World
ISIS is a growing threat in Libya, says John Kerry
Rome: Addressing an anti-IS summit in Rome on Tuesday, US Secretary of State John Kerry said that the US-led coalition battling the Islamic State has pushed back the terror group in Syria and Iraq however it is a growing threat in Libya and could capture nation’s oil wealth.
“In Libya, we are on the brink of getting a government of national unity, and that will prevent Daesh (IS) from turning Libya into a stranglehold on that country’s future,” Kerry told an anti-IS summit in Rome on Tuesday.
“That country has resources. The last thing in the world you’d want is a false caliphate with access to billions of dollars in revenue,” he said.
At the opening of the Rome conference attended by 23 nations from the international coalition against IS, Kerry called for more financial contributions to stabilise recently liberated areas of Iraq and to address the humanitarian crisis in Syria.
So far extremists have been driven from 40 percent of territory they controlled in its self-declared Islamic ‘caliphate’ in Iraq and 20-30 percent of territory it overran in Syria.
“We are still not at the victory that we want to achieve and will achieve, in either Syria or Iraq, and we have seen Daesh playing a game of metastasising out to other countries, particularly Libya,” Kerry said.
Much of the focus of Tuesday’s conference was on Libya, which is emerging as a new magnet for militants who have left the battlefields of Syria or who are coming afresh to the fight.
Italy, a member of the anti-IS coalition, is especially interested in routing IS in Libya, its former colony, where the turmoil is fuelling the smuggling of tens of thousands of migrants to Europe across the Mediterranean.
Under a UN backed plan for a political transition to end four years of deepening chaos since the 2011 ouster of late dictator Muammar Gaddafi, the country’s warring factions are due to form a unity government.
A month after the deal was agree in Morocco, however, its implementation has been blocked by infighting.
Western nations are considering military intervention in Libya but want a go-ahead from the planned unity government before acting.
Shanghai’s rich middle class is leading a wave of online dissent over the strict and prolonged lockdowns imposed in various parts of the country. Chinese internet censorship is struggling as patience is wearing thin in many urban centers, coming up with creative forms of online protests.
Social Media Posts Revealing Lockdown Tension in Shanghai
Drawn-out lockdowns are nothing new in China as authorities insist with the nation’s zero-Covid policy since the start of the pandemic. Currently over This time around, however, metropolitan areas like Shanghai are increasingly difficult to keep quiet, given that its more than 25 million residents have seen weeks of total isolation along with food shortages and many other service interruptions.
Dozens of towns and reportedly over 300 million Chinese citizens have been affected by lockdowns of different severity. As expected, urban netizens have been most outspoken over their difficulties by finding creative ways to get around state censorship and bans placed on topics, news comments and spontaneous campaigns.
Shanghai residents have been using mobile proxies and hijacking seemingly unrelated hashtags to talk about healthcare issues, delivery failures and the overall severity of their situation. The “positive energy” that the Chinese government wants to transmit during the recent prolonged series of lockdowns does not come naturally to those counting food supplies and online censors are working hard to filter words, trending topics and undesired social media sharing.
WeChat groups and message threads are under constant monitoring. Posts questioning the zero-Covid approach have been quickly deleted, including by leading Chinese health experts like Dr. Zhong Nanshan. Video footage is soon censored and protests and investigations are quickly made to disappear.
Where this has not worked, officials have exposed banners with warnings and outright threats like “watch your own mouth or face punishment”, while drones have been patrolling the city skies. Yet, if anything, this has led to further tensions and unspoken confrontation with Shanghai’s educated and affluent middle class.
Creative Online Solutions Harnessing Civic Energy
Announcements by Chinese social media that they would be publishing the IP addresses of users who “spread rumors” have not helped either. Tech industry research has shown that much of Asia’s tech-savvy population has a habit of using mobile proxies and other privacy tools, quickly finding workarounds to browse the internet freely and talk to the world about the hottest topics.
The sheer volume of forbidden posts is already a challenge for the very censorship system, experts explain. Unable to track all trending hashtags, state workers overlook topics that speak about the US, Ukraine or other popular news. Linking human rights elsewhere to their situation, Chinese online dissidents establish their informal channels and “hijack” the conversation to share personal or publicly relevant information about the Covid suppression in their town.
Sarcastic and satirical posts still dominate. Others hope to evade the censors by replacing words from famous poems or the national anthem. One thing is certain – social media, when harnessed with the right creativity, has proven its ability to mount pressure on the government in even some of the most strictly controlled tech environments like China.
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