US annual conferences can’t just leave the United Methodist Church, rules top court

The decision by the Judicial Council, the denomination’s top court, comes just over a week after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a new denomination formed by theologically conservative Methodists.

Attendees of the Kentucky Annual Conference raise their arms in prayer during a morning session on June 13, 2017, at the Sloan Convention Center in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Photo by Kathleen Barry/UM News

May 11, 2022

By 

Emily McFarlan Miller

(RNS) — No, an annual conference in the United States can’t just up and leave the United Methodist Church. At least not yet.

While the denomination’s Book of Discipline has provisions for individual churches wishing to leave the United Methodist Church with their properties, there’s nothing within church law that would allow an annual conference — one of the United Methodist Church’s 53 regional networks of churches and ministries within the United States — to do the same, according to the denomination’s Judicial Council.

The Judicial Council ruled Tuesday (May 10) that only the General Conference, the denomination’s global decision-making body, can determine the process and conditions for annual conferences to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church.

And the General Conference hasn’t done that. 

“There is no basis in Church law for any annual conference to adopt stopgap policies, pass resolutions, take a vote, or act unilaterally for the purpose of removing itself from The United Methodist Church,” Decision 1444 reads.

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RELATED: Florida churches among first to begin exit from UMC to new, conservative denomination

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The decision by the Judicial Council, the denomination’s top court, comes just over a week after the launch of the Global Methodist Church, a new denomination formed by theologically conservative Methodists.

The name and logo of the Global Methodist Church. Image courtesy of Global Methodist Church

It also comes ahead of annual conferences’ yearly meetings, which take place in May and June.

At least two annual conferences — Northwest Texas and South Georgia — were set to consider resolutions to disaffiliate from the United Methodist Church at their meetings this summer, the Judicial Council noted in its decision. The Northwest Texas Annual Conference also approved a nonbinding resolution last year indicating it planned to leave the United Methodist Church for a conservative denomination should the General Conference pass a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation, according to United Methodist News Service.

And the Bulgaria-Romania Provisional Annual Conference already has voted to leave and join the Global Methodist Church over its bishop’s objections, according to United Methodist News Service.

Bulgaria-Romania Bishop Patrick Streiff has requested the Judicial Council rule on whether an annual conference in one of the denomination’s central conferences — including those in Europe, Africa and the Philippines — has the authority to vote to separate from the United Methodist Church. That question remains on the council’s spring docket.

Keith Boyette, who chairs the Transitional Leadership Council of the Global Methodist Church and will step into the role of its chief executive next month, told Religion News Service he was “very disappointed” by the Judicial Council decision.

The Cross and Flame is the official logo of the United Methodist Church. Image courtesy of United Methodist Church

The ruling, he said, will lead to the kind of litigation the 16 United Methodist bishops and advocacy group leaders who negotiated a proposed Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation — including Boyette — had hoped to avoid. Now churches and annual conferences potentially will challenge the denomination’s trust clause, which maintains that the denomination — not the churches or their conferences — own church properties, he said.

“We have worked so hard to have a different witness to the world,” said Boyette, referencing the challenges faced by other denominations that have split over differing beliefs about the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ members.

The 2020 General Conference was set to consider the proposed protocol, which would create a pathway for churches and annual conferences to leave with their properties to form new denominations. Conservative United Methodists had announced preparations to launch the Global Methodist Church after a General Conference vote.

But when the General Conference was pushed back to 2024 by the COVID-19 pandemic, the Global Methodist Church pushed up its timeline.

“Unfortunately, what is transpiring is exactly what we have tried to avoid through the protocol,” Boyette said.

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RELATED: New denomination urges United Methodists to walk out of the wilderness

 Opinion

Alito and public opinion reveal link between Roe and broader white Christian nationalist agenda

Attitudes on abortion are strongly correlated with a worldview that denies systemic racism and pines for a 1950s America.

A person holds a sign that reads “Don’t Tread On Me” with a uterus-shaped snake and an American flag, May 3, 2022, during a rally at a park in Seattle in support of abortion rights. (AP Photo/Ted S. Warren)

May 4, 2022

By 

Robert P. Jones

(RNS) — Like many of you, I’m still taking in the bombshell news — broken by Politico Monday evening (May 2) — that the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 Supreme Court decision that affirmed a constitutional right to abortion. The leaked draft opinion, attributed to Justice Samuel Alito, goes straight for the jugular:

“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

The heart of Alito’s argument is striking: that because the Constitution is silent on the specific issue of abortion, no support for it can be found there. This highly restrictive interpretation intentionally mounts a full frontal assault on the long-standing body of jurisprudence based on an implied right to privacy in the Constitution.

As big as the impact of this potential ruling is for the issue of abortion, its shock waves will extend far beyond it. As it stands, it would provide a basis for dismantling nearly six decades of jurisprudence, going back to the 1965 case Griswold v. Connecticut, which secured the right of a married couple to use contraception. The current ruling, should it proceed in its present form, will set up future challenges to a range of other rights, such as same-sex marriage, birth control and even interracial marriage.

In short, Alito’s opinion, which looks likely to become the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court, is the legal equivalent of a time machine that threatens to transport American jurisprudence back to the 1950s. It is part of a gambit — seen in attacks on LGBTQ rights, immigrants, the separation of church and state, and critical race theory — to hold onto a particular conservative vision of white Christian America and impose it upon a more religiously and racially diverse nation that is increasingly supportive of this set of rights grounded in a constitutional right to privacy.

The connective tissue between these issues can be seen both in how out of touch this opinion is with mainstream public opinion and in how opposition to abortion connects with other issues being pushed by conservative religious activists this year.

The current state of public opinion on abortion

First, let’s take a look at public opinion on abortion, which shows that most Americans are supportive of Roe and the legality of abortion. Support for the legality of abortion has remained fairly stable over time. If anything, there has been a slight increase in the proportion of Americans who say abortion should be legal in all cases and a slight decrease in the proportion who say it should be illegal in all cases.

“Majorities of Americans Say Abortion Should be Legal in Most or All Cases, 2010-2022” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

In PRRI’s most recent data from March, just released (click here for full analysis), nearly two-thirds of Americans say abortion should be legal in all (28%) or most (36%) cases, compared with just over one-third who say abortion should be illegal in all (9%) or most (26%) cases. Notably, while most Americans are in the support-leaning middle, at the poles, three times as many Americans say abortion should be legal in all cases than say it should be illegal in all cases.

Support for the legality of abortion varies significantly by state. Overall, the states with the least public support for the legality of abortion are found along a U-shaped curve from Idaho in the Mountain West, down through the Deep South and up through the Appalachian Mountains. Generally speaking, these are states with high proportions of conservative white Christians (including Latter-day Saints in the Mountain West) relative to the rest of the population.

Notably, there are twice as many states in which there is clear majority support for the legality of abortion, compared with states in which there is less than majority support (25 vs. 12). In 13 states, residents are roughly divided over the legality of abortion. There are four states — Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin — in which abortion would be banned or severely restricted because of existing state laws if Roe were struck down, despite having clear majorities that support the legality of abortion.

“Support for Legality of Abortion, by State” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

The division of opinions by party and religious affiliation also reveal findings that run against some conventional wisdom. The patterns of support on this issue are a good illustration of what political scientists call “asymmetric polarization,” where one party (Republicans) is further from the center than the other party.

Only 36% of Republicans believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a view significantly at odds with both independents (66%) and Democrats (87%).

Despite the dated conventional wisdom that abortion is opposed by religious Americans, public opinion data shows a similar asymmetric polarization among religious groups. The reality is that there is only one major religious group, white evangelical Protestants, in which a majority believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases (30% legal vs. 69% illegal all/most cases). Latino Protestants, a group that largely shares an evangelical religious orientation with white evangelicals, are divided (52% legal vs. 47% illegal in all/most cases).

Notably, with the two exceptions of white evangelical and Latino Protestants, majorities of every other major religious group say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Religious groups supportive of the legality of abortion, for example, include both white Catholics (59%) and Latino Catholics (57%) — who hold these positions despite the official opposition of the Catholic Church. The ranks of religious groups supportive of the legality of abortion also include African American Protestants (73% support), who are often mistakenly perceived to be conservative on this issue.

The connection between opposition to abortion and the broader white Christian nationalist agenda

It should be no surprise that we see these attacks on abortion — settled law for half a century — ramping up in the same year we are seeing attacks on teaching kids about systemic racism or LGBTQ identity and families, and renewed challenges to church-state separation, such as the current case before the Supreme Court about whether a football coach at a public high school should be allowed to lead Protestant Christian prayers on the 50-yard line after games. These are all of a piece — a concerted attempt by conservative white Christians to reassert their dominance in a rapidly diversifying America.

Look, for example, at the strong connection between opposition to abortion and the denial of the existence of systemic racism, the understanding that the long history of discrimination continues to impact outcomes among African Americans. The general population is roughly divided on this question. But among those who believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, nearly 7 in 10 disagree that the legacy of slavery and discrimination results in barriers for African Americans today.

“Relationship between Opposition to Abortion and Denial of Systemic Racism” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

Similarly, there is a strong correlation between opposition to the legality of abortion and nostalgia for a 1950s America. As it has generally been since 2015 when PRRI first asked this question, the public is divided about whether American culture and way of life has mostly changed for the better or changed for the worse. But among those who oppose the legality of abortion, nearly two-thirds (64%) believe American culture and way of life has changed for the worse.

“Relationship between Opposition to Abortion and Nostalgia for the 1950s” Graphic courtesy of PRRI

It’s no coincidence that those leading and bankrolling these efforts are largely conservative white Christians, and disproportionately white evangelical Protestants. Even as their numbers have shrunk from 54% of the population in 2008 to 44% today, white Christians continue to comprise the vast majority (73%) of the Republican Party; and white evangelical Protestants alone — a group that constitutes only 14% of the population — comprise 31% of self-identified Republicans.

In PRRI’s latest March 2022 polling, you can clearly see the links between attitudes on abortion and a range of cultural issues among white evangelical Protestants:

• 69% believe abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.
• 59% oppose same-sex marriage.
• 70% disagree that past discrimination impacts outcomes among African Americans today.
• 68% believe being a Christian is important for being “truly American.”
• 69% believe American culture and way of life has changed for the worse since the 1950s.

On most of these issues, the attitudes of white evangelicals are wildly out of step with mainstream public opinion, often by as much as 30 to 40 percentage points. White evangelical Protestants (whose median age is now 56) are living in what could be fairly described as a cultural world that is detached not only from Americans under the age of 40 but from the growing number of Christians of color and nonreligious Americans.

During Donald Trump’s presidency, conservative white Christians were enamored by his rhetoric about building a wall on our southern border. Trump’s repeated references to a wall — however disconnected from reality — penetrated deep into his followers’ consciousnesses. Even if he didn’t build a physical wall, Trump built, syllable by syllable, a metaphorical one, a symbol of protection against menacing outside forces.

While the culture wars over abortion have been with us in their current form since the Roe v. Wade decision, the pending ruling of this court, with its broad attack on a right to privacy, must be seen in the light of this current moment if it is to be fully understood. If Trump fancied himself, in the executive branch, the embodiment of a wall protecting white Christian America from the changes of the last half-century, the conservative majority on the court is unequivocally signaling to this same base that it is willing to play an analogous role in the judicial branch.

And just as Trump disregarded the damage he did to the office of the presidency, this court looks poised to shrug off the damage this baldly partisan ruling may do to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court.

Robert P. Jones. Photo courtesy of PRRI

This decision is not just about abortion. It represents just one, albeit powerful, part of a multipronged, desperate effort by a shrinking and aging group, while they still wield power, to impose their vision of a 1950s white Christian America on an increasingly diverse nation.

(Robert P. Jones is CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute and the author of “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity.” This article was originally published on Jones’ Substack #WhiteTooLong. Read more at robertpjones.substack.com. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.) 

Queer Muslim group aims to conduct largest survey of LGBTQ Muslims in the US

The survey’s goal is to recognize the political needs of LGBTQ Muslims, who according to Queer Crescent are erased from the broader Muslim narrative.

May 11, 2022

By 

Alejandra Molina

Twre

Photo by Katie Rainbow/Unsplash/Creative Commons

(RNS) — In the early months of the pandemic, the LGBTQ Muslim group Queer Crescent launched a mutual aid fund that raised more than $60,000 to distribute to people prioritized as the most in need.

The money helped nearly 400 individuals, including those who were disabled, incarcerated, families of loved ones behind bars, and survivors of domestic violence, according to the group based in Oakland, California.

“We kind of highlighted the most marginal of our LGBTQ Muslim communities,” said Shenaaz Janmohamed, executive director of Queer Crescent. “It let us know that there’s so much more nuance and need and systemic barriers to our community members than we know.”

Now, to further gain an understanding of the experiences of LGBTQ Muslims, Queer Crescent is spearheading and funding what it describes as the largest survey of LGBTQ Muslims in the United States. The goal is to recognize the political needs of LGBTQ Muslims, who according to the group are erased from the broader Muslim narrative.

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RELATED: New academic journal will challenge notion that religions hate queer and trans people

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“How can we self determine what Muslim means to us?” To Janmohamed, this is one question the survey could potentially help LGBTQ Muslims figure out.

The nationwide online survey will be released during Pride Month this June. It will ask participants about their income levels, what kind of access they have to health care and whether they have experienced any kinds of discrimination, among other things. 

Queer Crescent logo. Courtesy image

For hard-to-reach populations like LGTBQ Muslims, Amara Ahmed — a member of Queer Crescent and the survey’s lead researcher — said they are hoping to engage enough people who will then encourage others to take the survey. Simply visiting a mosque will not be enough to get the necessary voices from LGBTQ people, Ahmed said. Fliers of the survey will be distributed at community spaces and Pride events. Queer Crescent will be spreading the word with the help of other advocacy groups.

“The basic idea is to jump-start both a sense of the community, and by doing that, make the community more visible,” said Ahmed, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on the experiences of queer Muslims in the U.S.

Ahmed said she’s not aware of any other studies that have focused on LGBTQ Muslims in the U.S. She noted the 2014 Pew Research Center’s Religious Landscape Study that found that 42% of Muslims favored same-sex marriage legalization, compared with just 28% of evangelicals.

This kind of data point, Ahmed said, “can only tell so much of the story.”

“A lot of Muslims in the United States might be OK with gay marriage from a sort of societal, legal perspective,” Ahmed said. “That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re OK with it in their community, or if their kid came out. There’s a much more complicated story to tell.”

Shenaaz Janmohamed. Courtesy photo

These kind of surveys, Janmohamed said, “presume that queerness is not part of the (Muslim) community.”

Janmohamed was raised in a Shiite Muslim household in Sacramento where she was surrounded by a large Sunni Muslim community. “That really shaped so much of my organizing, thinking of who is not present,” Janmohamed said.

She started Queer Crescent in 2017 after the Trump administration’s travel ban blocked people from Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S. At the time, Janmohamed thought: “Where can I go to register my grief, my sorrow, my fears and my rage?”

“I think that mainstream Muslim organizations, basically straight Muslim organizations, have not always felt like the welcoming space for me to really feel seen and heard,” she said.

Since then, Queer Crescent has held workshops on “Islam & Transformative Justice” as a way to respond to harm, abuse and violence. The organization is also collecting Muslim abortion stories for its Muslim Repro Justice Storytelling project to learn how Muslims have navigated accessing clinics, costs, travel, language and cultural barriers. 

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RELATED: D.C. imam provides counseling, weddings and prayer space for gay Muslims

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Ahmed joined Queer Crescent about three years ago when she was in the process of coming out as trans. She became involved in a support group and is now leading the group’s research efforts. 

Amara Ahmed. Courtesy photo

She grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area with a supportive family that was not “super religious.” Ahmed’s mother converted from Catholicism to Islam after marrying Ahmed’s Muslim father. Her parents and others have embraced her trans identity, including a family friend who runs a Muslim K-12 school and whom Ahmed described as a “very religious” person who wears a hijab.

“When my mom told her, the first thing she did was launch into an Islamic justification for why according to the Quran and the Hadith it is OK to be trans,” Ahmed said.

Ahmed is curious about how LGBTQ Muslims create a sense of belonging “even though being LGBTQ and Muslim is often seen as not compatible,” she said.

“Both by LGBTQ people who potentially see Muslims as religiously conservative, and thus opposed to LGBTQ people, and vice versa, with many Muslims seeing being gay or trans as not particularly compatible with the form of the religion that they follow,” Ahmed said.

“How does an everyday sense of belonging come out of that position … when you’re doing something very extraordinary?” she said.

As Tigray Aid Blockade Continues, Nearby Areas Also in Desperate Need of Aid  

Despite Ethiopia’s declared humanitarian cease-fire with Tigrayan rebels, aid groups are struggling to get food and medicine to those in need. Even outside the worst affected areas in Tigray, which are cut off to reporters, providing aid is fraught with risks and challenges. For VOA, Henry Wilkins reports from Dessie, Ethiopia. Camera: Henry Wilkins 

 

Over 90,000 civil servants in UK may get the axe

Prime Minister Johnson reportedly wants to free up cash for tax cuts

© Getty Images / Justin Macdonald / EyeEm

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Thursday ordered cabinet ministers to significantly reduce departmental staffing levels in a push to lower government spending. According to media reports, the PM has set out plans to terminate up to 90,000 civil servants, which is equivalent to a fifth of Whitehall.

Johnson told the Daily Mail that reducing the headcount would generate savings that could be deployed to help the general public. “We have got to cut the cost of government to reduce the cost of living,” he said. “Every pound the government pre-empts from the taxpayer is money they can spend on their own priorities, on their own lives.”

Johnson has ordered ministers to prepare proposals for job cuts for their departments within a month.

“The PM and ministers are clear that the civil service does an outstanding job delivering for the public and driving progress on the government’s priorities,” a government spokesperson was quoted by the Financial Times as saying. “But when people and businesses across the country are facing rising costs, the public rightly expect their government to lead by example and run as efficiently as possible.”

Read more

 Britons facing ‘real food poverty’, supermarket giant warns

The FT revealed in December that the British government had been developing plans to cut the size of the civil service by 49,000 workers, returning it to its pre-pandemic level. The new plan to axe 90,000 jobs would take the size of Whitehall back to its level before the 2016 Brexit vote and save about £3.5 billion (over $4 billion) a year.

London has vowed to focus on economic growth in order to address the country’s spiraling cost of living crisis. This month, the Bank of England issued a dire warning, saying that Britons would suffer a “historic” shock to their incomes as it expects the record-high inflation to continue. The central bank also said that the cost-of-living crisis could plunge the economy into recession this year.

 

'Largest' US museum considers returning looted artworks

The Smithsonian Museum has acknowledged that many ancient artifacts were acquired illegally

Benin Bronzes © Getty Images / Thomas Niedermuller

The Smithsonian Museum has officially admitted many of its celebrated collections were obtained unethically – essentially looted – in a statement published on Tuesday. Observing that “many artifacts and works of art have been in the Smithsonian’s holdings for decades or, in some cases, more than 150 years,” the museum acknowledged that “ethical norms and best practices in collecting have changed, particularly with respect to collecting cultural heritage from individuals and communities.”

The Smithsonian has collections it would not have acquired under present-day standards.

The statement comes a year after a group of curators and collection specialists began contemplating whether the Smithsonian network of museums should come up with a “shared stewardship” policy that would allow the temporary return of looted, stolen, or otherwise unethically-obtained collections. The policy will focus particularly on repatriating or agreeing on shared stewardship of human remains, especially those acquired without the consent of the individual in question or their family, the policy notes. 

The “ethical returns policy” took effect on April 29 and will apply to all Smithsonian museums, though given the wide range of artifacts on display at the various sites, it will be implemented differently from location to location.

Individual museums will decide on criteria and procedures for “deaccessioning and returning collections for ethical reasons, with occasional interventions by the parent organization’s Board of Regents when the collections in question are of “significant monetary value, research or historical value, or when the deaccession might create significant public interest.”

The principles as outlined in the museum’s news release state that “past acquisitions raising ethical concerns should be investigated and addressed in a manner consistent with current ethical standards,” meaning “being proactive” is preferable to being “simply responsive” – i.e. responding to scandals – in addressing issues related to past collecting.

The museum also acknowledged that it has collected “in a manner that has caused harm or benefited from unequal power relationships,” admitting that while it was impossible to deny the role of predatory practices in the accumulation of the museums’ impressive hoards, “they must have no part in our future interactions and collecting.”

Despite its rapacious past, the museum has vowed to go forward with a “commitment to implement policies that respond in a transparent and timely manner to requests for return or shared stewardship.”

Even before releasing its policy on “ethical returns,” the Smithsonian pledged in March to repatriate 39 bronze sculptures to Nigeria, which has been demanding the return of the 'Benin Bronzes' for decades. The museum erected a display of photographs in their place and a sign declaring that the organization recognized “the trauma, violence and loss such displays of stolen artistic and cultural heritage can inflict on the victims of those crimes, their descendants, and broader communities.”

Many of the sculptures were ransacked from Benin City in 1897 by the British, who – according to the Smithsonian’s website – “confiscated all the royal treasures, giving some to individual officers but taking most to auction in London to pay for the cost of the expedition. The looted objects eventually made their way into museum and private collections around the world.”

READ MORE: Harvard acknowledges history of slavery and eugenics

Such morally questionable distribution routes are responsible for much of the pre-colonial art that has landed in western museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which repatriated its own works from the Benin Bronzes collection last year. The museum also returned a tenth-century Nepalese sculpture looted from a temple in the Kathmandu Valley.

The Smithsonian Institution describes itself as “the world’s largest museum, education, and research complex.”

THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY

Pentagon: Iran-backed militias, PKK coordinated vs. Turkish troops in Iraq

Turkey’s targeting of veteran PKK cadres in Iraq has pushed the Kurdish guerrillas to collaborate with an unlikely partner, a new Pentagon report suggests.

A truck drives on a road in the province of Sirnak, Nov. 10, 2007, near the Turkish-Iraqi border, south-eastern Turkey. - JEAN-PHILIPPE KSIAZEK/AFP via Getty Images

Jared Szuba
@JM_Szuba
May 3, 2022


US military intelligence believes Iran-backed militias have been coordinating with Kurdish guerrillas to launch attacks on Turkey’s military presence in northern Iraq, according to a Pentagon inspector general report released today.

Prominent Iran-backed militias have publicly slammed Turkey’s military operations targeting fighters of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) from the mountains of northern Iraq, citing violations of Iraq's sovereignty.

The militias are also behind a small but increasing number of rocket attacks on Turkish forces in both Iraq and Syria in recent months, according to the declassified report. Some of the strikes in Iraq were carried out “in cooperation with the PKK,” the US Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported.

“Following Turkish airstrikes in February that targeted the PKK in northern Iraq, a new Iran-aligned militia group conducted a rocket attack against a Turkish expeditionary base north of Mosul,” the report read. The Turkish outpost near Zlikan, northeast of Mosul, has repeatedly come under rocket fire in the past year.

“The DIA assessed that the militias probably will continue to coordinate with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a US-designated foreign terrorist organization, in response to Turkish air and UAV strikes on PKK positions,” the report read.

Why it matters: Since the battlefield defeat of the Islamic State, Iran-backed militia groups in Iraq have typically focused their rocket and drone attacks on bases and diplomatic facilities used by the US in Iraq. They have also targeted political rivals and the Iraqi prime minister.

Such attacks have been less frequent in recent months, however. That may be due the militias' desire to avoid actions that could weaken the standing of their political affiliates amid the ongoing government formation following last year’s elections, according to the DIA's assessment.

Now, the unpopular expansion of Turkey’s military operations against the PKK in Iraq's Kurdistan region appears to be giving Iran-aligned groups space to carve out some new legitimacy.

“The militias probably calculate that their attacks against Turkey will deter Turkey from attacking the PKK in federal Iraq while enhancing their public image as defenders of Iraqi sovereignty,” the DIA reported.

The Pentagon’s assessment raises questions as to the extent to which cooperation between the Iran-backed militias and PKK-linked groups has spread beyond northwestern Iraq’s Sinjar region, where both Baghdad and Ankara have sought to dislodge militants affiliated with both factions.

“There does seem to be some significant militia-PKK cooperation going in the Sinjar area and potentially around Mosul too,” said Alex Almeida, the lead security analyst at Horizon Client Access.

“They’ve hit Zlikan with rocket barrages over six times so far this year, plus a drone attack last month on the Iraq-Turkey export pipeline infrastructure up near Fishkhabur,” Almieda told Al-Monitor, adding, “Usually the rockets are fired from the Shabak militia areas of the eastern Nineveh Plains, in federal Iraq.”

Almeida expressed skepticism that the militias’ motivations stretch beyond political posturing. Lobbing rockets at Turkish forces, he said, is a way for the militias to “boost their [Iraqi] nationalist credentials on the cheap."

The background: The PKK and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps are ideologically distinct, but both battled against the Islamic State and in its wake have built broad networks of their own affiliated militias in Iraq and Syria which have resisted attempts by central governments to challenge their autonomy.

Turkey announced a new military operation to encircle core PKK strongholds in the mountains of Iraq northern border region last month. Meanwhile, Iraq’s military has sent armored units to suppress clashes with a PKK-trained Yazidi militia known as the Sinjar Resistance Units (YBS) in the country’s northwest, fueling speculation that Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi’s government is coordinating security operations with Ankara.

Turkey’s government sees Iraq’s Sinjar region as a key node linking PKK strongholds in northern Iraq with the groups’ affiliates in Syria. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has threatened to launch a ground operation into Sinjar to dislodge PKK-linked fighters if necessary.

Last year, Iran’s ambassador to Iraq, former IRGC official Iraj Masjedi, triggered a diplomatic row when he admonished Ankara to withdraw its troops from Iraq, adding that Turkey had no justification to intervene in Sinjar. Just over a month later, a Turkish soldier was killed in a rocket attack at a base near Bashiqa.

With US support, Iraq has been fortifying its open desert border with Syria by installing cameras, watchtowers, concertina wire, and constructing sections of trench and concrete wall.

Know more: Read Fehim Tastekin’s story on the latest moves in Sinjar.

How Russian war bloggers cover the war in Ukraine • FRANCE 24 English

May 3, 2022

Pro-Russian war bloggers embeded in Russian military units, with hundreds of thousands of followers on social media, report on the war in Ukraine. Their reports fall somewhere in between journalism and disinformation. We tell you more in this edition of Truth or Fake.