LCCC ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
April 29/2018
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani

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The IDF's eyes on Syria: the new MMS system forewarning of Iranian retaliation
عين جيش الدفاع الإسرائيلي على سوريا: نظام المراقبة والرصد الألكتروني الجديد يحذر من الانتقام الإيراني
Yoav Zitun/Ynetnews/April 28/18
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/64210
https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5244371,00.html
Ynet provides a special, exclusive peek at the advanced MSS, or multisensory system, deployed across Israel's northeastern frontier; as each suspicious occurrence is graded on a 1-10 scale, with a flick of their joysticks lookouts can spot rebels deep within Syrian territory down to the gun they're carrying.
The Syrian village of Al-Ahmadiyah sits on the road between New Quneitra—one of the last symbols of the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad remaining in the Golan—and the southern part of the Golan Heights, which is controlled by the rebels.
The road can be clearly seen from the top of the Israeli Hermonit outpost, at the slopes of which is the verdant Valley of Tears. Soldiers stationed in the Syrian army positions that surround Quneitra occasionally open machinegun fire at rebel vehicles going south, toward the villages Assad is planning to retake.
Only three months ago, assisted by helicopters dropping incendiary barrels, was Assad's army able to conquer the region surrounding the town of Beit Jann in the Syrian Hermon—merely several kilometers away from the Israeli side of the mountain. Assad's current objective in the Syrian Golan Heights is to cut off the supply route passing through the aforementioned road.
The echoes of a mortar bomb meeting its target can still be heard on occasion, drowning out the bucolic sounds of the western (Israeli) portion of the region. Observation from the Hermonit outpost is an easy one even without binoculars and offers a full view of the mushroom cloud appearing immediately thereafter, before it dissipates in the Heights' winds. Soon, however, the echoes of explosions may no longer be confined to the Syrian side of the border. An Iranian revenge attack for the strike on drone base the Islamic republic built near Homs—and which is attributed to Israel—may take the form of an antitank strike on IDF forces or a heavy barrage of rockets near the border.
The soldiers tasked with recognizing such a strike and warning against it are the lookouts of the Golan Division. To carry out this momentous task, they have been outfitted with the most sophisticated of "weapons": a multisensory system (MSS), of which Ynet has been cleared to provide the first glimpse.
The MSS is comprised of a series of poles affixed with state of the art radars and advanced cameras capable of shooting in both day and nighttime conditions, allowing the operation room's lookouts to scan and observe not only the Golan across the border, but also deep within Syria—and all with a flick of their joysticks.
Deployment of the army's first MSS in the Syrian Golan was not coincidental. Hezbollah made a play for precisely that region four years ago but was thwarted by offensive actions—both overt and covert—attributed to the IDF. Since then, the war-torn country's various rebels groups—from the Islamic State through the successors of Al-Qaeda and the Free Syrian Army—have overtaken most of the strip of land near the border Syria shares with Israel.
While Assad is growing ever bolder in light of his impending Russian-assisted victory in the civil war, the Syrian Golan has still been rather low on his priorities list. While regime forces have even succeeded in overtaking the Syrian Hermon ridge in the past few months, they have yet to begin a significant maneuver southward, to the Heights' plains. According to one IDF estimate, Assad's significant move to reconquer the Syrian Golan will be carried out either simultaneously or after he retakes the large community of Daraa near Jordan, which is also not far from the tri-border area with Israel.
Radars throughout the sector
Either way, the Israeli intelligence hold on the ground is becoming more and more tenuous. Dozens of armed groups the IDF has never encountered before, each armed with a different ideology that is not exactly Zionist, have staked their claim several hundreds of meters from the border. These groups are joined by the regime's own militias, Iranian "advisers" and routine security officers from Assad's army, with no one on the Israeli side being able to surmise what relations with any of them will look like once the war comes to its inevitable conclusion.
Commander of the Eagle Battalion 595 Lt.-Col. Nir Megidish, overseeing combat intelligence collection for the Bashan Division that has been tasked with defending the sector, said, "You can see tanks and APCs driving near the border fence and have to distinguish at a moment's notice who's a suspect and who isn't, who's about to point a barrel at you and who won't attack."
Megidish has become one of the region's most tenured field officers, and has marked his fourth year in this sensitive role. Prior postings saw him taking part in creating the battalion that collects intelligence as to the goings-on in Syria in real-time.
He added, "With all of the chaos in Gaza right now, they mostly have to deal with Hamas while the Galilee Division mostly faces Hezbollah. Here you have rebels armed with tanks positioning near the border with Israeli families hiking and Israeli farmers tilling their lands mere hundreds of meters away."
"Calm has been maintained in the past three years just when the rebels controlled most of the border," he remarked. Senior IDF officials have been speaking about the moment the Syrian civil war trickles to Israel for the past five years, most likely in the form of a large-scale terrorist attack carried by a group infiltrating across the border.
The army's biggest fear is the Yarmouk Martyrs Brigade, which has since changed its name to Khalid ibn al-Walid Army. the group is affiliated with the Islamic State and controls the southern Syrian Golan Heights. Terror attacks were noted on the border from the war's outset, however, with combat soldiers wounded by the detonation of explosive devices and, in another instance, the death of an Israeli teen hit by an antitank rocket. The feared "mega-attack" has yet to take place, nonetheless, and tasked with blocking it are Lt.-Col. Megidish's orders to the MSS's lookouts—and to that end the army seems to have undergone a technological revolution of sorts.
"The fence has been wired with different kinds of radars and the most advanced cameras," Megidish continued. "The MSS technology allows us to translate our operational priorities list—which we predetermine, who or what to track—into tasklist the lookout on duty receives." "There are long stretches here on the Hermon without a fence acting as barrier due to the difficult topography, which makes control that much more challenging," the IDF official stated.
Lookouts can pick up combatants from kilometers away
The MSS enables to rank every suspicious spotting—such as any irregular movements—on a scale of one to ten, in accordance with a list of automatic criteria including intelligence alerts, the sector's history, distance from the fence and the type of object that triggered movement (vehicles, people or animals). The system is so smart, in fact, it can recreate the path a Syrian vehicle took near the village of Hader, for instance, which ended up attracting the lookout's attention. The lookouts' keyboards are cutting-edge and tiny, and their joysticks are also smoother to control. A lookout constantly jumps from one point to another—examining a Syrian outpost and then zooming in on an Assad poster on the wall of a regime soldier's booth, with a tarp covering an armored vehicle not far away.
Flanking the lookout is the selector, who delves into suspicious points to decipher any irregular movements. The MSS allows them to complete actions in seconds—direct tanks, aircraft and precise fire. "The cameras we have here allow lookouts to pinpoint not only a combatant on the roof of a building several kilometers away, but also note exactly the kind of gun he's armed with," Megidish concluded.
Six months ago, the sector came to the brink of combustion, with Majdal Shamas residents demanding to prevent a rebel-directed slaughter of their brethren residing in the Syrian-Druze town of Hader near the border. The IDF, and the elders of the village of the slopes of the Hermon, feared violent riots that will trickle into Syria. Materials documented and collected in the new observation operations rooms and then forwarded to Northern Command and heads of the Druze community helped ameliorate tensions. The lookouts' documentation showed rebels have not yet overtaken the town's outskirts, and the IDF's warnings of intervening to defend the Syrian-Druze sufficed to end the crisis without further escalation.
Motivation of the soldiers stationed as lookouts runs high, their commanders said, and it appears the IDF is going to great lengths to leave behind past imbroglios such as disobeying orders, abandoning bases and multiple complaints by lookouts due to the harsh conditions. Lessons, it appears, were learned: each lookout's shift lasts only four hours, after which she rests for eight, while some lookouts remain on standby. Their residential complex, erected near the operations room, does not strike one as military barracks. Rooms are spacious and attractive, each outfitted with a shower and bathroom, like any hotel accommodation, as well as personal lighting fixtures and outlets near the beds and personal lockers for each soldier.
Also on offer is a special menu, made up of dishes created to the soldiers' own specifications. Rice crackers will even be purchased, for the first time in the army's history, at the lookouts' behest. The army, it is evident, will go the extra mile for these soldiers, busy keeping Israel's northern frontier secure.

Trump, Macron and Merkel Have an Opportunity in Iran's Crisis
Eli Lake/Bloomberg View/April 28/18
Those who want to kill the Iran nuclear deal, and those who want to fix it, may both overlook that there's a strong third option: keep its fate in limbo.
May 12 is the deadline for US President Donald Trump to decide whether to re-impose crippling sanctions, which were lifted by the deal that was intended to provide transparency into and temporary limits on Iran's nuclear development.
French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel will press Trump more to hold off. Iran's foreign minister, Javad Zarif, went on CBS to threaten that Iran had "unpleasant" options should Trump impose the sanctions. Even HBO late-night host John Oliver has gotten in on the act. His program will take out ads this week on Fox News asking the president to remain in the nuclear bargain that was forged by Barack Obama. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said recently that his preference is to strengthen, and not end, the nuclear deal.
That bargain is no doubt important. There are however more pressing matters than the fate of the nuclear deal -- namely the fate of the Iranian regime. Any consideration of abrogating or maintaining the deal should include how the actions would affect the regime and the pro-democracy resistance.
It's an easy story to miss, but since late December when protests broke out throughout the country, Iran's ruling clerics have faced a cascade of crises that pose the most serious threat to the regime's legitimacy since the 1979 revolution.
Let's start with the currency crisis. There is already a run on Iran's banks. The Iranian rial has lost a third of its value in 2018 compared to the US dollar. One dollar is worth around 60,000 rials on the black market in Iran today. Compare that to when the current president, Hassan Rouhani, took power in 2013 -- when the dollar was worth 36,000 rials. That was before Obama offered Iran any sanctions relief, when Iran's government was fast running out of cash reserves.
There is also an ecological crisis in Iran. As Reuters reported last month, several protests have erupted throughout the country because of an ongoing drought and government's botched response. Farmers are being driven off their land. The regime has started arresting environmental activists. The state is running television commercials urging the conservation of drinking water.
Finally, there is a foreign policy crisis. One of the catalysts for the first round of mass demonstrations in December and January was a leak of the official budget. It showed that billions of dollars were funneled to Iran's military and Revolutionary Guard Corps, currently waging hot wars in Syria and Yemen, while Iran's youth unemployment rate continued to rise. This is one reason many of the demonstrators today chant slogans that proclaim Iran should focus on its problems at home and not on sowing mischief abroad.
All of these factors have stoked the embers of the protests that began nearly five months ago. They also explain why the regime has not been able to quiet the demonstrations the way it did in 2009 following rigged presidential elections, by arresting and "disappearing" the urban elites who took to the streets.
This time around the protests have spread to different strata of Iranian society. Alireza Nader, a former Iran specialist for the RAND Corporation, notes that even former insiders like the onetime president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad are predicting an end to the current regime. His electoral larceny in 2009 prompted the last uprising.
Nader this week translated on his Twitter feed Ahmadinejad's words to supporters, recorded by BBC's Persian Service at a recent rally. He said the current regime acts "in a way as if they'll be around forever. They have no news of what's happening. There's not ground below their feet. Events in Iran will soon transform the whole world."
Nader told me this week that he does not think Ahmadinejad has had a change of heart. Rather, "he is now positioning himself because he knows there will be a major upheaval and he doesn't want to be a guy who gets lynched."
And he's not alone. Geneive Abdo wrote for Bloomberg last month that there is now lively debate and protest over the detention of Ayatollah Hussein Shirazi, a prominent cleric who has challenged the divine authority of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. As I reported this month, Iran's Nobel laureate and human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, along with other activists, are now calling for indigenous regime change through a UN-monitored referendum that would eliminate Khamenei's position of supreme leader altogether.

The Logical Next Step for Europe's Integration
Ferdinando Giugliano/Bloomberg View/April 28/18
For the past year, euro-zone leaders have vowed to take steps to complete Europe's monetary union. The 19 countries share a single currency and a central bank, but they still lack all the necessary mechanisms to deal with major imbalances and shocks. While some members would like to have more fiscal transfers and a common safety net for the banks, others worry about subsidizing laggards and encouraging moral hazard.
The European Council at the end of June is widely seen as the last opportunity for some time to agree on an agenda of reforms. Afterwards, politicians will start to campaign ahead of the elections for the European Parliament next spring. With euroskeptic forces on the rise across the currency union, mainstream parties will have little appetite for negotiations over institutional reform in the run-up to the vote.
Political leaders won't say what would count as a success in June. But I would argue that the real test is whether the euro zone agrees to a roadmap for common deposit insurance. This would show that European governments are willing to go further in supporting each other in the event of a crisis.
The creation of joint deposit insurance has been on the agenda at least since European leaders agreed to transfer responsibility for banking policy from national to EU level in 2012. This project -- referred to as Europe's "banking union" -- is formed of three pillars: the joint supervision of significant banks, a framework to wind down failing lenders, and the creation of a European pot of money to guarantee deposits of up to 100,000 euros ($122,000). While the euro zone has taken the first two steps, the third has proven elusive. Germany and other low-debt countries such as the Netherlands fear they could be on the hook for troubles in banks in weaker member states.
These concerns are largely misplaced. Germany and the Netherlands have had their own recent history of severe banking crises. Joint deposit insurance would benefit them as much as Italy or Spain. A common safety net would also reassure all depositors that they will see their money back in case of a crisis; that helps reduce the risk of bank runs in all euro-zone countries.
So far, the holdouts aren't buying that argument. The European Commission had put forward an ambitious proposal for a European Deposit Insurance Scheme (EDIS), but then had to water it down significantly in the hope of reaching some consensus.
Leaders are discussing others ways to deepen monetary union ahead of the June summit too. There is talk of providing a backstop to the Single Resolution Fund (SRF), the pot of money used to wind down banks in crisis. At the moment, this is capped at 55 billion euros, an amount which will only be reached gradually. A meaningful backstop would see, for example, the SRF able to take money from the European Stability Mechanism (ESM), the much larger euro-zone rescue fund. The EU would then have significant firepower to deal with a large bank in crisis (though, in the case of a very large lender such as Deutsche Bank, there would remain concerns over the impact of a failure on the rest of the financial system). Another idea is to turn the ESM into a more flexible institution, which is capable of lending money to countries without them committing to fiscal adjustment and a full set of structural reforms.
Neither proposal will make or break the June summit. Any changes to the ESM will likely be a relabeling exercise. And leaders already agreed to the idea of strengthening the SRF a long time ago. In any case, its role in providing additional risk-sharing between governments is limited because the fund can only intervene after equity and bond investors have suffered hefty losses through a process called "burden-sharing."
A roadmap to common deposit insurance is therefore the sign investors need to be convinced that the euro zone is serious about deeper integration. This does not have to happen at once. As Mario Centeno, president of the Eurogroup of finance ministers, said at the spring meetings of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington last week, deposit insurance could initially exist alongside national funds, for example through a mechanism of co-insurance. European money would be called upon only when the national funds are depleted.
It is also possible to mitigate the risks that countries abuse this safety net.