this week in war...

This Week in War.  A Friday round-up of what happened and what’s been written in the world of war and military/security affairs this week. It’s a mix of news reports, policy briefs, blog posts and longform journalism.

• Syrian activists are reporting that 78 people were massacred in the town of Qubeir on Wednesday. The UN has been unfortunately unable to get into the village to verify any of the reports, but activist networks like Shaam News Network have provided disturbing and graphic videos of the massacre’s aftermath.
• A senior Syrian military officer, Major Jihad Raslan, defected from Assad’s forces following the Houla massacrein disgust and anger.
• Is Libya’s turbulent southern region a danger to the country’s integrity? And the revolutionaries are getting restless.
• Hosni Mubarak and his sons’ acquittals on corruption charges will be an obstacle to retrieving to retrieving the money smuggled by the family out of Egypt.
• A former top aide to Saddam Hussein, Abid Hamid Mahmud, was executed in Iraq this week.
• A new report from the Center for New American Security titled “Risk and Rivalry: Iran, Israel and the Bomb” argues very seriously against the use of preventive war against Iran.
• A US drone strike inside Pakistan this week killed Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, Abu Yahya al-Libi.
• His death is “likely to accelerate” the ongoing shift of Al Qaeda’s regional power away from its hub in Pakistan and toward more independent groups like Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), which is focused in Yemen.
• The National Counterterrorism Center has released its 2011 Report on Terrorism, which shows that total worldwide attacks are dropping and that Americans face incredibly slight threat from terror attacks. In fact, the primary victims by a huge margin are non-American Muslims.
• With NATO and the US leaving the region over the course of the next two years, Russia and China are seeing an opportunity for greater power and influence in Afghanistan.
• A retired Russian colonel has been convicted of being a US spy and sentenced to 18 years in prison.
• A two-day security summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Council (Russia, China, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) was held this week.
• Defense Secretary Panetta arrived in Afghanistan on Thursday and said in a speech that the US is “reaching the limits our patience” with Pakistan.
• May saw an uptick in air combat in Afghanistan after a slow during the first four months of this year.
• More than a dozen prisoners, including Taliban members, have escaped from jail in northern Afghanistan.
• Amy Davidson at The New Yorker argued on the TNY Close Read blog that we should be applying greater scrutiny to the tax money being sent to Afghanistan.
• Pakistan successfully test-launched the nuclear capable Hatf-VII cruise missile this week, in a continuation of a regional arms build-up to counter India.
• Mustafa Qadri wrote an angered opinion piece in Dawn about the Pakistani government’s inactivity on cases of murdered journalists and lack of motivation to prevent their murders. No one has come to justice for the murder of a journalist in Pakistan since the 2002 sentencing in Daniel Pearl’s murder.
• At least 10 high-ranking officers within Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps have died violent, mysterious deaths recently.
• A new law passed by Putin to sharply curtail the rights of protesters will go into effect next week to international condemnation.
• The House Foreign Affairs Committee marked up the Magnitsky Bill on Thursday, which is designed to punish Russian human rights violators.
• Fourteen bodies were found inside a truck in the center of a northern farming town in Mexico. That area, the Tamaulipas state, which borders Texas, has been one of the bloodiest in the drug war as drug cartels battle over smuggling routes.
• Mexican judges allowed for the extradition of Sandra Avila Beltran, a suspected drug trafficker known as the “Queen of the Pacific,” to the US on cocaine charges.
• The policies of the war on drugs in Latin America are having increasingly heavy impact on women.
• A survey by the College of William and Mary of 3500 international relations faculty globally reveals some predictions and assessments of world politics.
• Suicides among active-duty US troops are soaring: we’re up to an average of about one a day this year (154 suicides for the first 155 days of 2012). The number of active-duty suicide is 50 percent higher than death toll from the Afghan war this year. 
• The aging aircraft in the Air Force’s inventory are spelling an “aircraft crisis.”
• An anonymous survey for Marines to take regarding women serving in combat went online on June 1. The Huffington Post obtained a list of the survey’s questions.
• A federal district judge in New York elaborated on her injunction against the controversial detention provisions of the 2011 defense appropriations bill. The Obama administration decided to interpret her original ruling narrowly, applying the injunction only to the plaintiffs in the case, which include a group of journalists worried that they could be detained for the research they do. Judge Katherine B. Forrest rejected this saying her injunction applied “broadly.”
• A new smartphone app to be released in fall will help pinpoint grave locations in Arlington Cemetery.