Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/17/2021 10:26:36 AM 08/16/21 Monday This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia Videos: Israel Seeks Help Fighting Huge Blaze Raging in Hills Above Jerusalem by Morgan Artvukhina Record-setting wildfires have broken out across the planet in 2021, from California to Turkey and from Greece to Siberia, raising concerns about how a warming global climate could make fires larger and more common, but also about how humans use the land in areas prone to wildfires. A powerful new wildfire in the hills to the west of Jerusalem has the Israeli government looking for international help to fight the blaze. Just last week, Israel sent its own firefighters to help Greece tame a wave of fires. On Monday, Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid appealed to his counterparts in Greece, Cyprus, Italy, France, and other countries in the region for help against the fire that began on Sunday near Beit Meir, about nine miles west of Jerusalem. Although just two days old, the fire is already poised to become the country’s worst-ever, having consumed 80% as much as the 2010 Mount Carmel fire near Haifa that destroyed roughly 6,200 acres of land. Photos and videos posted on social media captured the towering flames as they consumed the land’s legendary pine trees and the billowing smoke blotted out the sun over Jerusalem. On Monday afternoon, Israeli officials began evacuating the residents of Shoeva, Kibbutz Tzuba and Kiryat Yearim, Ein Nakuba, Shoresh, Har Etan, and the Eitanim psychiatric hospital, according to Haaretz. “Tomorrow, 88 firefighting teams will continue to fight this fire,” Fire and Rescue Commissioner Dedi Simchi told reporters on Monday night. “I hope and believe we’ll finish this tomorrow.” Simchi said the fires “were a human act,” noting there had not been any lightning strikes in the country on Sunday. “We don’t know yet if it was arson or negligence. We’ll investigate.” No deaths have been reported as of yet, but one firefighter was injured. In the 2010 Mount Carmel blaze, 44 people were killed. “The climate crisis will make such events more frequent and powerful, and Israel is particularly sensitive to drought and warming,” Environmental Protection Minister Tamar Zandberg said on Monday during a visit to the front lines. “Climate disasters must be declared a strategic threat, and prepared for accordingly.” The Defense Ministry told the Times of Israel on Monday that it was looking to rent six aircraft from private aviation company Chim-Nir “to expand our aerial firefighting capability.” They will join another 10 firefighting aircraft already in service in the area. According to the Times of Israel, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett was motivated to seek international help after the fire breached a defensive line on its eastern side and firefighters were forced to regroup and establish a new line at Ora and Aminadav, two neighborhoods that abut the municipal borders of Jerusalem itself, which Israel claims as its capital. Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/17/2021 10:26:36 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/17/2021 10:26:36 AM This material is distributed by Ghebi LLC on behalf of Federal State Unitary Enterprise Rossiya Segodnya International Information Agency, and additional information is on file with the Department of Justice, Washington, District of Columbia From Afghan War Diary to Afghanistan Papers, US ‘Reconstruction’ Long Known to be Farce by Morgan Artvukhina The US spent $143 billion on “nation-building” in Afghanistan, a cause US President Joe Biden said Monday was never Washington’s goal, despite regular boasting about the progress made toward westernizing the country’s political system and values. In the end, little has changed in 20 years, except the deaths of nearly half a million people. The quick folding of the US-backed Afghan government before a Taliban advance has caught many off-guard after Pentagon leaders claimed little chance of its overthrow. However, almost since the 2001 US invasion, a steady stream of reports showed the “reconstruction” was a rolling disaster. ‘So-Called Nation Building’ The US invasion of Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 - less than a month after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans. None of the airplane hijackers were Afghans, but the Islamic terrorist group that claimed responsibility, Al-Qaeda, was based in eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban had allowed them to build training facilities. The administration of then-US President George W. Bush demanded the Taliban hand over Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden; they agreed to do so, if the US provided firm evidence of bin Laden’s guilt. Washington rejected this and prepared for the first strikes of what would become a “global war on terrorism.” In reality, this was always the goal: Bush’s government was dominated by neoconservative figures from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) think tank, which had mused in September 2000 that the US needed “some catastrophic and catalyzing event - like a new Pearl Harbor” to jump start their grand crusade against what Bush’s deputy secretary of defense, Paul Wolfowitz, called “old surrogate Soviet regimes” across the Middle East, including Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. However, Bush and his central leadership scarcely believed overthrowing these governments would require extensive work afterward on their part: on October 12, five days after the US invasion began, Bush told reporters ”it would be a useful function for the United Nations to take over the so-called nation-building.” Bush pledged $320 million in aid for Afghanistan for the following year, but it wasn’t until 2004 that the first elections were organized. The winner was Hamid Karzai, a CIA asset appointed to head the interim government beginning in December 2001. The US invasion drove the Taliban from power, but it didn’t destroy their organization, and after a few months’ regrouping, the group launched a new insurgency in early 2002 in the country’s east and south, which proved impossible to quash and grew steadily to control half the country by the summer of 2018. Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/17/2021 10:26:36 AM Received by NSD/FARA Registration Unit 08/17/2021 10:26:36 AM Eight years after the 2001 invasion, as newly elected president Barack Obama announced a surge of 33,000 troops were being sent to Afghanistan to rapidly end the war, he denied the US was interested in “a nation-building project of up to a decade.” By 2010, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the US had authorized some $345 billion spending on the Afghan War, and US troops in-country exceeded 100,000. Karzai’s re-election in 2009 was accomplished via ballot-stuffing, demonstrating the country was no closer to democracy than before the war. Meanwhile, civilian deaths grew dramatically, with nearly 14,000 killed by the end of 2010, according to a count by the Watson Institute. Afghanistan War Diary In July 2010, WikiLeaks published a massive compendium of 91,000 Pentagon documents from the war, most of them classified as secret, which it dubbed the Afghan War Diary and which were later revealed to have been passed to them by then-US Army specialist Chelsea Manning. The logs covered the full scope of the war up until that point and revealed a grim side of the war scarcely seen in the corporate media, including the routine cover-up of civilian deaths by soldiers who classify the dead as combatants and the worsening military situation as the Taliban deployed improvised explosive devices (lEDs) with increasing and deadly effectiveness. Indeed, more recently, National Security Agency intelligence analyst Daniel Hale, who was sentenced last month to 3.75 years in prison for blowing the whistle on the US’ drone warfare practices, revealed that simply being a male of a certain age was enough for American servicemembers to classify them as combatants when it came to authorizing a drone strike or counting those killed in one. The files WikiLeaks published also revealed how dependent the Pentagon had become on private security contractors - mercenary outfits like DynCorp and the infamous Blackwater USA- to buttress its numbers, and how those same mercenaries destroyed any goodwill the US-led occupation might have accumulated through their terrorizing of civilians and routine and wanton violence. SIGAR Reveals Corruption, Waste Seven years into the war, in 2008, Congress created the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to keep track of the massive amounts of money being spent on the Central Asian country. SIGAR’s quarterly reports, delivered in the frank style of a watchdog, became an important sounding board for the ongoing failures of the “reconstruction.” - until that sounding board was muzzled by the Trump White House. The watchdog issued two damning reports in 2014 called “Lessons Learned” aimed at unveiling what had gone wrong in the US’ approach to Afghanistan but which, ironically, had their most damning interviews censored. In 2019, when the Washington Post published thousands of documents in what it called the Afghanistan Papers, the paper revealed what didn’t make it into the official reports. In one interview, Robert Finn, who served as US ambassador to Afghanistan from 2002 to 2003, told SIGAR the Bush administration had refused to form long-term plans for the country, shaping its approach by domestic politics. “This is a systemic problem of our government,” he said.