Barack Obama urges United Nations to set up global ban on fighters

The Guardian – by Shiv Malik, Dan Roberts in Washington, Dominic Rushe in New York, and Nicholas Watt

Barack Obama is to press the UN security council to pass a sweeping new resolution that would impose global travel bans on fighters intent on enlisting in overseas wars, and could lead to sanctions on countries that fail or refuse to implement the new regime.

US officials say the UN resolution, which will be personally pushed by Obama when he chairs a meeting of the security council on Wednesday, is supported by sufficient countries to pass a vote this week.  

But the diplomatic move will raise questions about UN intervention in the democratic processes of its member states. If passed, the resolution would require UN member states to implement and update their own national laws to tackle the flow of foreign fighters, including withholding travel documents and sharing airline information.

Other measures expected to be contained within the resolution include the UN freezing assets of “foreign terrorist fighters” by placing them on sanctions lists; Interpol coordinating efforts to monitor the transit of fighters across several countries; and a call for the international community to implement preventative programmes to deal with radicalisation of their populations.

“As the president has made clear, every country can contribute something to this effort,” said Samantha Power, the US ambassador to the UN. “And there’s universal support, I think, for degrading and destroying this group.”

The US is building a coalition of allies to take on Isis in the hope that a combination of air strikes, intelligence sharing, financial freezes and a travel crackdown will obviate the need for boots on the ground to fight the militants.

The move comes as Tony Blair warns Britain must be prepared to join a wide coalition of countries in deploying ground troops, including special forces, to combat Isis. In an essay on his website, the former prime minister said he was not calling for a repeat of the lengthy military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, but warned: “Airpower is a major component of this to be sure, especially with the new weapons available to us. But – and this is the hard truth – airpower alone will not suffice. They can be hemmed in, harried and to a degree contained by airpower. But they can’t be defeated by it.”

In his article the former prime minister also warned that western governments are in danger of making a “fateful error” in assuming that they should only challenge Islamist extremists who advocate violence. Echoing the warnings by the Conservative chief whip Michael Gove, who has called for a “draining of the swamp”, Blair called for action against the “fringe” of extremists who advocate violence as well as the wider “spectrum” that believes in “religious exclusivity”.

Blair wrote: “This Islamism – a politicisation of religion to an intense and all-encompassing degree – is not confined to a fringe. It is an ideology (and a theology derived from Salafist thinking) taught and preached every day to millions, actually to tens of millions, in some mosques, certain madrassas, and in formal and informal education systems the world over … The truth is that Islamism, unless fundamentally reformed, is incompatible with modern economies and open-minded, religiously pluralistic societies.”

The UN resolution is aimed primarily at tackling a terrorist threat posed by Islamic State, which has rampaged through a vast swath of Iraq and Syriain recent months, killing civilians and hostages and sending thousands of people fleeing. Over the weekend, as many as 100,000 Kurds fled the Kobani enclave of northern Syria as the Isis militants seized more ground.

But a draft of the resolution, obtained by a UN blog and verified by the Guardian, includes a much broader definition of terrorism. According to one academic expert who was involved in advising diplomats preparing the language, this is a deliberate tactic to keep countries like Russia from exercising a veto.

The draft defines foreign terrorist fighters as “individuals who travel to a state other than their states of residence or nationality for the purpose of the perpetration, planning, or preparation of, or participation in, terrorist acts or the providing or receiving of terrorist training, including in connection with armed conflict”. Such a wide-ranging definition may raise concerns that the resolution could be used to undermine foreign assistance in a wide range of armed conflicts, including theoretically at least US plans to train and equip other rebel groups in Syria.

US national security adviser Susan Rice said the unique threat posed by Islamic State, or Isis, fighters in Syria and Iraq justifies a new approach to international counter-terrorism policy.

“I do expect that we will have a successful resolution, which means agreement among at least a majority of member states and no vetoes,” Rice told White House reporters. “I expect, actually, it will be a resolution that we’re able to reach unanimity on, given the import of the issue … the negotiations are going on, but I think they’re going comparatively well.”

Peter Neumann, a terrorism expert who was consulted by Power and other ambassadors, said that the intensity of what had emerged in Syria and the likelihood of jihadists joining other conflicts, had jolted the international community into tackling the phenomenon of the foreign fighter. “They [the US] want to change this whole paradigm whereby a lot of countries say, as long as you don’t attack us at home it’s fine if you go abroad,” he said. “From an international point of view, foreign fighters actually make these conflicts more difficult to resolve.”

He said that foreigners were often “the most ideological, most brutal and the most sectarian” soldiers and therefore often proved to be a major barrier to peacemaking efforts.

“If you look at all of the excessive violence that has taken place in Syria for example or even in the last decade in Iraq, nearly all the suicide bombings, incidents of torture, of beheadings, it’s always the foreigners … because they don’t have a stake … they are not rooted in these countries.”

Neumann added that the qualification of “terrorist” fighters into the language of the draft resolution was vital to placate differences between nations and ensure its smooth adoption by the security council.

Neumann’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalism, based at Kings College London, has been at the forefront of analysing the conduct of foreign fighters for al-Qaida affiliated groups in Syria and Iraq and estimates around 12,000 foreigners from 74 countries have gone to fight with rebels in Syria: 60-70% from other Middle Eastern countries and 20-25% from western nations.

The new rules may prove particularly problematic for US allies such as Turkey which have been conduits for foreign fighters entering Syria, but the White House stressed that seeking such a resolution under chapter 7 of the UN charter, which allows sanctions for non-compliance, did not necessarily mean it was looking to force countries to agree.

“I wouldn’t make the case to you that we’re going to the security council because we’re trying to coerce other people to do things,” US spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

“The security council merely provides a convenient venue for talking about these issues in a high-profile way. We want to make sure that countries all around the globe understand that we think this is a priority and that they should too.”

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/21/barack-obama-united-nations-foreign-fighters-ban-isis