Thursday, September 03, 2015

It took Russia limiting the instability in the region for Turkey to finally close borders. Amazing.

It looks like Turkey likes being a member of NATO. It is a preferred status for Turkey. It has been a preferred status for Turkey for a long, long time. And guess what? The majority religion is Muslim and they practice democracy.

2 September 2015

Turkey (click here) has begun to close some of its border crossings with Syria after about 130,000 Kurdish refugees entered the country over the weekend.
On Sunday Turkish security forces clashed with Kurds protesting in solidarity with the refugees. Some protesters were reportedly trying to go to Syria to fight Islamic State (IS).
Most refugees are from Kobane, a town threatened by the advancing militants.
IS has taken over large swathes of Iraq and Syria in recent months.
Before the latest influx, there were already more than one million Syrian refugees in Turkey. They have fled since the start of the uprising against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad three years ago.
Some of the new arrivals are being sheltered in overcrowded schools, as Turkey struggles to cope with the influx....

I find it odd Afghanistan would have refugees coming along the same route as Syria.

1 September 2015

...Some 3,000 people (click here) are expected to cross into Macedonia each day in the coming months, according to the UN.
Many then cross into Serbia, which says it has seen 90,000 migrants so far this year, and head for Hungary - a gateway to the EU's passport-free Schengen zone.
In July alone, 34,000 migrants were detected trying to cross from Serbia into Hungary.
Faced with that influx, Hungary has built a controversial 175km (110-mile) razor-wire fence to keep migrants out. It plans to fortify it over the coming weeks.
It has also urged EU partners not to send back migrants who have travelled on from Hungary.
After hundreds of migrants crowded onto trains bound for Austria and Germany at a central Budapest station the Hungarian authorities decided to close it to migrants on 1 September....

The money is too much. Afghanistan was corrupt under Karzai. The reason there has been this level of corruption is because it is simply too much money. It isn't too much money for private contractors, but, the bribery that goes along with being a private contractor is ridiculous. The more money the USA throws into these countries the worse the conditions are. 

What in Afghanistan can possibly cost $1 billion?  

3 September 2015

...Almost $1 billion (click here) in support from the U.S. government has done little to stem a refugee crisis in Afghanistan that has reportedly displaced millions of people from their homes and now accounts for tens of thousands of deaths abroad each year. In fact, corruption is so endemic among the local institutions tasked with solving the problem that even a precise number of refugees is unknown.

A new report released Thursday from the congressionally mandated office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction finds the local Ministry of Refugees and Repatriation has made little progress in implementing a strategy to bring home refugees and allocate land where they can live. As many as 2.5 million Afghans are living in Pakistan, according to U.N. estimates, 1.5 million of whom are declared refugees, and roughly 950,000 are living in Iran. The U.N. is unable, however, to confirm these numbers with those countries, according to the SIGAR report, hampering the State Department's ability to request corresponding funds from Congress....