This is The Prophecy. The Prophecy is much more than seeing into the future. For The Prophecy sees without the limits of time. For The Prophecy sees what is, what was, and what always shall be.
A report this week from the Los Angeles Instances took a have a look at what a devastating earthquake may do to Los Angeles — and the classes to be discovered from the calamitous 6.three magnitude quake in 2011 that every one however flattened Christchurch, New Zealand.
However whereas People are conscious of the San Andreas fault and the seismic exercise in California, which has wreaked havoc in San Francisco and Los Angeles, there are different, lesser-known fault traces in the United States that fly dangerously underneath the radar. These cracks in the crust have prompted appreciable harm in the previous — and scientists say will achieve this once more.
Virginia Seismic Zone
In 2011, New Yorkers had been jolted by a 5.eight magnitude earthquake that shook the East Coast from New Hampshire all the approach down by means of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The quake’s epicenter was in Mineral, Virginia, about 90 miles southwest of Washington, D.C., and was so highly effective that Union Station, the Pentagon and the Capitol Constructing had been all evacuated.
The quake woke lots of people in the northeast as much as the Virginia Seismic Zone (VSZ) under the Mason Dixon — and the consequential results it may have on main cities alongside the East Coast. The final time the VSZ prompted a lot chaos was in 1867 when it launched an earthquake of 5.6-magnitude — the strongest in Virginia’s historical past.
This 150 mile-long sequence of faults stretches underneath 5 states: Illinois, Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky, and is answerable for 4 of the largest earthquakes in the historical past of the United States, which befell over three months from December 1811 and February 1812. The quakes had been so robust the mighty Mississippi River flowed backward for 3 days. Fortunately, the space was not as populated as it’s now, so the harm was restricted. Nonetheless, a FEMA report launched in 2008 warned {that a} quake now could be catastrophic and end in “the highest financial losses as a consequence of a pure catastrophe in the United States.”
The Northern Sangre de Cristo Fault
In 2011, a magnitude 5.three quake hit Trinidad, Colorado, one other space that has seen little seismic exercise on such a big scale. In line with the Colorado Division of Homeland Safety and Emergency Administration, The Sangre de Cristo Fault, which lies at the base of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains alongside the japanese fringe of the San Luis Valley, and the Sawatch Fault, which runs alongside the japanese fringe of the Sawatch Vary, are “two of the most distinguished probably energetic faults in Colorado” and that “Seismologists predict that Colorado will once more expertise a magnitude 6.5 earthquake at some unknown level in the future.”
The Cascadia Subduction Zone
One in every of the most probably harmful fault traces lies north of California, stretching between Oregon and Washington. Main cities like Portland, Seattle and Vancouver lie alongside the Cascadia Subduction Zone, which scientists say has the functionality of a 9.zero or 10 magnitude earthquake — 16 occasions extra highly effective than the 1906 quake which ravaged San Francisco. A quake of this magnitude would have devastating penalties on infrastructure and will probably set off large tsunamis. The risk is so nice, the BBC even did a nifty video on the potential MegaQuake risk.
Relatives at the funeral of two sisters killed in a shooting attack at the Kfar Etzion settlement in the occupied West Bank. Menahem Kahana / AFP – Getty Images
Maia and Rina Dee were shot and killed Friday while driving to a family holiday. Their mother was wounded in the attack and died a few days later.
April 12, 2023, 3:56 AM MDT
By Shira Pinson and Aina J. Khan
KFAR ETZION, The West Bank — The crowd spilled out of the funeral home, encircling the modest light-caramel, Jerusalem-stone building nestled in the hills near Bethlehem.
The wailing was almost constant, the sound swelling with every mention of Maia and Rina Dee, whose deaths last week sparked nationwide outrage. The mourners were there to remember the British Israeli sisters, who were shot and killed in their car in the West Bank while driving to a family holiday. Their mother, Leah Dee, was wounded in the attack and died of her injuries on Monday.
“How will I explain to Lucy what’s happened to our two precious gifts, Maia and Rina, when she wakes up from her coma?” Rabbi Leo Dee, the father of the young women, said of his wife the day before she died.
As he wept, the sound of sobs surged up from the crowd. Nearby, two Dee sisters and one brother held on to one another tightly. One sobbed uncontrollably, her legs shaking.
Leo Dee described his distress at trading missed calls with his daughters and wife on Friday during, he assumed, the attack that killed them.
“I called Lucy, no answer. I called Maia, no answer. I called Rina, no answer,” he told reporters.
“Then I saw a missed call from Maia at 10:52. I hadn’t noticed it ring, I had not picked up the phone. The feeling that she called me during the attack, and I wasn’t able to speak to her, will come back and haunt me for a while,” he said.
As with so much else in the region, the Dees’ deaths quickly became a political rallying cry.
Far-right Israeli politicians, including Itamar Ben-Gvir, the minister of national security who has been convicted of incitement to racism and support for a terrorist organization, and Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, who has advocated segregating Jews and Arabs in maternity wards, attended Maia and Rina’s memorial with their wives.
Visiting the scene of the attack, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the shooters as “vile and heartless terrorists,” and promised to hold them accountable.
The Palestinian Islamist group Hamas praised the attack, but stopped short of claiming responsibility.
The cycle of pain and death persisted into the weekend, when an Italian tourist was killed in a car-ramming attack. On Monday, at Aqabat Jaber, a refugee camp some 30 miles northeast of Kfar Etzion, near Jericho in the West Bank, a 17-year-old boy, Mohammad Balhan, was killed by Israeli army gunfire during a raid, according to Palestinian officials.
“I had just left my house when I saw military forces and people throwing stones,” said the boy’s father, Fayez Balhan. “I stopped the car and got out. I saw one person get shot.”
“We walked further ahead and saw a boy lying on the ground. I approached him … and realized that it’s my son,” Balhan added.
In a statement, the Israeli military said its soldiers were trying to apprehend a terror suspect when Mohammad Balhan was killed. They fired at the suspects with bullets, explosive devices and Molotov cocktails, they said. One person was arrested.
Relatives of Palestinian teenager Mohammad Balhan mourn at the family home near Jericho in the occupied West Bank on Saturday.Ahmad Gharabli / AFP via Getty Images
Israel says military raids are meant to dismantle militant networks and thwart future attacks; the Palestinians view them as further entrenchment of Israel’s open-ended, 55-year occupation.
The killings came ahead of an Israeli march to the abandoned settlement of Eviatar in the northern West Bank.
Smotrich and Ben-Gvir — who both live in Jewish settlements in the West Bank — were among several Israeli Cabinet ministers attending the march on Monday.
Already, 2023 has been one of the deadliest years on record for Palestinians, with 96 people — most of them militants but some of them civilians, including 18 children — killed by Israeli fire so far.
At least 19 Israelis and foreigners have died, according to Reuters.
Meanwhile, mourning and fury are growing.
“May God avenge their names,” cried a woman during the Dee sisters’ funeral as emotions spiraled like the rising number of deaths.
Shira Pinson reported from Kfar Etzion, and Aina J. Khan from London.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does. The Biden administration is working on a plan that would make the world a far more dangerous place.
March 19, 2022 10:09pm
It’s a plot with three steps, all terrible and each arguably worse than the previous one.
Step One is the determination to make a new sweetheart nuclear deal with Iran. There is no good reason, only the fetish to undo everything Donald Trump did.
Step Two in the budding disaster is that the White House is letting the butcher of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, broker the talks between America and Iran. As I noted last week, on one hand, Putin is a war criminal raining death and destruction on millions of civilians, and on the other hand, we trust him to make an ironclad deal that blocks the mad mullahs from getting the ultimate weapons of mass destruction.
Oh, and in consideration of Putin’s efforts for world peace, any construction work Russia does in Iran related to the nuke deal would be exempt from sanctions imposed over Ukraine. As Biden would say, no joke.
If this sounds absolutely insane, get a load of Step Three. The Biden bots are actively considering, as a bonus to the mullahs, removing the terrorist designation of their main military group, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Recall that Trump droned the longtime commander of the Guards’ elite Quds Force, Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, who was responsible for killing and maiming thousands of American soldiers in Iraq. Soleimani had spread terror in the region for decades, yet Biden said during the 2020 campaign he would not have ordered the hit.
Under the Iran deal, the dangerous Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps force will no longer be designated as terrorists.
His objection is probably relevant to the fact that Iran added the demand about removing the terror label. They figured they were pushing on an open door with the appeaser in chief.
Reports say all the group must do is pledge to make nice and stop killing Iran’s enemies across the Middle East and a separate agreement will lift the sanctions blocking its financing, travel, etc., as if it’s the Chamber of Commerce.
The whole notion is so far off the charts that the Jewish News Syndicate reports that Israeli leaders, already unhappy about the prospect of any deal with Iran, initially refused to believe the White House would even consider giving a free pass to the Revolutionary Guards.
Iranians still honor Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani and Iraqi Cmdr. Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis two years after former President Donald Trump ordered their assassinations.
Convinced the proposal is real, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid issued a furious statement denouncing the group as “responsible for attacks on American civilians and American forces throughout the Middle East” and said it was “behind plans to assassinate senior American government officials.”
Bennett and Lapid continued: “The IRGC were involved in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Syrian civilians; they destroyed Lebanon and they are brutally oppressing Iranian civilians. They kill Jews because they are Jews, Christians because they are Christians, and Muslims because they refuse to surrender to them.”
Former American diplomats who have advised both Democrats and Republicans in the region agreed the idea stinks.
Dennis Ross tweeted that the concept “makes us look naive” and, citing the group’s recent rocket attacks in Iraq that nearly struck an American consulate, added: “For the IRGC, which admitted this week to firing rockets into Erbil, to promise to de-escalate regionally is about as credible as Putin saying Russia would not invade Ukraine.”
Iran claimed responsibility for firing ballistic missiles near the US consulate in Erbil, Iraq, in response to an Israeli strike on the Iranian Revolutionary Guard in Syria.
Ambassador Martin Indyk tweeted that removing the Guards from the terror list would be seen as a “betrayal” by many US allies who suffered from their brutal terrorism.
Nonetheless, it looks as if Biden wants to give the terrorists a pass in exchange for a vague promise. The White House has said no decision has been reached, which probably means it has but officials won’t defend it publicly until the agreement is signed.
There is one potential roadblock to all the madness, and that is the Senate. Because the entire package is new, Senate approval is required.
Many people believe it should be considered a formal treaty, which would require two-thirds support. Instead, Democrats are likely to try to use an end run similar to the one they used in 2015 to get the first deal through.
After a GOP-led filibuster effort failed, 58 to 42, the pact was deemed approved through what one critic called “brilliant political subterfuge.” That critic, Eric R. Mandel, director of the Middle East Political Information Network, writes in The Hill: “So, let’s recap: Forty-two senators were able to bind America to an agreement that should have required the votes of 66 senators for a treaty.”
If the Senate lets anything like that happen again, it will prove that Biden’s love of extremely bad ideas is contagious.
Grossi and the IAEA must walk a fine line diplomatically to even get access to the ZNPP, which sits in Russia-occupied southeastern Ukraine, so he opted not to comment on what appears to be a new sinister Russian tactic: trying to induce Ukraine’s nuclear power stations into a catastrophic meltdown.
Ukraine has four operating nuclear power plants, including the massive ZNPP, now just behind Russian lines. The threat to the ZNPP is the most grave of Russia’s menacing waves of attacks on Ukraine’s energy infrastructure
. Russian forces regularly shell the ZNPP’s surrounding area as a cynical way to discourage Ukrainian advances. In doing so, shelling attacks frequently cut off normal power supply to the plant, which dramatically raises the specter of nuclear reactor failure. Nuclear reactors need incoming energy to function properly; without it, the facilities must rely on stores of diesel fuel to run.
Grossi reported that on March 9, 2023, Russian attacks caused the ZNPP to lose “all off-site power. … As a result, all 20 of the site’s emergency diesel generators were activated. … This is the first time the site has lost all power since Nov. 23, 2022.” He noted that “this is the sixth time that the [ZNPP] has lost all off-site power and has had to operate in this emergency mode. … And if we allow this to continue, time after time, then one day our luck will run out.”
It appears Russia is trying to run down this luck by deliberately targeting the electrical substations and connection lines closest to Ukraine’s nuclear power stations. Russian shelling near the ZNPP in November 2022 disconnected the power station from its main “Dniprovska” power line, which is also one of three power lines connected to the Southern Ukrainian Nuclear Power Plant (SUNPP) in Mykolayiv Oblast. In effect, Russian artillery barrages cut connection to two of Ukraine’s nuclear power facilities, prompting SUNPP operators to reduce its power output to avert disaster. Subsequent shelling and rocket attacks near the SUNPP in February and March 2023 have prompted similar concerns.
The effect of this ultra-targeted campaign is twofold. Substations are key electrical grid nodes that receive energy from generating stations and distribute that energy into smaller branches of the grid toward cities and towns in Ukraine. Striking the substations cuts power to homes, schools, hospitals and businesses — precisely the inhumane bombing campaign that Western countries have condemned for the past several months.
This new spate of attacks could make things a whole lot worse. Nuclear power plants are an efficient source of power but cannot be shut off easily. So, when relevant substations are down, there is no outlet for nuclear power to be distributed through the rest of the network. As a result, energy builds up as it bounces back and forth between the only two possible endpoints — the reactor and the damaged substation. Think about a tennis ball thrown against a wall: the ball loses velocity after hitting the wall and eventually falls safely to the ground. But imagine a tennis ball thrown against a wall and then immediately racketed back against that wall — it will retain more velocity bouncing between those two points. This is the danger of Russia’s insidious new strategy: if enough energy builds up between the reactor and the substation, the whole system could crash.
If that were to happen, Ukraine and the world would be staring down a Russian-induced nuclear meltdown. Ukraine relies on nuclear power for over 50 percent of its energy supply. Russian forces’ sustained threat to the ZNPP has forced that plant to a complete shutdown. As IAEA chief Grossi noted, the safety and security of the ZNPP too frequently depends entirely on the external supply of electricity from the Ukrainian grid just to avoid collapse.
Even worse, Russia is targeting not just the ZNPP. The prospect of losing energy production from SUNPP, or Ukraine’s two other nuclear power plants in central-southern Khmelnytskyi Oblast and northwestern Rivne Oblast, to a Moscow missile attack would put the country in danger of severe, extended blackouts. Ukraine would be forced to rely on emergency power while trying to push Russian forces out of its territory and dealing with the environmental and humanitarian fallout of a nuclear disaster.
Such an attack would be an obvious escalation of the war. Vladimir Putin’s forces would have single-handedly created a nuclear disaster in the heart of Europe. As Grossi and the IAEA make clear, this is not a distant prospect. A Russian-induced nuclear accident and the ensuing environmental and health disaster would require a strong, swift response from Ukraine’s Western allies and from Russia’s two major diplomatic partners, China and India.
To help reduce the threat of a nuclear accident, the United States should first publicly announce that it believes Russia is deliberately targeting Ukraine’s nuclear power plants through strikes on adjacent energy infrastructure. The Biden administration has done this effectively before by preempting planned Russian provocations in January 2022, and in 2023 on the possibility of China sending Russia weapons and Russia’s stirring up tensions in Moldova. Therefore, the administration must make the deliberate sabotage of civilian facilities and its auxiliary infrastructure that provides safety and security of NPPs a clear “red line” not to cross.
The administration would do well to pair this message with the threat of coordinated U.S.-European Union sanctions on Russian state-owned nuclear energy company Rosatom. This would signal Moscow that “we know what you’re doing; knock it off.”
Leaders from China and India have reportedly conveyed to Putin that Russia’s use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine would be unacceptable. The U.S. should engage Beijing and India to get word to Putin that Russia’s attacks on nuclear energy facilities and relevant substations would also be “red lines.”
Washington can also help stop Russia’s attacks at their source. Supplying Ukraine with longer-range missile systems, such as Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS), would force the Russian military to move their positions back to 300 kilometers from the front lines. U.S. provisions of 80-kilometer range High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) have helped Ukraine win back Kherson and fend off Russian attacks in the east using this strategy.
ATACMS would give Ukraine an even better chance of breaking Russian lines again in its expected summer counteroffensive and liberate the ZNPP. Russian forces certainly could still threaten Ukrainian energy facilities, but they would have to expend precious stores of longer-range missiles to do so and could not indiscriminately shell the ZNPP in particular.
The Biden administration continues to hold out on sending Ukraine F-16 fighter jets over Moscow in fact is escalating the war. Among the jets’ many uses, Ukraine could employ F-16s to shoot down high-trajectory Russian rockets that ground-based air defense systems struggle to locate. The ability to prevent a nuclear disaster — and thus further escalation — should be reason enough for the White House to send F-16s to Ukraine.Red states win with Inflation Reduction Act — GOP wants to kill it anywayIsn’t the Social Security Trust Fund already broke?
The world recoiled in horror when Russia began its campaign to freeze Ukrainians last fall. Moscow is now raising the stakes and not-so-subtly aiming to cause a nuclear catastrophe in southern Ukraine. This requires a robust response from the West and earnest engagement from China and India with the Kremlin. The only person who may stand to gain from causing a nuclear meltdown in Ukraine is Putin — world leaders must combine forces to stop him.
Andrew D’Anieri is assistant director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center. Follow him on Twitter @andrew_danieri.
Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh met in Beirut with Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah to discuss resistance efforts against Israel, after a tense weekend in which his terror group fired rockets across the country’s southern and northern borders.
Haniyeh’s deputy Saleh al-Arouri was also present at the meeting, which was reported on by the affiliated news outlet Al-Mayadeen.
In Israel, the IDF continued to reinforce itself with additional reserve forces, which was itself a response to several days of rocket attacks from Gaza, then Lebanon and then Syria, as well as multiple terror incidents and tension surrounding the Temple Mount at the height of Passover and Ramadan.Top ArticlesRead More
The IDF last week had already called up unspecified numbers of reservist Border Police officers, and air defense and air force attack personnel. On Saturday, it was announced that there would be reinforcements of police in Tel Aviv following a car-ramming attack there.
“The crimes of the Zionist regime are a sign of weakness and are proof of a bright and promising future for the resistance movement.”Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi
IRAN’S PRESIDENT Ebrahim Raisi meets with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Tehran, earlier this month. (credit: OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL WEBSITE / REUTERS)
Then on Sunday, the IDF and Israel Police announced that they were calling up an additional four companies of reservists, after having called up six companies in recent weeks.
All of this came after the IDF called up multiple additional battalions (larger than companies) in recent weeks to handle security issues in Huwara and other West Bank hot spots.
The IDF has also sent clear signals that it views Iran, Syria and Hezbollah as being responsible for the overall threat picture, even as it accused Hamas or Palestinian groups affiliated with it of actually firing the rockets.
In its responses to rocket fire, the IDF struck not only Hamas positions in Lebanon and Gaza, but also Iranian ones in Syria, as well as some affiliated with the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad.
There was speculation that the IDF was trying to get Assad to restrain Iran and get Tehran to restrain the groups that fired on Israel, or face further IDF retaliation.
There have been no new rockets fired on any front since the IDF’s latest airstrikes against Syria on Sunday morning.
Iranian, Syrian presidents talk “resistance” against Israel
Also on Sunday, Assad and Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi discussed Ramadan and “resistance” efforts against Israel. According to Iranian state media outlets, Raisi told Assad that “the crimes of the Zionist regime are a sign of weakness and are proof of a bright and promising future for the resistance movement.”
Although there were confrontations between Palestinians and the Israel Police, they were muted compared to last week. On Wednesday, police stormed al-Aqsa Mosque in order to ferret out Palestinians who tried to barricade themselves inside overnight in violation of a curfew agreed upon with the Wakf Islamic religious trust, through which Jordan administers the Muslim holy sites.
In that incident, police fired stun grenades and removed the people inside; Palestinians in the mosque shot fireworks and threw stones at Israeli forces. Dozens of Palestinians were reportedly injured or arrested in those clashes.
Footage from the scene published by Palestinian media showed police officers hitting Palestinians in the mosque with chairs and batons and arresting many of them.
A few hours after last week’s clashes, 10 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip toward southern Israel. That was followed by further rocket fire in the next two days from Gaza, Lebanon and later Syria.
In fact, over Saturday night and Sunday, the police did not have much direct conflict with Palestinians, despite some of them violating the curfew again.
There were also no new terror incidents on Sunday after multiple incidents on Friday in Tel Aviv and the Jordan Valley.
Present-day Pakistan is on the brink of collapse, plagued by longstanding and crippling problems that have left it reliant on outside help. The country’s economy has been decimated by corrupt officials and a small group of wealthy business and bureaucratic elites who hold the reins of power. Currently, Pakistan’s foreign debt accounts for 80% of its GDP, and its representatives are forced to travel to other friendly nations to seek loans with exorbitant interest rates, ultimately paid for by the Pakistani people. Additionally, the country’s foreign reserves are inadequate, totaling only Rs 25 thousand crore, enough to cover just three weeks’ worth of expenses.
This situation has led to various crises, with politicians willing to risk national assets to try to solve the country’s economic problems. One of Pakistan’s most powerful assets is its nuclear arsenal, which is seen as essential to its existence in the face of its rivals, India and Israel.
Aristocrats of Pakistan are hindering national growth by focusing on personal issues rather than constitutional matters. They claim that they will not sell off Pakistan’s nuclear assets under any circumstances. Civilian unrest has yet to escalate to the point of clashing with police or rangers, but if stringent measures and corrective actions are not taken soon, Pakistan could be compared to war-torn countries such as Syria, Yemen, and some African nations, suffering from internal terrorism and civil war that spreads into neighboring countries. SAJID ALI NAICH, Khairpur Nathan Shah.
The Chinese aircraft carrier Shandong joined large-scale maneuvers directed against Taiwan in recent days as Beijing conducted what it described as practice blockades of the island as well as so-called “precision strikes,” marking a notable escalation in terms of rhetoric. The aircraft carrier’s appearance came during a larger three-day exercise that also included other warships, plus missile and rocket forces on the mainland.
As the drills around Taiwan came to an end today, the PLA said it had “comprehensively tested” the capabilities of multiple units under combat conditions.
The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) exercise, which was reportedly codenamed Joint Sword, began on Saturday, after Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen returned to Taipei after a meeting in Los Angeles with U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
“The troops in the theater are ready to fight all the time and can fight at any time, resolutely crushing any form of Taiwan independence separatism and foreign interference,” the PLA’s Eastern Theater Command said in a statement.
The People’s Republic of China views Taiwan as a rogue province that is fully within its sovereign territory. It has never ruled out the use of force to bring it under Beijing’s control in the future and, in recent years in particular, has undertaken increasingly complex large-scale military maneuvers in the Taiwan Strait and around the island.A PLA Navy Type 072A (Yuting II) class landing ship sails towards the zone where China said it would conduct live fire exercises northeast of Pingtan island, the closest point in China to Taiwan, in China’s southeast Fujian province on April 10, 2023. Photo by GREG BAKER/AFP via Getty Images
The latest drill was one of the biggest to date, at least in terms of PLA aviation activity. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense, as of 6:00 P.M. local time today, there were 12 Chinese ships and no fewer than 91 military aircraft around the island. Those aircraft included J-15 carrier-based fighter jets operating from the Shandong, as well as J-16 and Su-30 Flanker multirole fighters, the J-16D electronic attack derivative of the Chinese-made Flanker, and H-6 bombers that are assessed to be capable of delivering nuclear weapons.A screen capture from the latest exercise shows a PLA Air Force J-16D electronic warfare aircraft (nearest camera) and a J-16 multirole fighter escorting a missile-armed H-6KG bomber. via Twitter/CCTV-7
On at least one occasion, Chinese and Taiwanese warships came into relatively close proximity to one another, as evidenced by imagery released by both countries. A report from Reuters, citing an unnamed source familiar with the security situation in the region, said that the PLA conducted simulated attacks by aircraft and warships against “foreign military targets” in the waters off the southwestern coast of Taiwan.
Of the detected aircraft, 54 crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait and entered Taiwan’s Southwest and Southeast Air Defense Identification Zones, or ADIZ.
It’s worth noting that Taiwan’s ADIZ covers not only the entirety of the strait but also portions of mainland China, too. As for the median line, this serves as a de facto boundary between Taiwan and the mainland. While crossing the median line is itself not an uncommon occurrence, the scale of such activity by the PLA has ramped up considerably in recent times.
As for Taiwan, its Republic of China Armed Forces said they had “monitored the situation and tasked our assets to respond.” In an official statement, Taipei said it would “never relax” its efforts to strengthen combat readiness and would closely monitor the PLA missile forces as well as the movements of the Shandong.
For this latest round of maneuvers, China released an unusually detailed breakdown of the kinds of activities its armed forces undertook. According to a report on Chinese state television today, the aircraft involved in the drills included H-6 bombers armed with live missiles. These are said to have worked alongside warships to “form a multi-directional island-encompassing blockade situation.” This is a clear reference to one of the strategies that could be employed by Beijing were it go on the offensive against Taiwan, namely, an aerial and maritime blockade of the island with the aim of choking Taiwan into submission.
In one video released by the Eastern Theater Command on its WeChat instant messaging account, an H-6 bomber was shown flying over what was described as airspace north of Taiwan.
“The missiles are in good condition,” the narrator says. Next, another voice says: “Start the fire control radar, lock on the target,” while the video cuts to footage of a missile under the wing.
Although no actual missile launch is shown, the video does include one of the pilots preparing for what is described as a simulated attack, before pressing the launch button.
While multiple aircraft and warships have previously been involved in these Taiwan-related drills, the appearance of one of the two aircraft carriers active with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) is notable.
According to the Japan Ministry of Defense, the Shandong was active in air operations in waters close to the Okinawan islands on Sunday. The same source stated that jet fighters and helicopters had been launched and recovered on the carrier 120 times between Friday and Sunday. At one point, the carrier — accompanied by three other warships and a support vessel — came within around 140 miles of Japan’s Miyako island.
The involvement of the Shandong in the Taiwan-oriented war games points to the growing power of Chinese carrier aviation in general. More specifically, it points to the likelihood that this, or another carrier would be available to launch fixed-wing operations by fighter jets from the east of Taiwan during hostilities, something that is far more complicated to achieve from the mainland. The combination of carrier aircraft and long-range bombers approaching Taiwan from the east makes the defense of the island a much more challenging proposition.
As well as PLA aircraft and naval vessels, the latest series of exercises also tested the country’s missile and rocket forces. On Sunday, the Chinese military said it conducted simulated precision strikes against Taiwan.
“Under the unified command of the theater joint operations command centre, multiple types of units carried out simulated joint precision strikes on key targets on Taiwan island and the surrounding sea areas,” Chinese state television reported on Sunday, adding that the PLA was continuing “to maintain an offensive posture around the island.”
Another video posted to WeChat by the Eastern Theater Command showed an animation of simulated attacks, with missiles fired from land, sea, and air into Taiwan. Two of the missiles were shown exploding in flames as they hit their targets. The video doesn’t appear to be technically accurate, but serves more as a general representation.
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said that particular attention was being paid to the PLA Rocket Force for the duration of the maneuvers.
“Regarding the movements of the Chinese communists’ Rocket Force, the [Taiwanese] military also has a close grasp through the joint intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance system, and air defense forces remain on high alert,” the ministry said.
The Taiwanese response to the maneuvers also included the deployment of launchers for Hsiung Feng series anti-ship/land attack cruise missiles in Pingtung county in the very south of the island, according to a report from Reuters.
While the drills are now over, they have once again shown that Beijing is increasingly willing to conduct significant shows of force in response to the visits of U.S. officials to Taiwan, or of their Taiwanese counterparts to the United States. Indeed, based on the fallout of U.S. Speaker of the House Pelosi’s trip to Taiwan last year, this would now seem to be something like a standard reaction.
At the same time, these kinds of maneuvers are ever more explicitly aimed at practicing for a potential future armed confrontation with Taiwan. As well as testing the PLA’s ability to establish a blockade around the island, China is now openly stating that its strike assets are practicing for precision attacks against Taiwan. This becomes even more ominous when considering that the PLA is known to train for decapitation strikes against Taiwanese leadership, hoping to cripple decision-making and thereby lead to a swift victory.
For the time being, the United States and the international community at large will no doubt be keeping a close eye on Chinese military exercises in the area, as well as any other indicators of a potential actual military operation. After all, it’s highly likely that any offensive directed against the island would be followed by a long string of large-scale exercises, which would then morph into a real invasion, for example.
In the meantime, Taiwan has said that it will respond calmly to any future PLA drills so as not to provoke a conflict. However, Beijing is clearly much less concerned about potential escalation — a position in keeping with its continued willingness to consider force to bring Taiwan back under its control.
IRAN’S PRESIDENT Ebrahim Raisi meets with Syrian President Bashar Assad in Tehran, earlier this month. (credit: OFFICIAL PRESIDENTIAL WEBSITE / REUTERS)
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