil, with an official second in line to the presidency after the vice president.

Their meeting at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library highlighted the strengthening ties between Taipei and Washington, even though they remain unofficial in nature. The US withdrew its diplomatic recognition of Taiwan back in 1979, meaning it does not officially recognize it as a country. However, it supports Taiwan’s ability to defend itself by selling arms to Taipei.

Following the meeting between Tsai and McCarthy Wednesday, the US House Speaker said his country should continue to boost its support for Taiwan.

“We must continue arms sales to Taiwan and make sure such sales reach Taiwan on time. We must also strengthen our economic cooperation, particularly with trade and technology,” he tweeted.

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April 8, 2023
North Korea launches at least two unidentified ballistic missile into waters off eastern Korean peninsula | CNN

CNN
—

North Korea launched two suspected ballistic missiles into the waters off the east coast of the Korean peninsula on Monday morning, according to the Japan Coast Guard.

The first suspected ballistic missile is believed to have already fallen, Japan’s Coast Guard said on Monday morning at 7:54 a.m. local time (6:54 p.m. ET).

A second missile launched from North Korea landed in the water, the Japan Coast Guard said at 8:05 a.m. local time (7:05 p.m. ET).

This is a developing story and will be updated.

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March 26, 2023
South Korean leader lands in Japan for first visit in 12 years for fence-mending summit | CNN

CNN
—

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol arrived in Japan Thursday for a fence-mending summit, the first such visit in 12 years as the two neighbors seek to confront growing threats from North Korea to rising concerns about China.

Those shared security challenges were on stark display just hours before the trip when North Korea fired a long-range ballistic missile into the waters off the east coast of the Korean Peninsula – the fourth intercontinental ballistic missile launch in less than one year.

Japan’s Chief Cabinet Secretary Hirokazu Matsuno condemned the latest launch, calling it a “reckless act” that “threatens the peace and security of our country, the region, and the international community.”

The summit between Yoon and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida is a crucial step to mend frayed ties after decades of disputes and mistrust between two crucial US allies in Asia.

Yoon’s office has hailed it “an important milestone” in the development of bilateral relations.

The two East Asian neighbors have a long history of acrimony, dating back to Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean Peninsula a century ago.

The two normalized relations in 1965, but unresolved historical disputes have continued to fester, in particular over colonial Japan’s use of forced labor and so-called “comfort women” sex slaves.

In recent years the often fraught relations have undermined efforts by the United States to present a united front against North Korea – and the growing assertiveness of Beijing.

Now, the region’s two most important allies for the US appear ready to turn a new page in bilateral ties.

Much of that is driven by deepening security concerns about Pyongyang’s ever more frequent missile tests, China’s increasingly aggressive military posturing and tensions across the Taiwan Strait – an area both Tokyo and Seoul say is vital to their respective security.

Before departing for Tokyo, Yoon told international media on Wednesday “there is an increasing need for Korea and Japan to cooperate in this time of a polycrisis,” citing escalating North Korean nuclear and missile threats and the disruption of global supply chains.

“We cannot afford to waste time while leaving strained Korea-Japan relations unattended,” Yoon said.

Analysts say this outreach is a break from the past.

Under Yoon’s predecessor Moon Jae-in, South Korea’s relationship with Japan was “openly combative,” said Joel Atkinson, a professor specializing in Northeast Asian international politics at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in Seoul.

“So this visit is significant, sending a strong signal that under the Yoon administration, both sides are now working much more cooperatively,” Atkinson said.

The thaw in relations comes after South Korea took a major step toward resolving a long-running dispute that plunged ties to their lowest point in decades.

Last week, South Korea announced it would compensate victims of forced labor under Japan’s occupation from 1910 to 1945 through a public foundation funded by private Korean companies – instead of asking Japanese firms to contribute to the reparations.

The move was welcomed by Japan and hailed by US President Joe Biden as “a groundbreaking new chapter of cooperation and partnership between two of the United States’ closest allies.”

The deal broke a deadlock reached in 2018, when South Korea’s Supreme Court ordered two Japanese companies to compensate 15 plaintiffs who sued them over forced labor during Japan’s colonial rule.

Japan did not agree with the South Korean court’s 2018 decision, and no compensation had been paid by Tokyo.

That led to rising tensions between the two sides, with Japan restricting exports of materials used in memory chips, and South Korea scrapping its military intelligence-sharing agreement with Tokyo during the presidency of Moon.

But the Yoon administration has been striving to improve relations between Seoul and Tokyo – even if it means pushing back against domestic public pressure on contentious, highly emotional issues like the compensation plan.

Apart from the growing North Korean nuclear threat, China appears to have been a big factor in Yoon’s willingness to face the domestic backlash over the compensation deal, said Atkinson, the expert in Seoul.

“The administration is making the case to the South Korean public that this is not just about Japan, it is about engaging with a wider coalition of liberal democracies,” he said.

“What South Koreans perceive as Beijing’s bullying, arrogant treatment of their country, as well as its crushing of the Hong Kong protests, threats toward Taiwan and so on, have definitely prepared the ground for that.”

Even before the pivotal move to settle the historical dispute, Seoul and Tokyo have signaled their willingness to put the past behind them and foster closer relations.

On March 1, in a speech commemorating the 104th anniversary of South Korea’s protest movement against Japan’s colonial occupation, Yoon said Japan had “transformed from a militaristic aggressor of the past into a partner” that “shares the same universal values.”

Since taking office, the two leaders have embarked on a flurry of diplomatic activities toward mending bilateral ties – and deepening their joint cooperation with Washington.

In September, Yoon and Kishida held the first summit between the two countries since 2019 in New York on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly, where they agreed to improve relations.

In November, the two leaders met Biden in Cambodia at a regional summit, where they “commended the unprecedented level of trilateral coordination” and “resolved to forge still-closer trilateral links, in the security realm and beyond.”

Closer alignment among the US, Japan and South Korea is an alarming development to China, which has accused Washington of leading a campaign to contain and suppress its development.

Beijing is particularly worried about the involvement of South Korea in the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue – better known as “the Quad” – an informal security dialogue among the US, Japan, Australia and India. It views the grouping as part of Washington’s attempt to encircle the country with strategic and military allies.

Last week, a senior South Korean official said Seoul plans to “proactively accelerate” its participation in the Quad working group.

“Although we have not yet joined the Quad, the Yoon Suk Yeol government has been emphasizing its importance in terms of its Indo-Pacific strategy,” the official told reporters during a visit to Washington, D.C., Yonhap reported.

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March 15, 2023
China has shattered the assumption of US dominance in the Middle East | CNN

CNN
—

With a grandiose diplomatic flourish China brokered a rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the process upending US calculus in the Gulf and beyond.

While the United States has angered its Gulf allies by apparently dithering over morality, curbing arms supplies and chilling relations, Saudi Arabia’s King-in-waiting Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, has found a kindred spirit in China’s leader Xi Jinping.

Both are bold, assertive, willing to take risks and seemingly share unsated ambition.

Friday’s announcement that Riyadh and Tehran had renewed diplomatic ties was unexpected, but it shouldn’t have been. It is the logical accumulation of America’s diplomatic limitations and China’s growing quest to shape the world in its orbit.

Beijing’s claim that “China pursues no selfish interest whatsoever in the Middle East,” rings hollow. It buys more oil from Saudi Arabia than any other country in the world.

Xi needs energy to grow China’s economy, ensure stability at home and fuel its rise as a global power.

His other main supplier, Russia, is at war, its supplies therefore in question. By de-escalating tensions between Saudi and Iran, Xi is not only shoring up his energy alternatives but, in a climate of growing tension with the US, also heading off potential curbs on his access to Gulf oil.

Xi’s motivation appears fueled by wider interests, but even so the US State Department welcomed the surprise move, spokesman Ned Price saying, “we support anything that would serve to deescalate tensions in the region, and potentially help to prevent conflict.”

Iran has buy-in because China has economic leverage. In 2021 the pair signed a trade deal reportedly worth up to $400 billion of Chinese investment over 25 years, in exchange for a steady supply of Iranian oil.

Tehran is isolated by international sanctions and Beijing is providing a glimmer of financial relief.

And, in the words of Iran’s Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last year, there’s also the hope of more to come as he sees geopolitical power shifting east.

“Asia will become the center of knowledge, the center of economics, as well as the center of political power, and the center of military power,” Khamenei said.

Saudi has buy-in because war with Iran would wreck its economy and ruin MBS’s play for regional dominance. His bold visions for the country’s post fossil-fuel future and domestic stability depend on inwardly investing robust oil and gas revenues.

It may sound simple, but the fact the US couldn’t pull it off speaks to the complexities and nuance of everything that’s been brewing over the past two decades.

America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have burned through a good part of its diplomatic capital in the Middle East.

Many in the Gulf see the development of the war in Ukraine as an unnecessary and dangerous American adventure, and some of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s territorial claims over Ukraine not without merit.

What the global West sees as a fight for democratic values lacks resonance among the Gulf autocracies, and the conflict doesn’t consume them in the same way as it does leaders in European capitals.

Saudi Arabia, and MBS in particular, have become particularly frustrated with America’s flip-flop diplomacy: dialling back relations over the Crown Prince’s role in the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi (which MBS denies); then calling on him to cut oil production swiftly followed by requests to increase it.

These inconsistencies have led the Saudis to hew policy to their national interests and less to America’s needs.

During his visit to Saudi last July, US President Joe Biden said: “We will not walk away and leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran.” It seems now that the others are walking away from him.

On Beijing’s part, China’s Gulf intervention signals its own needs, and the opportunity to act arrived in a single serving.

Xi helped himself because he can. The Chinese leader is a risk taker.

His abrupt ending of austere Covid-19 pandemic restrictions at home is just one example, but this is a more complex roll of the dice.

Mediation in the Middle East can be a poisoned chalice, but as big as the potential gains are for China, the wider implications for the regional, and even global order, are quantifiably bigger and will resonate for years.

Yet harbingers of this shake-up and the scale of its impact have been in plain sight for months. Xi’s high-profile, red-carpet reception in Riyadh last December for his first overseas visit after abandoning his domestic “zero-Covid” policy stirred the waters.

During that trip Saudi and Chinese officials signed scores of deals worth tens of billions of dollars.

China’s Foreign Ministry trumpeted Xi’s visit, paying particular attention to one particular infrastructure project: “China will deepen industrial and infrastructure cooperation with Saudi Arabia (and) advance the development of the China-Saudi Arabia (Jizan) Industrial Park.”

The Jizan project, part of China’s belt and road initiative, heralds huge investment around the ancient Red Sea port, currently Saudi’s third largest.

Jizan lies close to the border with Yemen, the scene of a bloody civil war and proxy battle between Riyadh and Tehran since 2014, sparking what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Significantly since Xi’s visit, episodic attacks by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels on Jizan have abated.

There are other effects too: the plans to upscale Jizan’s container handling puts Saudi in greater competition with the UAE’s container ports and potentially strains another regional rivalry, as MBS drives to become the dominant regional power, usurping UAE’s role as regional hub for global businesses.

Xi will have an interest seeing both Saudi Arabia and the UAE prosper, but Saudi is by far the bigger partner with higher potential global economic heft and, importantly, massive religious clout in the Islamic world.

Where the UAE and Saudi align strongly is eschewing direct conflict with Tehran.

A deadly drone attack in Abu Dhabi late last year was claimed by the Houthis, before the rebels quickly rescinded it. But no one publicly blamed the Houthis’ sponsors in Tehran.

A once shaky ceasefire in Yemen now also seems to be moving toward peace talks, perhaps yet another indication of the potential of China’s influence in the region.

Beijing is acutely aware of what a continued war over the Persian Gulf could cost its commercial interests – another reason why a Saudi/Iran rapprochement makes sense to Xi.

Iran blames Saudi for stoking the massive street protests through its towns and cities since September.

Saudi denies that accusation, but when Iran moved drones and long-range missiles close to its Gulf coast and Saudi, Riyadh called on its friends to ask Tehran to de-escalate. Russia and China did, the threat dissipated.

Tehran, despite US diplomatic efforts, is also closing in on nuclear weapons capability and Saudi’s MBS is on record saying he’ll ensure parity, “if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible.”

Late last week US officials said Saudi was seeking US security guarantees and help developing a civilian nuclear program as part of a deal to normalize relations with Israel, an avowed enemy of Iran’s Ayatollahs.

Indeed, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Israel late January, concerned over a rising Palestinian death toll in a violent year in the region, potential settlement expansions and controversial changes to Israel’s judiciary Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to Blinken about “expanding the circle of peace,” and improving relations with Arab neighbours, including Saudi Arabia.

But as Saudi seems to shift closer to Tehran, Netanyahu’s mission just got harder. While both Saudi and Israel strongly oppose a nuclear-armed Iran, only Netanyahu seems ready to confront Tehran.

“My policy is to do everything within Israel’s power to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons,” the Israeli leader told Blinken.

Riyadh favors diplomacy. As recently as last week the Saudi foreign minister said: “It’s absolutely critical … that we find and an alternative pathway to ensuring an (Iranian) civilian nuclear program.”

By improving ties with Tehran, he said, “we can make it quite clear to the Iranians that this is not just a concerns of distant countries but it’s also a concern of its neighbors.”

For years this is what America did, such as brokering the Iran nuclear deal, or JCPOA, in 2015.

Xi backed that deal, the Saudis didn’t want it, Iran never trusted it, Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump’s withdrawal confirmed Iran’s fears and sealed its fate, despite the ongoing proximity talks to get American diplomats seated at the table again.

Iran has raced ahead in the meantime, massively over-running the bounds of the JCPOA limits on uranium enrichment and producing almost weapons-grade material.

What’s worse for Washington is that Trump’s JCPOA withdrawal legacy tainted international perceptions of US commitment, continuity and diplomacy. All these circumstances perhaps signaled to Xi that his time to seize the lead on global diplomacy was coming.

Yet the Chinese leader seems to accept what Netanyahu won’t and what US diplomacy is unable to prevent: that sooner, rather than later, Iran will have a nuclear weapon. As such, Xi may be fostering Saudi-Iran rapprochement as a hedge against that day.

So Netanyahu looks increasingly isolated and the Israeli leader, already under huge domestic pressure from spiking tensions with Palestinians and huge Israeli protests over his proposed judicial reforms, now faces a massive re-think on regional security.

The working assumption of American diplomatic regional primacy is broken, and Netanyahu’s biggest ally is now not as hegemonic as he needs. But by how much is still far from clear.

It’s not a knockout, but a gut blow, to Washington. How Xi calculates the situation isn’t clear either. The US is not finished, far from it, but it is diminished, and both powers are coexisting in a different way now.

Earlier this month, the Chinese leader made unusually direct comments accusing the US of leading a campaign against China and causing serious domestic woes.

“Western countries led by the United States have contained and suppressed us in an all-round way, which has brought unprecedented severe challenges to our development,” Xi told a group of government advisers representing private businesses on the sidelines of an annual legislative meeting in Beijing.

Meanwhile, Biden has defined the future US-China relationship as “competition not confrontation,” and he has built his foreign policy around the tenets of standing up for democracy.

It is striking that neither Xi, nor Khamenei, nor MBS are troubled by the moral dilemmas that circumscribe Biden. This is the big challenge the US president warned about, and now it’s here. An alternative world order, irrespective of what happens in Ukraine.

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March 14, 2023
Australia, the UK and US are joining forces in the Pacific, but will nuclear subs arrive quick enough to counter China? | CNN

Canberra, Australia
CNN
—

More than a year after the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia dropped the tightly held news they were combining submarine forces, the trio released more details Monday of their ambitious plan to counter China’s rapid military expansion.

Under the multi-decade AUKUS deal, the partners will build a combined fleet of elite nuclear-powered submarines using technology, labor and funding from all three countries, creating a more formidable force in the Indo-Pacific than any of them could achieve alone.

But the long timeline and huge financial costs – running into the hundreds of billions for Australia alone – poses questions about how far the partners’ plans could stray from their “optimal pathway” in the decades to come as governments, and potentially priorities, change.

In a joint statement Monday, US President Joe Biden, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and UK counterpart Rishi Sunak said the “historic” deal will build on past efforts by all three countries to “sustain peace, stability, and prosperity around the world.”

The plan begins this year with training rotations for Australian personnel on US and UK subs and bases in the expectation that in roughly 20 years, they’ll commandeer Australia’s first ever nuclear-powered fleet.

But there’s a long way to go between now and then, as outlined in a series of phases announced by the leaders as they stood side-by-side in San Diego Harbor.

From 2023, along with training Australians, US nuclear-powered subs will increase port visits to Australia, joined three years later by more visits from British-owned nuclear-powered subs.

Come 2027, the US and UK subs will start rotations at HMAS Stirling, an Australian military port near Perth, Western Australia that’s set to receive a multibillion dollar upgrade.

Then from the early 2030s, pending Congress approval, Australia will buy three Virginia-class submarines from the US, with an option to buy two more.

Within the same decade, the UK plans to build its first AUKUS nuclear-powered submarine – combining its Astute-class submarine with US combat systems and weapons.

Soon after, in the early 2040s, Australia will deliver the first of its homemade AUKUS subs to its Royal Navy.

As a series of bullet points on the page, the plan seems straightforward.

But the complexities involved are staggering and require an unprecedented level of investment and information sharing between the three partners, whose leaders’ political careers are set to be far shorter than those of the man they are working to counter: China’s Xi Jinping.

Last week China’s political elite endorsed Xi’s unprecedented third term, solidifying his control and making him the longest-serving head of state of Communist China since its founding in 1949.

The most assertive Chinese leader in a generation, Xi has expanded his country’s military forces and sought to extend Beijing’s influence far across the Indo-Pacific, rattling Western powers.

Richard Dunley, from the University of New South Wales, said Australia was under pressure to respond after years of inaction and the proposal is an impressive scramble for a workable plan.

“It’s a last roll of the dice. And they’ve managed to just about thread the eye of a needle coming up with something that looks plausible.”

A rush of diplomacy took place before Monday’s announcement, partly to avoid the shock impact of the initial announcement in 2021, when French President Emmanuel Macron accused former Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison of lying to him when he pulled out of a 90 billion Australian dollar deal to buy French subs.

That deal would have delivered new submarines on a faster timeline, but they would have been conventional diesel-powered vessels instead of state of the art nuclear ones.

Australia learned from that diplomatic row and its senior leaders – including Albanese – made around 60 calls to allies and regional neighbors to inform them of the plan before it was announced, according to Australian Defense Minister Richard Marles.

China wasn’t one of them.

Biden told reporters Monday that he plans to speak with Xi soon but declined to say when that would be, adding that he was not concerned Xi would see the AUKUS announcement as aggression.

That contrasts with the sentiment emerging from Beijing including its accusations the trio is fomenting an arms race in Asia.

At a daily briefing Monday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin said the AUKUS partners had “completely ignored the concerns of the international community and gone further down a wrong and dangerous road.”

He said the deal would “stimulate an arms race, undermine the international nuclear non-proliferation system and damage regional peace and stability.”

Peter Dean, director of Foreign Policy and Defense at the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney, said the Chinese claims are overblown.

“If there is an arms race in the Indo-Pacific, there is only one country that is racing, and that is China,” he told CNN.

Smaller countries around the region are watching the AUKUS plan with concern that a greater presence in their waters could lead to unintended conflict, said Ristian Atriandi Supriyanto, from the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University.

“With more rotational presence of US and UK subs in Australia, there is a greater necessity for China to surveil these units and thereby, increase the likelihood of accidents or incidents at sea,” he said.

Biden stressed Monday that he wanted “the world to understand” that the agreement was “talking about nuclear power not nuclear weapons.”

According to a White House fact sheet, the US and UK will give Australian nuclear material in sealed “welded power units” that will not require refueling. Australia has committed to disposing of nuclear waste in Australia on defense-owned land. But that won’t happen until at least the late 2050s, when the Virginia-class vessels are retired.

Australia says it doesn’t have the capability to enrich it to weapons grade, won’t acquire it and wants to abide by International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) principles on non-proliferation.

The AUKUS plan is an admission by Australia that without submarines that can spend long periods of time at great depths, the country is woefully unprepared to counter China in the Indo-Pacific.

“It is hugely complex and hugely risky,” said Dunley from the University of New South Wales.

“But when the original announcement and decision was made in 2021, there were very few good options left for Australia. So I think they’ve come out as well as they could have done,” he added.

Multiple challenge are posed by a project of this scale, which includes many moving parts with potential knock-on effects to the timeline and cost.

The deal involves upgrades to ports and fleets, including expanding the operational life of Australia’s Collins-class submarines to the 2040s, to aid in the transition to nuclear.

“You’re having to take submarines out for quite a significant chunk of time to refit them, and if there are delays or issues that could cascade and you could see issues where Australia actually doesn’t have enough submariners to maintain its current forces of mariners, let alone augment that,” Dunley said.

As all three countries race to expand their fleets, training enough staff could become a serious challenge, Dunley said.

The security element of the roles mean the pool of skilled workers is inevitably shallow. Efforts are being made in all countries to entice trainees to a life below the surface of the sea for months at a time – potentially not an easy sell in a competitive jobs market.

And then there’s the funding.

The Australian government says it’ll find 0.15% of gross domestic product every year for 30 years – a cost of up to $245 billion (368 billion Australian dollars).

Max Bergmann, the director of the Europe Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the deal will ultimately require healthy economies, and all three countries are dealing with cost of living pressures.

“The UK economy is not doing great. And part of what it will need is a thriving economy, such that it can maintain the level of spending needed,” he told a reporter briefing.

Xi’s move to allow himself to retain the Chinese leadership for life means he could be approaching his 90s by the time Australia and Britain have launched their new AUKUS fleets.

By then, the landscape of the Indo-Pacific could be vastly changed.

Xi, 69, has made it clear that the issue of Taiwan, an island democracy that China’s Communist Party claims but has never ruled, cannot be passed indefinitely down to other generations.

For now, Australia says it is confident of continued bipartisan support in Washington for program, which will rely on the ongoing transfer of nuclear material and other weapons secrets from the US.

“We enter this with a high degree of confidence,” Defense Minister Marles said Monday.

However the risk remains that in future years an inward-facing US leader in the style of former President Donald Trump – or even perhaps Trump himself – could emerge to threaten the deal.

Charles Edel, senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the deal was about much more than a combined effort to change China’s calculations about its security environment.

“It’s meant to transform the industrial shipbuilding capacity of all three nations, it’s meant as a technological accelerator, it’s meant to change the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific, and, ultimately, it’s meant to change the model of how the United States works with and empowers its closest allies.”

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March 14, 2023
When China shot down five U-2 spy planes at the height of the Cold War | CNN

Seoul, South Korea
CNN
—

When a Chinese high-altitude balloon suspected of spying was spotted over the United States recently, the US Air Force responded by sending up a high-flying espionage asset of its own: the U-2 reconnaissance jet.

It was the Cold-War era spy plane that took the high-resolution photographs – not to mention its pilot’s selfie – that reportedly convinced Washington the Chinese balloon was gathering intelligence and not, as Beijing continues to insist, studying the weather.

In doing so, the plane played a key role in an event that sent tensions between the world’s two largest economies soaring, and shone an international spotlight on the methods the two governments use to keep tabs on each other.

Until now, most of the media’s focus has been on the balloon – specifically, how a vessel popularly seen as a relic of a bygone era of espionage could possibly remain relevant in the modern spy’s playbook. Yet to many military historians, it is the involvement of that other symbol of a bygone time, the U-2, that is far more telling.

The U-2 has a long and storied history when it comes to espionage battles between the US and China. In the 1960s and 1970s, at least five of them were shot down while on surveillance missions over China.

Those losses haven’t been as widely reported as might be expected – and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was responsible for all of America’s U-2s at the time the planes were shot down, has never officially explained what they were doing there.

Adding to the mystery was that the planes were being flown not by US pilots nor under a US flag, but by pilots from Taiwan who, in a striking parallel to today’s balloon saga, claimed to be involved in a weather research initiative.

That the CIA would be tight-lipped over what these American-built spy planes were doing is hardly surprising.

But the agency’s continued silence more than 50 years later – it did not respond to a CNN request for comment on this article – speaks volumes about just how sensitive the issue was both at the time and remains today.

The US government has a general rule of 25 years for automatic declassification of sensitive material. However, one of its often-cited reasons for ignoring this rule is in those cases where revealing the information would “cause serious harm to relations between the US and a foreign government, or to ongoing diplomatic activities of the US.”

Contemporary accounts of what the planes were doing – by the Taiwan pilots who were shot down, retired US Air Force officers and military historians among them – leave little doubt as to why it would have caused a stir.

The planes – according to accounts by the pilots in a Taiwan-made documentary film and histories published on US government websites – had been transferred to Taiwan as part of a top-secret mission to snoop on Communist China’s growing military capabilities, including its nascent nuclear program, which was receiving help from the Soviet Union.

The newly developed U-2, nicknamed the Dragon Lady, appeared to offer the perfect vessel. The US had already used it to spy on the Soviet’s domestic nuclear program as its high-altitude capabilities – it was designed in the 1950s to reach “a staggering and unprecedented altitude of 70,000 feet,” in the words of its developer Lockheed – put it out of the range of antiaircraft missiles.

Or so the US had thought. In 1960, the Soviets shot down a CIA-operated U-2 and put its pilot Gary Powers on trial. Washington was forced to abandon its cover story (that Powers had been on a weather reconnaissance mission and had drifted into Soviet airspace after blacking out from oxygen depletion), admit the spy plane program, and barter for Powers to be returned in a prisoner swap.

“Since America didn’t want to have its own pilots shot down in a U-2 the way Gary Powers had been over the Soviet Union in 1960, which caused a major diplomatic incident, they turned to Taiwan, and Taiwan was all too willing to allow its pilots to be trained and to do a long series of overflights over mainland China,” Chris Pocock, author of “50 Years of the U-2,” explained in the 2018 documentary film “Lost Black Cats 35th Squadron.”

Like the U-2, Taiwan – also known as the Republic of China (ROC) – seemed a perfect choice for the mission. The self-governing island to the east of the Chinese mainland was at odds with the Communist leadership in Beijing – as it remains today – and at that time in history had a mutual defense treaty with Washington.

That treaty has long since lapsed, but Taiwan remains a point of major tensions between China and the United States, with Chinese leader Xi Jinping vowing to bring it under the Communist Party’s control and Washington still obligated to provide it with the means to defend itself.

Today, the US sells F-16 fighter jets to Taiwan as part of that obligation. In the 1960s, Taiwan got the US-made U-2s.

The island’s military set up a squadron that would officially be known as the “Weather Reconnaissance and Research Section.”

But its members – pilots from Taiwan who had been trained in the US to fly U-2s – knew it by a different name: the “Black Cats.”

The author Pocock and Gary Powers Jr., the son of the pilot shot down by the Soviets and the co-founder of the Cold War Museum in Washington, DC, explained the thinking behind the squadron and its mission in the 2018 documentary film.

The other CIA unit in Taiwan
Coinciding with the Black Cat Squadron, the Black Bat Squadron was formed under the cooperation of the Central Intelligence Agency and Taiwan’s air force, according to a Taiwan Defense Ministry website.
While the Black Cats were in charge of high-altitude reconnaissance missions, the Black Bats conducted low-altitude reconnaissance and electronic intelligence gathering missions over mainland China from May 1956. It also operated in Vietnam in tandem with the US during the Vietnam War.
Between 1952 to 1972, the Black Bats lost 15 aircraft and 148 lives, according to the website.

“The Black Cats program was implemented because the American government needed to find out information over mainland China – what were their strengths and weaknesses, where were their military installations located, where were their submarine bases, what type of aircraft were they developing,” said Powers Jr.

Lloyd Leavitt, a retired US Air Force lieutenant general, described the mission as “a joint intelligence operation by the United States and the Republic of China.”

“American U-2s were painted with ROC insignia, ROC pilots were under the command of a ROC (Air Force) colonel, overflight missions were planned by Washington, and both countries were recipients of the intelligence gathered over the mainland,” Leavitt wrote in a 2010 personal history of the Cold War published by the Air Force Research Institute in Alabama.

One of the first men to fly the U-2 for Taiwan was Mike Hua, who was there when the first of the planes arrived at Taoyuan Air Base in Taiwan in early 1961.

“The cover story was that the ROC (air force) had purchased the aircraft, that bore the (Taiwanese) national insignia. … To avoid being confused with other air force organizations stationed in Taoyuan, the section became the 35th Squadron with the Black Cat as its insignia,” Hua wrote in a 2002 history of the unit for the magazine Air Force Historical Foundation.

At the Taiwan airbase, Americans worked with the Taiwan pilots, helping to maintain the aircraft and process the information. They were know as Detachment H, according to Hua.

“All US personnel were ostensibly employees of the Lockheed Aircraft Company,” Hua wrote.

The ROC air force and US representatives inked an agreement on the operation, giving it the code name “Razor,” Hua wrote.

He described the intelligence gained by the flights as “tremendous” and said it was shared between Taipei and Washington.

“The missions covered the vast interior of the Chinese mainland, where almost no aerial photographs had ever been taken,” he wrote. “Each mission brought back an aerial photographic map of roughly 100 miles wide by 2,000 miles long, which revealed not only the precise location of a target, but also the activities on the ground.”

Other sensors on the spy planes gathered information on Chinese radar capabilities and more, he said.

Between January 1962 and May 1974, according to a history on Taiwan’s Defense Ministry’s website, the Black Cats flew 220 reconnaissance missions covering “more than 10 million square kilometers over 30 provinces in the Chinese mainland.”

When asked for further comment on the Black Cats, the ministry referred CNN to the published materials.

“The idea was that black cats go out at night, and the U-2 would usually launch in the darkness. Their cameras were the eyes, and it was very stealthy, quiet, and hard to get. And so combining the two stories, they became known as the Black Cats,” the author Pocock said in the documentary.

The squadron even had its own patch, reputedly drawn by one of its members, Lt. Col. Chen Huai-sheng, and inspired by a local establishment frequented by the pilots.

But the Black Cats, like Powers Sr. two years before, were about to find out their U-2s were not impervious to antiaircraft fire.

On September 9, 1962, Chen became the first U-2 pilot to be shot down by a People’s Liberation Army antiaircraft missile. His plane went down while on a mission over Nanchang, China.

Sailors assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group 2 recover a high-altitude surveillance balloon off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, Feb. 5, 2023. (U.S. Navy Photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Tyler Thompson)

See photos showing US Navy recovering spy balloon from water

In the following years, three more Black Cat U-2 pilots were killed on missions over China as the PLA figured out how to counter the U-2 missions.

“The mainland Chinese learned from their radars where these flights were going, what their targets were, and they began to build sites for the missiles but move them around,” Pocock said.

“So they would build a site here, occupy that site for a while but if they thought the next flight would be going over here, they would move the missiles. It was a cat-and-mouse game, literally a black cat and mouse game between the routines from the flights from Taiwan and those air defense troops of the (Chinese) mainland, working out where the next flight would go.”

In July 1964, Lt. Col. Lee Nan-ping’s U-2 was shot down by a PLA SA-2 missile over Chenghai, China. According to the Taiwan Defense Ministry he was flying out of a US naval air station in the Philippines and trying to gain information on China’s supply routes to North Vietnam.

In September 1967, a PLA missile hit the U-2 being flown by Capt. Hwang Rung-pei over Jiaxin, China, and in May 1969, Maj. Chang Hsieh suffered a “flight control failure” over the Yellow Sea while reconnoitering the coast of Hebei province, China. No trace of his U-2 was ever found, according to Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.

A U-2 Dragon Lady, from Beale Air Force Base, lands at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii, in 2017.

Two other Taiwanese U-2 pilots were shot down but survived, only to spend years in Communist captivity.

Maj. Robin Yeh was shot down in November 1963 over Jiujiang, Jiangxi province.

“The plane lost control when the explosion of the missile took out part of the left wing. The plane spiraled down. Lots of shrapnel flew into the plane and hit both of my legs,” Yeh, who died in 2016, recalled in “The Brave in the Upper Air: An Oral History of The Black Cat Squadron” published by Taiwan’s Defense Ministry.

He said that following his capture Chinese doctors removed 59 pieces of shrapnel from his legs, but couldn’t take it all out.

“It didn’t really affect my daily life, but during winter my legs would hurt, which affected my mobility. I guess this would be my lifelong memory,” Yeh said.

Maj. Jack Chang’s U-2 was hit by a missile over Inner Mongolia in 1965. He, too, suffered dozens of shrapnel injuries and bailed out, landing on a snowy landscape.

“It was dark at the time, preventing me from seeking help anyway, so I had to wrap myself up tightly with the parachute to keep myself warm … After ten hours when dawn broke, I saw a village of yurts afar, so I dragged myself and sought help there. I collapsed as soon as I reached a bed,” he recalled in the oral history.

Neither Yeh nor Chang, who were assumed killed in action, would see Taiwan again for decades. The pilots were eventually released in 1982 into Hong Kong, which at the time was still a British colony.

However, the world into which they emerged had changed greatly in the intervening years. The US no longer had a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan and had formally switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing.

Though the Cold War US-Taiwan alliance was no longer, the CIA brought the two pilots to the US to live until they were finally allowed to return to Taiwan in 1990.

Members of the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron

Indeed, by the time of their release CIA control of the U-2 program had long since ceased. It had turned the planes over to the US Air Force in 1974, according to a US Air Force history.

Two years later, the Air Force’s 99th Strategic Reconnaissance Squadron and its U-2s moved into Osan Air Base in South Korea. Commander Lt. Col. David Young gave the location the “Black Cat” moniker.

Today, the unit is known as the 5th Reconnaissance Squadron.

But US U-2s continue to be involved in what might be characterized as “cat-and-mouse” activities and their activities continue to make waves occasionally in China. In 2020, Beijing accused the US of sending a U-2 into a no-fly zone to “trespass” on live-fire exercises being conducted by China below.

The US Pacific Air Forces confirmed to CNN at the time that the flight had taken place, but said it did not violate any rules.

Meanwhile, for those involved in the original Black Cats, there are few regrets – even for those who were captured.

Yeh told the documentary makers he had fond memories of life at 70,000 feet.

“We were literally up in the air. The view we had was also different; we had the bird’s eye view. Everything we saw was vast,” he said.

Chang too felt no bitterness.

“I love flying,” he said. “I didn’t die, so I have no regrets.”

Editor’s Note: A version of this story first appeared in CNN’s Meanwhile in the Middle East newsletter, a three-times-a-week look inside the region’s biggest stories. Sign up here.

Abu Dhabi, UAE
CNN
—

The devastating earthquake that hit Turkey on February 6 killed at least 45,000 people, rendered millions homeless across almost a dozen cities and caused immediate damage estimated at $34 billion – or roughly 4% of the country’s annual economic output, according to the World Bank.

But the indirect cost of the quake could be much higher, and recovery will be neither easy nor quick.

The Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation estimates the total cost of the quake at $84.1 billion, the lion’s share of which would be for housing, at $70.8 billion, with lost national income pegged at $10.4 billion and lost working days at $2.91 billion.

“I do not recall… any economic disaster at this level in the history of the Republic of Turkey,” said Arda Tunca, an Istanbul-based economist at PolitikYol.

Turkey’s economy had been slowing even before the earthquake. Unorthodox monetary policies by the government caused soaring inflation, leading to further income inequality and a currency crisis that saw the lira lose 30% of its value against the dollar last year. Turkey’s economy grew 5.6% last year, Reuters reported, citing official data.

Economists say those structural weaknesses in the economy will only get worse because of the quake and could determine the course of presidential and parliamentary elections expected in mid-May.

Still, Tunca says that while the physical damage from the quake is colossal, the cost to the country’s GDP won’t be as pronounced when compared to the 1999 earthquake in Izmit, which hit the country’s industrial heartland and killed more than 17,000. According to the OECD, the areas impacted in that quake accounted for a third of the country’s GDP.

The provinces most affected by the February 6 quake represent some 15% of Turkey’s population. According to the Turkish Enterprise and Business Confederation, they contribute 9% of the nation’s GDP, 11% of income tax and 14% of income from agriculture and fisheries.

“Economic growth would slow down at first but I don’t expect a recessionary threat due to the earthquake,” said Selva Demiralp, a professor of economics at Koc University in Istanbul. “I don’t expect the impact on (economic) growth to be more than 1 to 2 (percentage) points.”

There has been growing criticism of the country’s preparedness for the quake, whether through policies to mitigate the economic impact or prevent the scale of the damage seen in the disaster.

How Turkey will rehabilitate its economy and provide for its newly homeless people is not yet known. But it could prove pivotal in determining President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s political fate, analysts and economists say, as he seeks another term in office.

The government’s 2023 budget, released before the earthquake, had planned for increased spending in an election year, foreseeing a deficit of 660 billion liras ($34.9 billion).

The government has already announced some measures that analysts said were designed to shore up Erdogan’s popularity, including a near 55% increase in the minimum wage, early retirement and cheaper housing loans.

Economists say that Turkey’s fiscal position is strong. Its budget deficit, when compared to its economic output, is smaller than that of other emerging markets like India, China and Brazil. That gives the government room to spend.

“Turkey starts from a position of relative fiscal strength,” said Selva Bahar Baziki of Bloomberg Economics. “The necessary quake spending will likely result in the government breaching their budget targets. Given the high humanitarian toll, this would be the year to do it.”

Quake-related public spending is estimated at 2.6% of GDP in the short run, she told CNN, but could eventually reach as high as 5.5%.

Governments usually plug budget shortfalls by taking on more debt or raising taxes. Economists say both are likely options. But post-quake taxation is already a touchy topic in the country, and could prove risky in an election year.

After the 1999 quake, Turkey introduced an “earthquake tax” that was initially introduced as a temporary measure to help cushion economic damage, but subsequently became a permanent tax.

There has been concern in the country that the state may have squandered those tax revenues, with opposition leaders calling on the government to be more transparent about what happened to the money raised. When asked in 2020, Erdogan said the money “was not spent out of its purpose.” Since then, the government has said little more about how the money was spent.

“The funds created for earthquake preparedness have been used for projects such as road constructions, infrastructure build-ups, etc. other than earthquake preparedness,” said Tunca. “In other words, no buffers or cushions have been set in place to limit the economic impacts of such disasters.”

The Turkish presidency didn’t respond to CNN’s request for comment.

Analysts say it’s too early to tell precisely what impact the economic fallout will have on Erdogan’s prospects for re-election.

The president’s approval rating was low even before the quake. In a December poll by Turkish research firm MetroPOLL, 52.1% of respondents didn’t approve of his handling of his job as president. A survey a month earlier found that a slim majority of voters would not vote for Erdogan if an election were held on that day.

Two polls last week, however, showed the Turkish opposition had not picked up fresh support, Reuters reported, citing partly its failure to name a candidate and partly its lack of a tangible plan to rebuild areas devastated by the quake.

The majority of the provinces worst affected by the quake voted for Erdogan and his ruling AK Party in the 2018 elections, but in some of those provinces, Erdogan and the AK Party won with a plurality of votes or a slim majority.

Those provinces are some of the poorest in the country, the World Bank says.

Research conducted by Demiralp as well as academics Evren Balta from Ozyegin University and Seda Demiralp from Isik University, found that while the ruling AK Party’s voters’ high partisanship is a strong hindrance to voter defection, economic and democratic failures could tip the balance.

“Our data shows that respondents who report being able to make ends meet are more likely to vote for the incumbent AKP again,” the research concludes. “However, once worsening economic fundamentals push more people below the poverty line, the possibility of defection increases.”

This could allow opposition parties to take votes from the incumbent rulers “despite identity-based cleavages if they target economically and democratically dissatisfied voters via clear messages.”

For Tunca, the economic fallout from the quake poses a real risk for Erdogan’s prospects.

“The magnitude of Turkey’s social earthquake is much greater than that of the tectonic one,” he said. “There is a tug of war between the government and the opposition, and it seems that the winner is going to be unknown until the very end of the elections.”

Nadeen Ebrahim and Isil Sariyuce contributed to this report.

This article has been corrected to say that the research, not the survey, was conducted by the academics.

Sub-Saharan African countries repatriate citizens from Tunisia after ‘shocking’ statements from country’s president

Sub-Saharan African countries including Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Gabon, are helping their citizens return from Tunisia following a controversial statement from Tunisian President Kais Saied, who has led a crackdown on illegal immigration into the North African country since last month.

Background: In a meeting with Tunisia’s National Security Council on February 21, Saied described illegal border crossing from sub-Saharan Africa into Tunisia as a “criminal enterprise hatched at the beginning of this century to change the demographic composition of Tunisia.” He said the immigration aims to turn Tunisia into “only an African country with no belonging to the Arab and Muslim worlds.” In a later speech on February 23, Saied maintained there is no racial discrimination in Tunisia and said that Africans residing in Tunisia legally are welcome. Authorities arrested 58 African migrants on Friday after they reportedly crossed the border illegally, state news agency TAP reported on Saturday.
Why it matters: Saied, whose seizure of power in 2021 was described as a coup by his foes, is facing challenges to his rule at home. Reuters on Sunday reported that opposition figures and rights groups have said that the president’s crackdown on migrants was meant to distract from Tunisia’s economic crisis.

Iranian Supreme Leader says schoolgirls’ poisoning is an ‘unforgivable crime’

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Monday said that the poisoning of schoolgirls in recent months across Iran is an “unforgivable crime,” state-run news agency IRNA reported. Khamenei urged authorities to pursue the issue, saying that “if it is proven that the students were poisoned, the perpetrators of this crime should be severely punished.”

Background: Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country over the last few months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of parliament, said that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far, citing an unnamed, “reliable source.”
Why it matters: The reports have led to a local and international outcry. While it is unclear whether the incidents were linked and if the students were targeted, some believe them to be deliberate attempts at shutting down girls’ schools, and even potentially linked to recent protests that spread under the slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom.”

Iran to allow further IAEA access following discussions – IAEA chief

Iran will allow more access and monitoring capabilities to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), agency Director General Rafael Grossi said at a press conference in Vienna on Saturday, following a trip to the Islamic Republic. The additional monitoring is set to start “very, very soon,” said Grossi, with an IAEA team arriving within a few days to begin reinstalling the equipment at several sites.

Background: Prior to the news conference, the IAEA released a joint statement with Iran’s atomic energy agency in which the two bodies agreed that interactions between them will be “carried out in the spirit of collaboration.” Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said he hopes the IAEA will remain neutral and fair to Iran’s nuclear energy program and refrain from being affected “by certain powers which are pursuing their own specific goals,” reported Iranian state television Press TV on Saturday.
Why it matters: Last week, a restricted IAEA report seen by CNN said that uranium particles enriched to near bomb-grade levels have been found at an Iranian nuclear facility, as the US warned that Tehran’s ability to build a nuclear bomb was accelerating. The president of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), Mohammad Eslami, rejected the recent IAEA report, which detected particles of uranium enriched to 83.7% at the Fordow nuclear facility in Iran, saying there has been ‘“no deviation” in Iran’s peaceful nuclear activities.

A new sphinx statue has been discovered in Egypt – but this one is thought to be Roman.

The smiling sculpture and the remains of a shrine were found during an excavation mission in Qena, a southern Egyptian city on the eastern banks of the River Nile.

The shrine had been carved in limestone and consisted of a two-level platform, Mamdouh Eldamaty, a former minister of antiquities and professor of Egyptology at Ain Shams University said in a statement Monday from Egypt’s ministry of tourism and antiquities. A ladder and mudbrick basin for water storage were found inside.

The basin, believed to date back to the Byzantine era, housed the smiling sphinx statue, carved from limestone.

Eldamaty described the statue as bearing “royal facial features.” It had a “soft smile” with two dimples. It also wore a nemes on its head, the striped cloth headdress traditionally worn by pharaohs of ancient Egypt, with a cobra-shaped end or “uraeus.”

A Roman stela with hieroglyphic and demotic writings from the Roman era was found below the sphinx.

The professor said that the statue may represent the Roman Emperor Claudius, the fourth Roman emperor who ruled from the year 41 to 54, but noted that more studies are needed to verify the structure’s owner and history.

The discovery was made in the eastern side of Dendera Temple in Qena, where excavations are still ongoing.

Sphinxes are recurring creatures in the mythologies of ancient Egyptian, Persian and Greek cultures. Their likenesses are often found near tombs or religious buildings.

It is not uncommon for new sphinx statues to be found in Egypt. But the country’s most famous sphinx, the Great Sphinx of Giza, dates back to around 2,500 BC and represents the ancient Egyptian Pharoah Khafre.

By Nadeen Ebrahim

Ziya Sutdelisi, 53, a former local administrator, receives a free haircut from a volunteer from Gaziantep, in the village of Buyuknacar, near Pazarcik, Kahramanmaras province on Sunday, one month after a massive earthquake struck southeast Turkey.

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