Israel's Arrow anti-missile system 'in first hit'

Israel has shot down a Syrian missile using its most advanced anti-missile system for the first time, Israeli media say.

A surface-to-air missile (SAM) was intercepted using the Arrow system, designed to stop long-range ballistic missiles, reports say.

The SAMs were fired at Israeli jets which had just raided sites in Syria.

Debris from the intercepted SAM came down in Jordan. Two other SAMs are said to have landed in Israel.

In a rare admission, the Israeli military said its aircraft had attacked several targets in Syria before Syria launched the missiles.

Israel said none of its planes had been "compromised", despite Syria claiming it had shot down one of four aircraft involved in the raid.

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A serious escalation: Analysis by Jonathan Marcus, BBC defence correspondent

This episode is unusual on a number of counts. It is rare for Israel to admit to air strikes in Syria though there have been reports of at least four similar raids against Hezbollah weapons shipments since the start of December last year.

This also looks to be the first operational use of Israel's Arrow anti-ballistic missile system - launched possibly at an errant Syrian surface-to-air missile - that might have landed in Israeli territory.

The incident - not least because the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) statement has made it "official" - represents a serious escalation in tensions between Israel and Syria.

It comes less than 10 days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited Moscow for talks with Vladimir Putin. Russian radars and aircraft control a significant slice of Syrian airspace.

It's a signal perhaps to all concerned that if weapons supplies to Hezbollah continue, then Israel is ready to escalate its air campaign.

• Israeli missile defence a game-changer?

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There has been sporadic cross-border fire between the two countries since the start of the Syrian war in 2011.

Air strikes, said to have been carried out by Israel, have hit sites in Syria on numerous occasions, reportedly targeting weapons shipments for Lebanon's Shia militant movement Hezbollah.

Shells, mostly believed to be strays from the fighting in Syria, have also landed in the Israel-occupied Syrian Golan Heights. Syria has also previously fired anti-aircraft missiles at Israeli fighter planes over its airspace, although none are known to have been hit.

The Israeli military said its planes were already back in Israeli airspace when the SAMs were fired in the early hours of Friday.

Israeli media said one missile was intercepted north of Jerusalem by the Arrow system.

The Jordanian military said missile debris also landed in rural areas in the north of the country, the Associated Press news agency reported.

Pictures and video on social media showed a group of people gathered round what were said to be the burnt remains of a missile embedded in the ground amid twisted metal beside a building.

AP said it hit the courtyard of a home in Inbeh, about 25 miles (40 kilometres) from the Syrian border.

What is the Arrow system?

• An anti-missile defence system jointly developed by Israel and the US in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War, which saw Israel hit by 39 Scud missiles fired by Iraq
• Two increasingly advanced versions of the system have been developed since it was introduced in 2000
• Ostensibly designed to take out long-range ballistic missiles (those which leave the Earth's atmosphere on a very high trajectory)
• Part of a multi-tiered missile defence shield to protect Israel against short-, medium-, and long-range missile threats
• BBC

Is North Korea's leader Kim Jong-un rational?

Is Kim Jong-un rational? The new US ambassador to the United Nations thinks he is not. Nikki Haley said after North Korea's simultaneous launch of four ballistic missiles: "This is not a rational person." But is she right?

Kim Jong-un may have many flaws. He is without doubt ruthless - the bereaved relatives of the victims of his regime, including within his own family, would testify to that. He may have driven through an economic policy that keeps his people living at a standard way below that in South Korea and, increasingly, China.

And he seems to have personal issues, such as eating a lot - photographs show his bulging girth - and being a fairly heavy smoker.

But whatever these failings and foibles, is he actually irrational - which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as "not logical or reasonable, not endowed with the power of reason"?

Scholars who study him think he is behaving very rationally, even with the purging and terrorising of those around him. Prof Andrei Lankov of Kookmin University in Seoul told the BBC: "He is perfectly rational. He sometimes overdoes it. He sometimes tends to apply excessive force. Why kill hundreds of generals when dozens will do?

"Most people he kills would never join a conspiracy but he feels it's better to overdo it. It's better to kill nine loyal generals and one potential conspirator than to allow a conspirator to stay alive.

"But he is rational."

Prof John Delury of Yonsei University in Seoul said that even having his half-brother killed (as the allegation is - denied by Pyongyang) would be a rational act; not nice but rational.

"A sad fact of history is that young kings often kill their uncles and elder brothers. It may be cruel, but it is not 'irrational'. If you don't take my word for it, read Shakespeare."

• Kim Jong-nam death: Interpol 'red notice' for North Koreans
• How do you solve a problem like North Korea?
• North Korea's nuclear programme: How advanced is it?
• North Korea country profile

On this assassination of Kim Jong-nam, allegedly at the hands of agents of the regime, Prof Lankov says it is similar to the Ottoman Empire, where concubines of the Sultan had countless children, any of whom had a bloodline that might one day legitimise a claim to the throne.

Prof Lankov thinks that Kim Jong-nam was, accordingly, a threat, probably not that great a one but still intolerable: "Probably he was not that dangerous but you never know. He was definitely under Chinese control."

Prof Delury said that there was nothing irrational about Kim Jong-un's drive to obtain credible nuclear weapons: "He has no reliable allies to guarantee his safety, and he faces a hostile superpower that has, in recent memory, invaded sovereign states around the world and overthrown their governments.

"The lesson North Koreans learned from the invasion of Iraq was that if Saddam Hussein really possessed those weapons of mass destruction, he might have survived."

This was compounded by the lesson of Libya, according to Prof Lankov: "Did American promises of American prosperity help Gaddafi and his family? Kim Jong-un knows perfectly well what happened to the only fool who believed Western promises and renounced the development of nuclear weapons. And he's not going to make that mistake. Once you don't have nuclear weapons you are completely unprotected.

"Did Russian or American and British promises to guarantee Ukrainian integrity help Ukraine? No. Why should he expect American, Russian or Chinese promises to help him stay alive? He is rational."

If he is rational, what does he want? On this, scholars are divided. Prof Brian Myers of Dongseo University in Busan in South Korea said that Kim Jong-un wants security but also a united Korea as the only way he and the regime can survive in the long term.

"As every North Korean knows, the whole point of the military-first policy is 'final victory', or the unification of the peninsula under North Korean rule."

A credible nuclear force would give him the ability to pressure the United States to remove its troops from the peninsula.

"North Korea needs the capability to strike the US with nuclear weapons in order to pressure both adversaries into signing peace treaties. This is the only grand bargain it has ever wanted," said Prof Myers.

And once the US troops had gone, on this argument, North Korean rule would be unstoppable.

Prof Lankov doesn't agree with the emphasis. He thinks survival is by far the most important motive behind Kim Jong-un's actions: "Above all, he wants to stay alive. Second, economic prosperity and growth - but it's a distant second."

So what's to be done? Prof Lankov sees no good options: "I don't see any solution right now." He thinks the best option is to persuade North Korea to freeze its development of nuclear weapons at a particular size of arsenal "but it will be very difficulty and North Koreans may not keep their promises".

And money would have to be paid. "But this deal isn't good from an American point of view because it means paying a reward to a blackmailer, and if you pay a reward to a blackmailer once, you invite more blackmail.

"The second option which might work is a military operation but that is likely to trigger a second Korean war and will permanently damage American credibility as a reliable ally and protector.

"Worldwide, a lot of people would see that it's better to have enemies than such friends."

BBC NEWS

'Huge advance' in fighting world's biggest killer

An innovative new drug can prevent heart attacks and strokes by cutting bad cholesterol to unprecedented levels, say doctors.

The results of the large international trial on 27,000 patients means the drug could soon be used by millions.

The British Heart Foundation said the findings were a significant advance in fighting the biggest killer in the world.

Around 15 million people die each year from heart attacks or stroke.

Bad cholesterol is the villain in heart world - it leads to blood vessels furring up, becoming easy to block which fatally starves the heart or brain of oxygen.

It is why millions of people take drugs called statins to reduce the amount of bad cholesterol.

The new drug - evolocumab - changes the way the liver works to also cut bad cholesterol.

"It is much more effective than statins," said Prof Peter Sever, from Imperial College London.

He organised the bit of the trial taking place in the UK with funding from the drug company Amgen.

Prof Sever told the BBC News website: "The end result was cholesterol levels came down and down and down and we've seen cholesterol levels lower than we have ever seen before in the practice of medicine."

BBC NEWS

Islamic State: An invincible force?

In June 2014, so-called Islamic State (IS) took over the Iraqi city of Mosul. Within weeks, the organisation had swept through large swathes in Iraq and Syria, seizing a territory the size of the United Kingdom.

The territory IS controls has shrunk in the two years since a US-led multinational coalition launched an air campaign on its positions, first in Iraq and then Syria.

The coalition has managed to push IS out of the Iraqi cities of Tikrit and Ramadi, as well as an ever-increasing stretch of Syrian-Turkish borderland.

Enemies of the "caliphate", backed by (mostly) US fighter jets, are now bivouacked 50km (30 miles) from the IS "capital" of Raqqa, in northern Syria.

Yet IS' hold on its most valuable strategic terrain, the areas seized either in or before 2014, is still uncontested.

It is entrenched in Mosul and Raqqa and the Sunni Arab tribal heartland of the Euphrates river valley, which stretches from eastern Syria to western Iraq.

While it has lost much of the northern Syrian borderland, IS has also expanded into areas hitherto resistant to it, such as the Damascus suburbs and parts of the Aleppo countryside.

War spoils

IS' military arsenal consists of Russian and American weaponry mostly seized from government and rebel forces in both Iraq and Syria.

Its stockpiles include a fleet of Humvees seized after it defeated the US-equipped Iraqi army in Mosul and elsewhere.

The group's ability to acquire war spoils in the form of Russian and American tanks, recoilless rifles, rocket-launchers, light arms and ammunition was seriously diminished after it became harder to swiftly seize new territory.

When the campaign started in 2014, the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) said IS could muster between 20,000 and 31,500 fighters, up from an initial estimate of 10,000.

Despite over a year of air strikes, in February this year the White House said IS still had up to an estimated 25,000 fighters, mainly foreigners, from more than 90 countries.

Turning minds

Despite its fearsome reputation and initial shock grab of territory, IS is not invincible on the battlefield.

The bulk of its rank-and-file infantry, particularly foreign, do not fight well and are often dispatched by their native commanders as cannon fodder.

IS' most capable soldiers, its "special forces", have typically been Iraqi and Syrian militants with long experience of fighting in those countries, and graduates of other insurgencies, notably the Libyan-heavy al-Battar Brigade or the various units of militants from Chechnya or elsewhere in the Caucasus.

Where IS has excelled is in the realm of intelligence tradecraft.

This includes the maintenance of a highly elaborate and multilingual propaganda machine that caters to all constituencies, from American Muslims to Iraqi tribesmen.

Using bribery, blackmail and its own totalitarian form of cultural outreach, it has been able to win friends and influence people across thousands of square kilometres, often conquering a town, city or village long before its advancing columns lay siege to it.

IS dispatches cash-strapped sleeper agents into the ranks of its opposition, such as the Iraqi Security Forces or the Free Syrian Army, to slowly, covertly, buy or build a constituency.

Baathist core

IS is in many respects a project of Saddam Hussein's now-outlawed Baath Party, but with a different ideology.

Former agents or officers of the former Iraqi president's regime dominate its leadership.

For instance, Samir Abd Mohammed al-Khlifawi, better known as Hajji Bakr, was a colonel in Saddam's elite intelligence service of Saddam's Air Defence Force.

He was responsible for building IS' infrastructure in northern Syria in 2012 before being killed by anti-Assad rebels.

Another key IS figure was Abu Abdul Rahman al-Bilawi, a former captain in the Iraqi army. He was killed two days before the group's seizure of Mosul in June 2014, an operation whose final blitzkrieg he himself planned and so was accordingly dubbed "Bilawi Revenge".

Bilawi hailed from Iraq's Dulaim tribe, the country's largest. He was also quite close to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of a precursor to IS.

A third ex-Baathist was Abu Ali al-Anbari, also once an intelligence officer in Saddam's army.

Anbari is the mastermind of the group's espionage and clandestine services, heading the IS Security and Intelligence Council and so tasked with running a vast honeycomb network of spies, operatives and sleeper cells, including those now active in countries beyond Iraq and Syria.

The ex-Baathists shape the group's jihadist ideology, handle its security (weeding out infiltrators or possible putschists) and military operations, and ensure its resilience.

They represent a battle-hardened and state-educated core that would likely endure (as they have done through US occupation and a decade of war) even if the organisation's middle and lower cadres are decimated.

Ex-Baathists have established an underground network, whose operatives are often disguised, even from other members.

This network of sleeper cells and security-minded members represent the organisation's core and, even if IS is defeated or contained militarily, will make it difficult to vanquish all together.

Hassan Hassan is an Associate Fellow at Chatham House, London, and a Resident Fellow at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy, Washington; Michael Weiss is a senior editor at the Daily Beast.

BBC NEWS

Is so-called Islamic State finished?

Under fire from Russian, Turkish, Iraqi, Syrian and Kurdish forces, as well as US air power, so-called Islamic State has lost large swathes of land, as well as fighters and money. What does this mean for the Islamist militant group? Is it finished?

On 13 August this year, the town of Manbij in northern Syria was liberated from IS. After the last fighter left, the town erupted: men sat on street corners, cutting off each other's beards; women tore off their face veils and set fire to them; an old woman lit a cigarette and laughed through the smoke.

Previously, all of this was banned by IS.

IS has lost other towns too, such as Kobane, al-Qaryatain, Tikrit and Fallujah.

But how much land has it lost in total? The risk consultancy group IHS produces maps to show which areas IS currently controls. It says that the amount of territory that IS has lost depends on how you are measuring.

"If you include the desert," says senior principal analyst Firas Abi Ali, "then it's lost around half of what it controlled a few years ago."

• Islamic State group: The full story
• Islamic State: An invincible force?
• Who is Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi?
• Islamic State conflict: How will the battle for Mosul unfold?

But it is perhaps more instructive to look at which cities it has lost. In losing towns such as Manbij, it has lost access to the Turkish border, which means the supply of foreign fighters, weapons and ammunition is drying up.

Losing cities means losing money too.

"When you control land and people, you gain access to revenue," says Firas Abi Ali. "You can extort the population. As it loses territory, it loses access to that pile of cash and it has less money available."

Firas Abi Ali estimates IS has lost about one-third of its capability to make money and predicts that the group will be defeated militarily by late 2017.

The big question now is whether IS can win back some of these cities, and the answer to that is partly about support.

Hassan Hassan's hometown in Syria was taken over by IS a few years ago, and he is now an analyst at the Tahrir Institute in Washington DC.

Over the past few years, he has been talking regularly to IS fighters online, and he says he has noticed something new.

"They're certainly worried," he says. "You get a sense that many people have lost the morale and the zeal that they had in 2014 when they joined because it was a 'caliphate' and it was expanding."

Now that the "caliphate" is shrinking, thousands of fighters are leaving. Along with those killed in battle, Hassan Hassan thinks IS has lost about half those who once fought for it.

Then there are those who did not fight for IS but supported or at least tolerated the group - not many, but enough to make it easier for IS to conquer so many towns. That is now changing too.

"People inside Syria and Iraq, they didn't understand [IS] in the beginning," he says. "They understand it today. People no longer talk about [IS] in the same way they talked about it in 2014."

IS itself seems to be accepting its new, weaker position. In its Arabic newsletter, the Dabiq, it is now talking about retreat. "They've started preparing their fighters psychologically for the retreat into the desert," says Hassan Hassan. "They're showing videos of IS members fighting in the desert, and these videos are new."

There are questions too about what this loss of land, fighters and money means for IS's ability to launch attacks.

Seth Jones, director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at Rand Corporation think tank, has been studying IS documents found by Iraqi and US forces in Syria and Iraq.

"Islamic State is moving from an organisation that controls large amounts of territory into a terrorist group that is striking targets," he says.

In 2014, he says, every month there were about 150 to 200 attacks. In some months of 2016, there have been almost 400 attacks.

"They're trying to encourage people who believe the organisation is declining to continue to fight," he says. "To show that they still exist and they're still targeting 'the infidel'."

Other IS documents make it clear, he says, that the group wants to attack those countries involved in operations against it; such as the US, the UK and Australia. But with reduced finances, it will struggle to do so.

Increasingly, then, IS is relying on inspiring people to carry out attacks in its name, which means its leaders do not have to mastermind complex plots. IS is branching out too: into Nigeria, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Algeria and Egypt, as well as parts of Europe. But there, too, it is under threat.

This raises a question: how long can IS keep inspiring attacks and spreading its ideology? Will there come a time when it runs out of steam?

"At some point those attacks will likely come down as the group begins to lose more broadly," says Seth Jones. "It's unclear when that will be for IS. I don't think it's there yet, but it's certainly possible in the near- to mid-term."

Many experts think it is now just a matter of time before IS loses its most important cities: Mosul in Iraq and Raqqa in Syria. If that happens, what then?

"Even if the territorial caliphate in Iraq and Syria is dismantled, this doesn't mean the end of the movement," says Fawaz Gerges, author of ISIS: A history.

Although IS shares some of its ideology with other militant groups, such as al-Qaeda, it differs in one key respect: it did not just talk about a caliphate; it conquered cities, erased borders and declared one. And in doing so, says Fawaz Gerges, it has energised global jihadism.

"The caliphate model will likely haunt the imagination of jihadists for many years to come," he says.

So where does all of this leave IS?

A year ago, no-one predicted IS would lose so much so quickly. And as it loses more land in the coming months, it is likely to lose more fighters. After all, what is Islamic State without a state?

So is Islamic State finished? Yes, it will lose its caliphate. But then the insurgency will begin.

The Inquiry: Is Islamic State finished? is broadcast on the BBC World Service. Listen online or download the programme podcast.

BBC NEWS

Tillerson: Military action against North Korea 'an option'

Military action against North Korea is "an option on the table", US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has said during a visit to South Korea.

The policy of "strategic patience" had ended, he said, and the US was exploring a new range of diplomatic, security and economic measures.

He also defended the deployment of a US missile defence system in South Korea - a move that has angered Beijing.

Seoul and Washington say the system is needed to defend against North Korea.

Mr Tillerson spoke shortly after visiting the demilitarised zone which divides the two Koreas.

He arrived in South Korea from Japan, where he said that 20 years of efforts aimed at persuading North Korea to abandon its nuclear ambitions had failed.

• How do you fix North Korea?
• What is Tillerson facing in Asia?

Asked if the possibility for military action existed, he said: "Certainly we do not want to, for things to get to military conflict."

But he added: "If they elevate the threat of their weapons programme to a level that we believe requires action, then, that option's on the table."

He also called on China to fully implement sanctions imposed by the UN in response to North Korea's nuclear and missile tests.

"I don't believe we have ever fully achieved the maximum level of action that can be taken under the UN Security Council resolution with full participation of all countries," he said.

The US accuses China, North Korea's main ally, of not doing enough to rein it in. But Beijing remains wary of any action that could destabilise the North Korean regime and potentially create chaos on its border.

China is also strongly opposed to the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (Thaad) system in South Korea.

The US says the system is aimed at countering the threat from Pyongyang but China says its powerful radar will allow the US to spy on its territory.

In recent days there have been multiple reports of apparent economic retaliation aimed at South Korea by Beijing.

Rex Tillerson called these actions "unnecessary and troubling".

"We also believe it is not the way for a regional power to help resolve what is a serious threat for everyone," he said.

BBC NEWS