Today's Headlines and Commentary

The United States and Russia have announced agreement on a ceasefire in Syria set take effect next week. The plan will move forward the delivery of much needed aid to besieged Syrian cities. The New York Times writes that, if properly executed by both parties, the agreement would be the first sustained and official halt to the fighting in Syria which has plagued the country since 2011. The Wall Street Journal tells us that the agreement came after more than five hours of discussions with Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia.

As Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan continues to shame the West’s lack of contribution towards ending the Syrian conflict, Turkey has threatened that it will “open its gates” and allow hundreds of thousands of refugees to cross into Europe. Erdogan also said that EU leaders had not delivered on their agreement to provide Turkey with 3 billion euros in aid in return for Turkey’s decision to halt refugees heading to Europe.

Yesterday, NATO stepped into the crisis for the first time, announcing that it would deploy ships to the Aegean Sea in an attempt to stop smugglers. It was not clear, however, how this new deployment would affect the flow of refugees into Europe. The group of NATO warships deployed to the Aegean will focus on monitoring waterways and on providing intelligence to the European Union.

Time reports that 470,000 people have died in the five-year-old Syrian civil war, a number that almost doubles prior estimates of the human toll of the violent conflict. According to the Syrian Center for Policy Research, 11.5% of Syria’s population has been killed or injured.

Yet as the United States seeks to stop fighting between the Assad regime and its rebel opposition, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter made clarified that “there is no cease-fire in the war against ISIL.” The assault against the Islamic State continues as Saudi Arabia has made a final decision to deploy ground troops in Syria to combat the group. Brigadier General Ahmed Al-Assiri, Saudi Arabia’s military spokesman, stated that “Riyadh is ‘ready’ and will fight with its U.S.-led coalition allies to defeat ISIS.”

The United Arab Emirates is also set to send special forces soldiers into Syria to help train local Sunni Arab fighters to fight the Islamic State and retake Raqqa. Defense Secretary Ash Carter made the announcement that the UAE will join the fight at a meeting in Brussels today.

Besides Saudi Arabia and the UAE, Secretary Carter also secured contributions from other countries including Poland, Romania, and Denmark. The officials taking part in the anti-ISIS coalition meeting at NATO headquarters in Brussels listened to Carter as he warned, “We will look back after victory and remember who participated in the fight.” Defense News tells us that the line was meant to be a “not-so-subtle” message to countries who are hesitant to join in on the coalition.

The Daily Beast reports that Iranian-backed Iraqi Shia militias are now fighting CIA-backed rebels in the city of Aleppo. Iraqi militias who, at one time in cooperation with the United States, battled the Islamic State, are now working with the Russian and Iranian forces to fight American-backed rebels in Aleppo. The Daily Beast has more on the ever-complicated Syrian battlefield.

As pressure on the group mounts, ISIS is now utilizing child soldiers and drugged foreign fighters to replace senior fighters. Fox News shares that ever since the Islamic State took control of Mosul in 2014, daily skirmishes with Kurds and Iraqi forces in addition to coalition air attacks have taken a heavy toll on the former senior ranking military officers. The continued fighting in Mosul has also left the Islamic State with insufficient and depleting weaponry.

According to Reuters, the United States has “significantly” increased its airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Afghanistan ever since President Obama granted military commanders broader authority to target the group. Reuters adds that even though it is a relatively new entity in Afghanistan, the Islamic State has violently challenged the Afghan Taliban in parts of the country.

In Libya, Islamic State fighters that set up a safe haven are now quitting their bases and moving south. Reuters reports that this new shift by the Islamic State fighters poses a significant threat to countries in Africa’s Sahel region, including Niger and Chad. Some African and Western officials have expressed concern that the “vast and lawless” Sahel region of Africa may be the Islamic State’s new target to expand their territorial holdings.

The Islamic State allegedly has the capability to continue developing chemical weapons, according to CIA Director John Brennan. Director Brennan, who is set to appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday, stated that the Islamic State has already used chemical weapons a number of times on the battlefield. Read the rest from Newsweek here.

Foreign Policy has the latest on an Islamic State controlled gas facility that has surprising ties with the Russians. As Foreign Policy writes, the Tuweinan gas facility in northern Syria demonstrates that business links between the Islamic State and the Syrian regime persist, as well as ties between the militant group and Russian. The gas facility was built by a Russian construction company and is still owned by a Russian energy company with very close ties to Vladimir Putin.

The Pakistani military announced today that it had foiled a plot by militants to free Ahmed Omar Sheikh. Sheikh was convicted and sentenced to death for his role in the 2002 beheading of American journalist Daniel Pearl. According to Lt. Gen. Asim Saleem Bajwa, the Pakistani military’s chief spokesman, the prison break plan was 90 percent complete and the militants had planned to detonate car bombs near two prison facilities in order to release about 100 prisoners. Two men with ties to al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi were arrested.

Facebook has stepped up its efforts against terrorism on its network. The Wall Street Journal reports that the world’s largest social media site now acts more quickly to remove users who back terror groups and to investigate posts by their friends. Twitter also recently announced that they took down 125,000 accounts with extremist content. The Journal writes that the moves by both social media platforms come as U.S. lawmakers and the Obama administration intensify pressure to curb extremist propaganda online.

Finland is preparing to reform its cyber defense and intelligence gathering laws to include new provisions to give the military and national security services effective legal tools to launch offensive operations against hostile attacks in cyberspace. Defense News writes that the proposed security legislation will add greater clarity to existing Finnish laws relating to intelligence gathering, at home and abroad, and also strengthen cyber defense activities within the national security domain.

Foreign Policy reports that the White House believes cyberspace may be an Achilles’ heel for the United States. Speaking at the New America Foundation, Michael Daniel, the top White House advisor on cyber security policy, stated that for more than 40 years, the West and the United States, “have been able to leverage cyberspace and the Internet as a strategic advantage.” However, without proper actions to address what Mr. Daniel called “underlying fundamental cybersecurity challenges,” the United States will potentially risk turning the Internet into a “strategic liability.”

Google, caving to European pressure, is expanding how it applies Europe’s right-to-be-forgotten rule. The Wall Street Journal tells us that Google “will remove links from all of its global searching sites whenever a user from the EU searches for information about a person from the same country who has exercised the right to be forgotten.” The right to be forgotten was established in 2014 and allows Europeans to request search engines remove links associated with their names.

Police authorities in the United Kingdom, working with the FBI, have arrested a teenager suspected of being behind the hacking of CIA Director John Brennan’s AOL email account. Although the teenager’s identity has not been released, he is known as “Cracka,” the leader of the hacktivst group called “Crackas With Attitude.” Motherboard has more.

As debate over whether to require women register for the draft continues on the Hill, some lawmakers have an easy solution: get rid of it completely. Yesterday, a bipartisan group of lawmakers including Representatives Mike Coffman (R-CO), Jared Polis (D-CO), Peter DeFazio (D-OR), and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), introduced new legislation that would abolish the Selective Service System.

The occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern Oregon is officially over. The four final militants surrendered yesterday after speaking with supporters who persuaded them to give up, ending the 40-day occupation. The New York Times has more.

On Thursday, a Moroccan judge ordered the release of a former Guantanamo Bay detainee who has remained in custody for five months after he was transferred to Morocco. Younis Shokuri walks free for the first time in 15 years, but still faces possibile criminal charges for allegations that he was associated with a Moroccan Islamist group.

Mohammed Bwazir, the GTMO detainee who chose his cell rather than freedom, reportedly made his decision in a 10-minute standoff before he was scheduled to board the plane that would carry him to a new life. The Miami Herald has more on the Bwazir’s story.

Parting Shot: If you read one article today, let it be this: the New York Times shares that a team of scientists have confirmed the last prediction of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity—first hypothesized over 100 years ago—finding the first evidence of gravitational waves, which the Times describes as “ripples in the fabric of space-time.”

ICYMI: Yesterday, on Lawfare

David Phillips and Kelly Berkell argued “the case for delisting the PKK as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.”

Cody shared the latest revelation in the SSCI-CIA struggle over the “torture report,” outlining what’s in the quietly released CIA “Note to the Reader.”

Ben updated us on his application to be an e-Resident of Estonia, wherein he visited the Estonian Embassy, collected his Digital Identity Card, and interviewed Kristjan Kurrme.

Herb Lin asked how the Standing Rules of Engagements apply to drones and other remotely piloted aircraft.

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