Russia Begins Operations in Syria: End Game for the US Empire?
- Thread starter Ocean
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As far as I can determine the humanitarian aid for some Syrian areas is as recent as 02/17/2016 using a Reuters article for reference.
Aid reaches residents of besieged Syrian towns: U.N.
If the account above is factual the aid is not hampering the Russians from "cutting rebel supply lines". :/
Aid reaches residents of besieged Syrian towns: U.N.
If the account above is factual the aid is not hampering the Russians from "cutting rebel supply lines". :/
angelburst29
The Living Force
Time for Washington to Admit 'Russia Is Right on Syria'
http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160215/1034756552/washington-should-admit-russia-is-right-on-syria.html
Moscow warned the US about the consequences of interfering in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and happened to be right. In the Syrian conflict, Russia also turned out more clear-sighted. Washington has to admit that both countries will benefit from cooperation and start supporting Moscow’s strategy in Syria, a US analyst wrote.
Russia's strategy on settling the Syrian conflict has been more thought-out, a reputed American journalist and a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Stephen Kinzer, wrote in an article for the Boston Globe.
As for Washington's policy on the matter, it was wrong all the way, he believes. By making the toppling of the Syrian President Bashar Assad its primary goal, the US basically reduced to zero the possibility of negotiations between the Syrian government and opposition forces and contributed to the escalation of the conflict in the country, the analyst wrote.
Meanwhile, the toppling of Assad would create a "catastrophic vacuum" in Syria, which would be filled by representatives of terrorist groups. Russia takes the threat of such an outcome into account and for that reason wants victory for the government forces, Kinzer says. And he believes that the US needs to adopt this approach.
"We would have been more secure as a nation, and might have contributed to a more stable world, if we had followed Russia's foreign policy lead in the past," he wrote.
He also reminded about the failure of US interference in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They were right both times, and we were wrong. In Syria, Russia is right for a third time," he asserted.
Kinzer concluded that the best decision for Washington would be to support Moscow's strategy in Syria, otherwise it will only encourage continuous bloodshed in the region. By stubbornly refusing to cooperate, the US does itself more harm to itself than it does to Russia.
Britain scrambles fighters to intercept Russian bombers
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia-fighters-idUKKCN0VQ1YL
British Typhoon fighter jets intercepted two Russian Tu-160 bomber planes heading towards British airspace on Wednesday, a spokeswoman from the Ministry of Defence said.
The British aircraft were scrambled from a Royal Air Force base in eastern England and escorted the Russian planes while they flew in an area which is closely monitored by Britain, but outside its territorial airspace.
“At no point did the Russian aircraft enter UK territorial airspace,” the spokeswoman said, without giving more specific details of the location of the incident.
The Russian Defence Ministry did not respond to written questions submitted by Reuters.
Intercepts of Russian aircraft by NATO have increased over the last year amid heightened tensions between the West and Moscow over Ukraine. There was a similar incident last November.
NATO’s Syria War Footing Under Cover of Migrant Crisis
http://m.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/02/15/nato-syria-war-footing-under-cover-migrant-crisis.html
The US-led NATO alliance is dispatching warships to the Mediterranean to allegedly help ease Europe’s refugee crisis. However, a closer look at the naval vessels in the NATO mission shows that this is no refugee rescue attempt – but rather a full-on war mobilization.
The timing comes just as US-Russian diplomatic talks on the Syrian crisis reach a make-or-break moment, suggesting that NATO is preparing military action in league with Turkey in order to salvage the covert war for regime change in Syria.
That war has seen rapidly mounting losses for the United States and its allies who have been fueling clandestine proxy militias to topple the Assad government since March 2011. Those losses have escalated since Russia began its aerial bombing campaign four months ago to help stabilize the allied Syrian state of President Bashar al-Assad.
After a meeting with NATO ministers in Brussels on Thursday, the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that «without delay» the Standing Maritime Group 2 would be dispatched and «will be tasked to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance of the illegal [refugee smuggling] crossings in the Aegean Sea in cooperation with relevant authorities».
Significantly, in addition to the Aegean Sea crossing, the NATO mission will be tasked with monitoring the Syrian-Turkey border, again allegedly to combat human trafficking of refugees. That purported surveillance implies that the NATO vessels will be operating in the East Mediterranean, near Cyprus, where the Standing Maritime Group 2 is normally based.
«Mr Stoltenberg said reconnaissance and intelligence gathering was also being stepped up at the Turkey-Syria border», according to the BBC.
The mobilization has been ordered by NATO Supreme Commander General Philip Breedlove. Breedlove has distinguished himself previously for his rabid Cold War-style rhetoric against Russia. His new role, ostensibly, as a concerned humanitarian does not seem fitting.
The New York Times reported: «Gen. Philip M Breedlove of the United States Air Force, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, has ordered ships to the Aegean, Mr Stoltenberg said. The vessels are from Canada, Germany, Greece and Turkey, officials said».
Breedlove is quoted by the NY Times as saying: «This mission has literally come together in the last 20 hours, and I have been tasked now to go back and define the mission. We had some very rapid decision making and now we have to go out to do some military work».
The NATO military commander appears to be dissembling. Last week, NATO reported that the Standing Maritime Group 2 had just completed «extensive» training operations with the Turkish navy in the East Mediterranean, according to the alliance’s own website.
The same group of vessels are now being sent allegedly on a «refugee rescue» mission. It beggars belief that General Breedlove, the top NATO military planner, claims that «this has literally come together in the last 20 hours».
Comprising the NATO Standing Maritime Group 2 are three ships: FGS Bonn (Germany), HMCS Fredericton (Canada) and a Turkish Barbaros vessel. These are heavy-duty warships, bigger than destroyer class, each bristling with an array of weaponry, including anti-aircraft, anti-ship, anti-submarine and anti-missile firepower.
When the NATO naval group – which is described as a «rapid reaction force» – conducted its exercises last week in the East Mediterranean, the maneuvers included drills with Turkish F-16 fighter jets and corvettes.
Britain’s Independent newspaper cites NATO’s secretary-general Stoltenberg as saying that the naval mission will involve five ships and that more vessels may be included.
The Independent added: «The extent to which the NATO vessels will interact with refugee boats remains unclear. NATO diplomats said that rather than direct intervention, intelligence gathered about people-smugglers is likely to be handed over to Turkish coastguards to allow them to combat the traffickers more effectively».
Stoltenberg said that the objective was «not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats» but about contributing «critical information and surveillance to help counter human trafficking and criminal networks».
If NATO ships are not there to interact with refugee vessels, then what are they for?
The notion that heavy-duty warships are sent to tackle human trafficking gangs is also not plausible. The traffickers rarely make the crossing on the overcrowded boats with the refugees. After the extortionate fees are handed over on Turkish shores, the boats are pushed out to sea by the traffickers who then disappear inland.
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was also attending the NATO meeting in Brussels. He said of the new putative rescue mission: «There is now a criminal syndicate that is exploiting these poor people and this is an organized smuggling operation. Targeting that is the way that the greatest effect can be had… That is the principal intent of this».
The question is: why now? Last year, more than 3,000 people perished in Mediterranean crossings and up to one million entered the EU. So, why is NATO suddenly finding a sense of urgency now in allegedly tackling Europe’s refugee problem? It doesn’t add up.
More glaringly incongruous is the vast mismatch in vessel types and the supposed humanitarian naval purpose. The Standing Maritime Group 2 is a war operation, not a coastguard formation.
Another clue is that the mission has been initiated by NATO members Germany and Turkey. Earlier this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Turkey where she publicly backed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s calls for Russia to halt its military operations in Syria. Merkel iterated the NATO propaganda line that Russian bombing has «inflicted civilian suffering» and is responsible for the latest surge in people fleeing the Syrian city of Aleppo to Turkey’s border.
Russia’s successful military support for Syrian government forces has enabled dramatic strategic gains against the anti-government militia, most of whom are al-Qaeda-linked foreign terror brigades who have been infiltrated and weaponized by the US and its NATO allies, including Turkey and regional partners Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
In a separate report this week, the New York Times disclosed that Washington and its allies are under increasing pressure from Russia’s military success in Syria. In a startling admission the NY Times reported: «The Russians have cut off many of the pathways the CIA has been using for the not-very-secret effort to arm rebel [read «terror»] groups, according to current and former [US] officials».
Losing the covert war in Syria because of Russia’s intervention, Washington is thus considering «Plan B», added the NY Times, which means «a far larger military effort directed at Assad».
The losing dynamic of the US-led covert war in Syria also explains why frustrations between Washington, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are bursting into the public sphere, with Erdogan in particular rebuking the Americans in speeches this week.
The deployment of NATO warships to the Mediterranean under the cover of «stemming Europe’s refugee crisis» may be a sop from Washington to Turkey to feign a more muscular response to the covert military losses in Syria, and thereby shut Erdogan up for a bit.
There again, it could be a sign of the adverted Plan B, and a real military contingency toward more direct US-led NATO intervention in Syria. Time will tell.
http://sputniknews.com/middleeast/20160215/1034756552/washington-should-admit-russia-is-right-on-syria.html
Moscow warned the US about the consequences of interfering in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and happened to be right. In the Syrian conflict, Russia also turned out more clear-sighted. Washington has to admit that both countries will benefit from cooperation and start supporting Moscow’s strategy in Syria, a US analyst wrote.
Russia's strategy on settling the Syrian conflict has been more thought-out, a reputed American journalist and a senior fellow at the Watson Institute for International Studies at Brown University, Stephen Kinzer, wrote in an article for the Boston Globe.
As for Washington's policy on the matter, it was wrong all the way, he believes. By making the toppling of the Syrian President Bashar Assad its primary goal, the US basically reduced to zero the possibility of negotiations between the Syrian government and opposition forces and contributed to the escalation of the conflict in the country, the analyst wrote.
Meanwhile, the toppling of Assad would create a "catastrophic vacuum" in Syria, which would be filled by representatives of terrorist groups. Russia takes the threat of such an outcome into account and for that reason wants victory for the government forces, Kinzer says. And he believes that the US needs to adopt this approach.
"We would have been more secure as a nation, and might have contributed to a more stable world, if we had followed Russia's foreign policy lead in the past," he wrote.
He also reminded about the failure of US interference in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"They were right both times, and we were wrong. In Syria, Russia is right for a third time," he asserted.
Kinzer concluded that the best decision for Washington would be to support Moscow's strategy in Syria, otherwise it will only encourage continuous bloodshed in the region. By stubbornly refusing to cooperate, the US does itself more harm to itself than it does to Russia.
Britain scrambles fighters to intercept Russian bombers
http://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-russia-fighters-idUKKCN0VQ1YL
British Typhoon fighter jets intercepted two Russian Tu-160 bomber planes heading towards British airspace on Wednesday, a spokeswoman from the Ministry of Defence said.
The British aircraft were scrambled from a Royal Air Force base in eastern England and escorted the Russian planes while they flew in an area which is closely monitored by Britain, but outside its territorial airspace.
“At no point did the Russian aircraft enter UK territorial airspace,” the spokeswoman said, without giving more specific details of the location of the incident.
The Russian Defence Ministry did not respond to written questions submitted by Reuters.
Intercepts of Russian aircraft by NATO have increased over the last year amid heightened tensions between the West and Moscow over Ukraine. There was a similar incident last November.
NATO’s Syria War Footing Under Cover of Migrant Crisis
http://m.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/02/15/nato-syria-war-footing-under-cover-migrant-crisis.html
The US-led NATO alliance is dispatching warships to the Mediterranean to allegedly help ease Europe’s refugee crisis. However, a closer look at the naval vessels in the NATO mission shows that this is no refugee rescue attempt – but rather a full-on war mobilization.
The timing comes just as US-Russian diplomatic talks on the Syrian crisis reach a make-or-break moment, suggesting that NATO is preparing military action in league with Turkey in order to salvage the covert war for regime change in Syria.
That war has seen rapidly mounting losses for the United States and its allies who have been fueling clandestine proxy militias to topple the Assad government since March 2011. Those losses have escalated since Russia began its aerial bombing campaign four months ago to help stabilize the allied Syrian state of President Bashar al-Assad.
After a meeting with NATO ministers in Brussels on Thursday, the alliance’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg announced that «without delay» the Standing Maritime Group 2 would be dispatched and «will be tasked to conduct reconnaissance, monitoring and surveillance of the illegal [refugee smuggling] crossings in the Aegean Sea in cooperation with relevant authorities».
Significantly, in addition to the Aegean Sea crossing, the NATO mission will be tasked with monitoring the Syrian-Turkey border, again allegedly to combat human trafficking of refugees. That purported surveillance implies that the NATO vessels will be operating in the East Mediterranean, near Cyprus, where the Standing Maritime Group 2 is normally based.
«Mr Stoltenberg said reconnaissance and intelligence gathering was also being stepped up at the Turkey-Syria border», according to the BBC.
The mobilization has been ordered by NATO Supreme Commander General Philip Breedlove. Breedlove has distinguished himself previously for his rabid Cold War-style rhetoric against Russia. His new role, ostensibly, as a concerned humanitarian does not seem fitting.
The New York Times reported: «Gen. Philip M Breedlove of the United States Air Force, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, has ordered ships to the Aegean, Mr Stoltenberg said. The vessels are from Canada, Germany, Greece and Turkey, officials said».
Breedlove is quoted by the NY Times as saying: «This mission has literally come together in the last 20 hours, and I have been tasked now to go back and define the mission. We had some very rapid decision making and now we have to go out to do some military work».
The NATO military commander appears to be dissembling. Last week, NATO reported that the Standing Maritime Group 2 had just completed «extensive» training operations with the Turkish navy in the East Mediterranean, according to the alliance’s own website.
The same group of vessels are now being sent allegedly on a «refugee rescue» mission. It beggars belief that General Breedlove, the top NATO military planner, claims that «this has literally come together in the last 20 hours».
Comprising the NATO Standing Maritime Group 2 are three ships: FGS Bonn (Germany), HMCS Fredericton (Canada) and a Turkish Barbaros vessel. These are heavy-duty warships, bigger than destroyer class, each bristling with an array of weaponry, including anti-aircraft, anti-ship, anti-submarine and anti-missile firepower.
When the NATO naval group – which is described as a «rapid reaction force» – conducted its exercises last week in the East Mediterranean, the maneuvers included drills with Turkish F-16 fighter jets and corvettes.
Britain’s Independent newspaper cites NATO’s secretary-general Stoltenberg as saying that the naval mission will involve five ships and that more vessels may be included.
The Independent added: «The extent to which the NATO vessels will interact with refugee boats remains unclear. NATO diplomats said that rather than direct intervention, intelligence gathered about people-smugglers is likely to be handed over to Turkish coastguards to allow them to combat the traffickers more effectively».
Stoltenberg said that the objective was «not about stopping or pushing back refugee boats» but about contributing «critical information and surveillance to help counter human trafficking and criminal networks».
If NATO ships are not there to interact with refugee vessels, then what are they for?
The notion that heavy-duty warships are sent to tackle human trafficking gangs is also not plausible. The traffickers rarely make the crossing on the overcrowded boats with the refugees. After the extortionate fees are handed over on Turkish shores, the boats are pushed out to sea by the traffickers who then disappear inland.
US Secretary of Defense Ash Carter was also attending the NATO meeting in Brussels. He said of the new putative rescue mission: «There is now a criminal syndicate that is exploiting these poor people and this is an organized smuggling operation. Targeting that is the way that the greatest effect can be had… That is the principal intent of this».
The question is: why now? Last year, more than 3,000 people perished in Mediterranean crossings and up to one million entered the EU. So, why is NATO suddenly finding a sense of urgency now in allegedly tackling Europe’s refugee problem? It doesn’t add up.
More glaringly incongruous is the vast mismatch in vessel types and the supposed humanitarian naval purpose. The Standing Maritime Group 2 is a war operation, not a coastguard formation.
Another clue is that the mission has been initiated by NATO members Germany and Turkey. Earlier this week, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was in Turkey where she publicly backed President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s calls for Russia to halt its military operations in Syria. Merkel iterated the NATO propaganda line that Russian bombing has «inflicted civilian suffering» and is responsible for the latest surge in people fleeing the Syrian city of Aleppo to Turkey’s border.
Russia’s successful military support for Syrian government forces has enabled dramatic strategic gains against the anti-government militia, most of whom are al-Qaeda-linked foreign terror brigades who have been infiltrated and weaponized by the US and its NATO allies, including Turkey and regional partners Saudi Arabia and Qatar.
In a separate report this week, the New York Times disclosed that Washington and its allies are under increasing pressure from Russia’s military success in Syria. In a startling admission the NY Times reported: «The Russians have cut off many of the pathways the CIA has been using for the not-very-secret effort to arm rebel [read «terror»] groups, according to current and former [US] officials».
Losing the covert war in Syria because of Russia’s intervention, Washington is thus considering «Plan B», added the NY Times, which means «a far larger military effort directed at Assad».
The losing dynamic of the US-led covert war in Syria also explains why frustrations between Washington, Turkey and Saudi Arabia are bursting into the public sphere, with Erdogan in particular rebuking the Americans in speeches this week.
The deployment of NATO warships to the Mediterranean under the cover of «stemming Europe’s refugee crisis» may be a sop from Washington to Turkey to feign a more muscular response to the covert military losses in Syria, and thereby shut Erdogan up for a bit.
There again, it could be a sign of the adverted Plan B, and a real military contingency toward more direct US-led NATO intervention in Syria. Time will tell.
angelburst29
The Living Force
Washington’s Machiavellian Game in Syria
http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/17/washington-s-machiavellian-game-in-syria/
In geopolitical analysis, when I examine a major political or economic development, it’s very important that I first look into myself, to feel if I’m blurring my analysis because of deep-felt personal wishes for a peaceful, more harmonious world, blurring the reality of a given nation or groups of nations. Similarly, if I take those malevolent patriarchs who dominate American and NATO policies today, I must be certain I know, not merely the surface of what an American President or Secretary of State might say on a given day. It can be a lie, a slick maneuver or it can be even honest. The work of any serious analyst is to sort out which it is, to go deeper, to “mine” the lode in order to see the real strategic implications.
Such is the case with finding out what is the real Washington policy—the economic and foreign policy today. For example, what is the real meaning and purpose behind the journey of the 92-year-old Henry Kissinger to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin and others recently? What’s the real purpose of John Kerry when he appears to follow a policy more friendly towards Russia than, say, his Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter? Is it the voice of a significant faction within the foreign policy establishment that genuinely seeks a shift in Washington policy with Moscow from confrontation and war towards detente, diplomacy and a policy of peace and economic cooperation? What’s the real intent of the Roman Pope in wanting to come together with the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the first such meeting between those two churches–east and west–since the Great Schism of 1054? Is that a positive step towards world peace or is it something ominous?
Washington: confusion or deception?
It’s a widespread notion, fostered by US and European mainstream and other media, even by media in Russia and China that Washington is in confused disarray, a Superpower or hegemon which has lost its bearings. Media analysts write of a policy clash or internal factional battle that renders any US action in destroying DAESH or ISIS in Syria and Iraq a ludicrous, bumbling joke.
From years of looking at US foreign policy, I’ve learned to bring a certain respect in to my assessment. The respect is not at all admiration but an appreciation that, after all, the world’s most powerful Superpower did not come to that position of power without extraordinary skills, cunning, a remarkable ability to lie convincingly, to deceive, to very precisely manipulate the weaknesses of their opponents.
That deception has been the hallmark of American foreign policy for the entire post-1945 period, as towards the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, when Gorbachev trusted his American interlocutors who solemnly promised that the West would never advance NATO to the East. The deception is the hallmark of US economic policies since Bretton Woods in 1944 established the Dollar as supreme, and which destroyed any potential challenge to the domination of the US dollar as reserve currency—the most strategic of the American pillars of power aside from that of the US military.
Some years ago I was told by a former West Point officer that the cadets of West Point who go on to become America’s future colonels, generals and military strategists, are steeped in Sun Tzu as well as in Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, which teaches “the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct.”
In international politics, it’s unwise to believe your enemy is stupid. It can be fatal. Mistakes, of course, they continuously make, only to re-program and correct or push on another front in their obsession with world power and control.
More useful is to assume they have a well-thought-through strategy behind a veil of Machiavellian lies and deception, rather than to assume stupidity as our operating premise. So, amid a most incredible array of contradictory indications out of Washington, what’s going on between the actors in the war against Syria and the entire Middle East today, in February 2016?
Using Russia in Syria
If we look at current US policies in the Middle East, especially in Syria and in Iraq, and assume it is a very well-thought-out strategy to reach a specific, well-defined goal, the situation looks very different.
My current conclusion is that under a smokescreen of apparent policy confusion and incompetence on the side of Washington, of the Pentagon, of the State Department and their backers on Wall Street, there is a carefully-planned strategy to ignite a war in the oil-and-gas-rich Middle East that will dramatically alter the political and geopolitical oil map of the world. Yes, another war about oil like so many of the wars of the last century, a Century of War as one of my books calls it.
The Washington-Wall Street think tanks behind the coming change are orchestrating the actions of state actors in the Middle East who, blinded by their own greed or desire for empire, Ottoman or Saudi, see not that they are falling into a fatal trap.
They apparently haven’t studied Sun Tzu, much less, even a thought of such deep themes as knowing themselves and knowing their enemy. They are mostly driven by burning hate, as with Erdogan and his Turkey today–hate for the Syrians, for the Kurds, for the Europeans, even for the Saudis with whom Erdogan claims to be allied. In Erdogan’s Kasbah, everyone has their daggers ready behind their backs.
Washington sets the trap
What can be the true strategy of Washington and their patrons in Wall Street in the present Middle East chaos called the “war to defeat DAESH” or IS?
It’s useful to go back to the end of September, 2015 when Russia surprised not only Washington, but the entire world, with the swiftness and effectiveness of its requested military intervention against DAESH and other terror groups destroying Syria.
It’s clear from the lack of an effective Washington response, and from subsequent Washington actions, that their policy strategists took time to recalculate their original regime change strategy for Syria. What emerges is the clear evidence that they decided to actually use that Russian military intervention to advance their original strategic plan for the region, much like classical martial arts teaches–use your opponent’s force against them. It smacks of Churchill’s strategy of luring Hitler into a Polish invasion in 1939 so Britain could declare war on Germany, but waiting until Germany invaded the Soviet Union before seriously acting, the period of so-called Phony War.
Washington has orchestrated events, including the apparent US-Russian accord around the UN Security Council Resolution 2254 of December 18, 2015 that led to Geneva III “peace” talks. The Geneva III talks were sabotaged from the outset by Washington’s control of the UN “peace” mediators, including US diplomat, now UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffery D. Feltman, and his subordinate, Staffan de Mistura, the Machiavellian United Nations Envoy to Syria and the Arab League. Washington acceded to Saudi demands that the large Syrian Kurdish minority, who are in the firing lines of DAESH in Syria, be excluded, and that Syrian “opposition” be determined by the oil-hungry Saudis.
Now, following the Munich talks of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) on February 12, co-chaired by Kerry and Lavrov, Russia and the USA have on paper agreed that, “cessation of hostilities will commence in one week, after confirmation by the Syrian government and opposition, following appropriate consultations in Syria.” Further, “The members of the ISSG reaffirmed that it is for the Syrian people to decide the future of Syria.”
Now there are two points that I find flashing red. The “cessation of hostilities” means that Russian highly-effective air support to the Syrian National Army and Hezbollah and other pro-Assad forces will stop or be significantly reduced at a critical point. Russian parliamentarians claim cessation will not apply to the areas around Aleppo controlled by DAESH or Al-Nusra Front, but that remains to be seen. In either case it is a trap.
That ceasefire will happen just as Syrian forces, backed by Russia are on the brink of a major victory in Aleppo, breaking the DAESH supply lines to Erdogan’s Turkey, the patron of DAESH along with the Saudi monarchy. Second, there is no demand that DAESH or Al-Nusra cease “hostilities.” That means Russia has agreed to stop support of Assad but DAESH is no party to the deal, leaving it free to rearm with Turkish and Saudi support. Now the plot thickens and gets very dangerous.
Janus-faced Washington
Washington policy–the policy of the USA military-industrial complex and their Wall Street bankers– has in no way changed. That’s clear. I find no convincing evidence to the contrary. They plan to destroy Syria as a functioning nation, to finish the destruction of Iraq begun in 1991, and to spread that destruction now to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, and across the entire oil and gas-rich Middle East. They are simply using other means to that end given the “game-changing” presence of Russia since September 30.
While State Secretary John Kerry was working the “soft cop” routine with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the run-up to the February 12 Munich talks, on February 10 a Pentagon spokesman falsely accused the Russian military of hitting two hospitals in Aleppo, even though, by prior agreement, it was US aircraft that operated over the city on that day. The US Pentagon spokesman, Colonel Steve Warren, charged that Russian aircraft in Syria were using “dumb” bombs, “indiscriminately scattering those bombs across populated areas regardless of whether those populated areas have women and children, civilians or hospitals,” charges denied by Moscow.
Two days later in Munich, Lavrov, on behalf of Moscow, apparently compromised on its offer to impose a ceasefire in three weeks and instead accepted one week, a potentially devastating setback for the near-victory of the Syrian National Army forces to retake Aleppo and seal the Turkey DAESH supply route. It’s interesting that that decision came only nine days after Henry Kissinger met with Putin in Moscow. We may never know if there was a connection. Then on February 12, Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the committee for international affairs at the Federation Council, told TASS that the areas still occupied by terrorists such as DAESH and Al-Nusra were not covered by the Munich ceasefire.
The Pentagon is also quietly putting “boots on the ground” in Iraq. War jargon in Washington has become so dehumanized in the era of drone warfare that we no longer speak of the soldiers, merely their “boots.” They are preparing a major military move in Syria whether through Turkish and Saudi proxies or direct, or both, despite the nice sounding words about humanitarian aid and UN supervised Syrian elections in 18 months. At the same time, US military veterans are preparing the propaganda in the US for a ten-year siege before the US could drive the last DAESH terrorist out of the oil-rich Mosul, the heart of north Iraqi oil production.
On January 22 in an interview with CNBC Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated that the US intends to defeat Islamic State’s greatest strongholds: the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the IS “capital” Raqqa, in Syria.
“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and there will be boots on the ground, and I want to be clear about that. But it’s a strategic question whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold rather than trying to substitute for them,” Carter said. “We’re prepared to do a great deal because we have the finest fighting force the world has ever seen. We can do a lot ourselves,” Carter said.
The US says it has already sent 50 special operations forces to northern Syria to gather intelligence and maintain contacts with local forces. “It is a keyhole through which one gets a lot of insight, and thereby allows us more effectively to bring the huge weight of coalition military power to bear on the battlefield in an effective way,” he stated. A leading Russian Duma parliamentarian, Vladimir Soloyvov, head of the Russian parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Carter’s statements as a Washington publicity move to “steal thunder in fighting terrorism in the Middle East,” a sign that some at least in the Russian policy establishment do not really know their enemy.
A spreading world war
I’m going to make a prediction which you can verify as accurate or, hopefully, not. In about two months I estimate, around late March or April it will be clear. The US Machiavellians have lured not only Turkey’s Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Salman, but now Moscow into their trap in the Middle East. The initial losers in this unfolding deadly game will be Saudi, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and likely Russia. The ultimate losers, eventually, will also be the American Patriarchs or oligarchs behind these incessant wars of destruction, but not immediately, short of a miracle.
Look carefully at the little-reported statements in recent days of two key Washington war actors–Joe Biden and John Kerry. On January 24, Vice President Joe Biden, the one who orchestrated the US coup d’ etat in Kiev in February 2014, met with Turkish President and would-be Sultan of a neo-Ottoman imperium, Recep Erdogan. Biden told Erdogan and Prime Minister Davotoglu that Washington wanted Turkey and Iraq to “coordinate” on an emerging US military plan to take back the Iraqi city of Mosul from DAESH or the so-called Islamic State. An Obama Administration official described the Mosul attack as in “hard-core planning” stages, though not imminent.
The unnamed US “senior” official, most likely Biden, stated that the US is also selecting several hundred Sunni Arabs in Syria, as well as some Turks, who Turkey says its government has identified as “potential fighters,” to help the US close the roughly 60 miles of border with Syria that remains under Islamic State control. The source added that Washington is hoping to finalize a package in coming weeks of new technological assistance for Turkey to aid in securing that stretch of border.
Biden also strongly backed Turkey’s fight against the Turkish Kurdish PKK and said that the US would strengthen its military campaign against ISIS if there is no agreement on a political solution in Syria. Joe Biden well knows that Erdogan and Turkish MIT intelligence head, Hakan Fidan fully back DAESH and fully are out to create ethnic cleansing against the Kurds in Turkey, and in Syria. He knows because the CIA worked with Fidan, a US educated Turkish military veteran, at secret Turkish bases over the past two years to train DAESH terrorists in the Washington war against Assad.
If you are beginning to smell a big skunk here, you have a healthy sense of smell.
So now we have Washington and Erdogan bringing undesired US and Turkish troops into Iraq’s Mosul region to prepare a major military operation, with or without the agreement of Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has repeatedly and impotently demanded the Turkish army leave Mosul.
Why Mosul?
You may fairly ask, why Mosul? To paraphrase Bill Clinton in his 1992 famous retort to George H.W. Bush, “It’s the oil, stupid.” The US failed operation dubbed Arab Spring, the failed CIA and Obama Administration backing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across Middle East oil states, and now their operations with Turkey in Mosul and Syria are all about the oil.
This time, however it isn’t about taking over the rich oilfields of Iraq and Syria. It’s about destroying them. The US-engineered, French-executed destruction of Qaddafi’s Libya is the model. Iraq, as Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Policy Task Force discovered, holds the world’s third largest proven conventional oil reserves, on a par with Iran, with Saudi reserves the largest. The area around Mosul and the Kurd-controlled Kirkuk fields nearby are the current focus of the US military strategy. In Syria, DAESH terrorists control most all Syrian oilfields, where they illegally export with aid of Erdogan’s family to world markets to finance their terror campaign against Assad’s regime.
An ominous wire report sent a shiver down my spine when I read it. On January 28, US Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, head of the US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria, said that the US military was on site at the Mosul Dam to assess “the potential” for the collapse. Were it to be blown up, it would send a flood of water down the heavily populated Tigris river valley.
“The likelihood of the dam collapsing is something we are trying to determine right now… all we know is when it goes, it’s going to go fast and that’s bad,” MacFarland told reporters in Baghdad. The US State Department estimates up to 500,000 people could be killed and over one million rendered homeless should Iraq’s biggest dam collapse.
It would likely flood the large oilfields of Kirkuk on its path, rendering them inoperable. Whoever controls the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, controls most of the country’s water and power resource. The dam holds back over 12 billion cubic meters of water that is crucial for irrigation in the farming areas of Iraq’s western Nineveh province. In a 2007 letter, US General David Petraeus, a key figure in the destruction of Iraq and in the creation of what became DAESH, warned Iraq’s government that “A catastrophic failure of Mosul Dam would result in flooding along the Tigris River all the way to Baghdad.”
Washington Proxy War Builds
Combine this statement by General MacFarland, head of the US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria on that Mosul Dam, the Biden talks to get Turkey’s military invasion accepted by Iraq “in the war against DAESH” and the encouragement by State Secretary John Kerry of Prince Salman’s Saudi war against Yemen, as well as the recent Davos statements by Ash Carter. Add to that the fact that the Saudi and Turkish militaries just announced plans undertake joint military actions to “cooperate against common threats.”
On February 13, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu confirmed a joint Turkish-Saudi joint attack plan for invading Syria, telling press, “If we have such a strategy, then Turkey and Saudi Arabia may launch a ground operation.” xvi
Now add to that the fact that Turkish military began shelling a Syrian airbase and village recently retaken by Syrian Kurds, with the argument that the Kurds of Syria were “terrorists” like the Turkish PKK Kurds. Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu confirmed the cross-border mortar shelling into Syria territory on February 13: “We will retaliate against every step (by the YPG),” he told state broadcaster TRT Haber. “The YPG will immediately withdraw from Azaz and the surrounding area and will not go close to it again.”
Now add the fact that this week Washington repeated that it does not regard the Syrian Kurds as terrorists and that the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) have just opened its first foreign representative office in Moscow and we begin to see the outlines of Washington’s strategy of steering heated-up and hated-up Turkey and Saudi Arabia to trigger Washington’s surrogate war, a war where Turkey, a NATO member, Saudi and the Gulf Arab oil states, find themselves in a direct military confrontation with Russia in Aleppo province of Syria. The Turkish shelling at present is clearly a testing of the waters of a war with Russia to see how, in the wake of their ceasefire agreement, they will react. Will Russia retaliate by hitting Turkish military targets, in a NATO country?
Combine all that with the quiet but strategic Pentagon deployments inside Syria and Iraq with “boots on the ground,” and we have the combination for an explosion across the oilfields of the entire Middle East that would rock the world. Truly, as the old Greek saying goes,
whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/02/17/washington-s-machiavellian-game-in-syria/
In geopolitical analysis, when I examine a major political or economic development, it’s very important that I first look into myself, to feel if I’m blurring my analysis because of deep-felt personal wishes for a peaceful, more harmonious world, blurring the reality of a given nation or groups of nations. Similarly, if I take those malevolent patriarchs who dominate American and NATO policies today, I must be certain I know, not merely the surface of what an American President or Secretary of State might say on a given day. It can be a lie, a slick maneuver or it can be even honest. The work of any serious analyst is to sort out which it is, to go deeper, to “mine” the lode in order to see the real strategic implications.
Such is the case with finding out what is the real Washington policy—the economic and foreign policy today. For example, what is the real meaning and purpose behind the journey of the 92-year-old Henry Kissinger to Moscow to meet Vladimir Putin and others recently? What’s the real purpose of John Kerry when he appears to follow a policy more friendly towards Russia than, say, his Assistant Secretary Victoria Nuland or Secretary of Defense Ash Carter? Is it the voice of a significant faction within the foreign policy establishment that genuinely seeks a shift in Washington policy with Moscow from confrontation and war towards detente, diplomacy and a policy of peace and economic cooperation? What’s the real intent of the Roman Pope in wanting to come together with the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, the first such meeting between those two churches–east and west–since the Great Schism of 1054? Is that a positive step towards world peace or is it something ominous?
Washington: confusion or deception?
It’s a widespread notion, fostered by US and European mainstream and other media, even by media in Russia and China that Washington is in confused disarray, a Superpower or hegemon which has lost its bearings. Media analysts write of a policy clash or internal factional battle that renders any US action in destroying DAESH or ISIS in Syria and Iraq a ludicrous, bumbling joke.
From years of looking at US foreign policy, I’ve learned to bring a certain respect in to my assessment. The respect is not at all admiration but an appreciation that, after all, the world’s most powerful Superpower did not come to that position of power without extraordinary skills, cunning, a remarkable ability to lie convincingly, to deceive, to very precisely manipulate the weaknesses of their opponents.
That deception has been the hallmark of American foreign policy for the entire post-1945 period, as towards the Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989, when Gorbachev trusted his American interlocutors who solemnly promised that the West would never advance NATO to the East. The deception is the hallmark of US economic policies since Bretton Woods in 1944 established the Dollar as supreme, and which destroyed any potential challenge to the domination of the US dollar as reserve currency—the most strategic of the American pillars of power aside from that of the US military.
Some years ago I was told by a former West Point officer that the cadets of West Point who go on to become America’s future colonels, generals and military strategists, are steeped in Sun Tzu as well as in Italian Renaissance diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince, which teaches “the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct.”
In international politics, it’s unwise to believe your enemy is stupid. It can be fatal. Mistakes, of course, they continuously make, only to re-program and correct or push on another front in their obsession with world power and control.
More useful is to assume they have a well-thought-through strategy behind a veil of Machiavellian lies and deception, rather than to assume stupidity as our operating premise. So, amid a most incredible array of contradictory indications out of Washington, what’s going on between the actors in the war against Syria and the entire Middle East today, in February 2016?
Using Russia in Syria
If we look at current US policies in the Middle East, especially in Syria and in Iraq, and assume it is a very well-thought-out strategy to reach a specific, well-defined goal, the situation looks very different.
My current conclusion is that under a smokescreen of apparent policy confusion and incompetence on the side of Washington, of the Pentagon, of the State Department and their backers on Wall Street, there is a carefully-planned strategy to ignite a war in the oil-and-gas-rich Middle East that will dramatically alter the political and geopolitical oil map of the world. Yes, another war about oil like so many of the wars of the last century, a Century of War as one of my books calls it.
The Washington-Wall Street think tanks behind the coming change are orchestrating the actions of state actors in the Middle East who, blinded by their own greed or desire for empire, Ottoman or Saudi, see not that they are falling into a fatal trap.
They apparently haven’t studied Sun Tzu, much less, even a thought of such deep themes as knowing themselves and knowing their enemy. They are mostly driven by burning hate, as with Erdogan and his Turkey today–hate for the Syrians, for the Kurds, for the Europeans, even for the Saudis with whom Erdogan claims to be allied. In Erdogan’s Kasbah, everyone has their daggers ready behind their backs.
Washington sets the trap
What can be the true strategy of Washington and their patrons in Wall Street in the present Middle East chaos called the “war to defeat DAESH” or IS?
It’s useful to go back to the end of September, 2015 when Russia surprised not only Washington, but the entire world, with the swiftness and effectiveness of its requested military intervention against DAESH and other terror groups destroying Syria.
It’s clear from the lack of an effective Washington response, and from subsequent Washington actions, that their policy strategists took time to recalculate their original regime change strategy for Syria. What emerges is the clear evidence that they decided to actually use that Russian military intervention to advance their original strategic plan for the region, much like classical martial arts teaches–use your opponent’s force against them. It smacks of Churchill’s strategy of luring Hitler into a Polish invasion in 1939 so Britain could declare war on Germany, but waiting until Germany invaded the Soviet Union before seriously acting, the period of so-called Phony War.
Washington has orchestrated events, including the apparent US-Russian accord around the UN Security Council Resolution 2254 of December 18, 2015 that led to Geneva III “peace” talks. The Geneva III talks were sabotaged from the outset by Washington’s control of the UN “peace” mediators, including US diplomat, now UN Under-Secretary-General for Political Affairs, Jeffery D. Feltman, and his subordinate, Staffan de Mistura, the Machiavellian United Nations Envoy to Syria and the Arab League. Washington acceded to Saudi demands that the large Syrian Kurdish minority, who are in the firing lines of DAESH in Syria, be excluded, and that Syrian “opposition” be determined by the oil-hungry Saudis.
Now, following the Munich talks of the International Syria Support Group (ISSG) on February 12, co-chaired by Kerry and Lavrov, Russia and the USA have on paper agreed that, “cessation of hostilities will commence in one week, after confirmation by the Syrian government and opposition, following appropriate consultations in Syria.” Further, “The members of the ISSG reaffirmed that it is for the Syrian people to decide the future of Syria.”
Now there are two points that I find flashing red. The “cessation of hostilities” means that Russian highly-effective air support to the Syrian National Army and Hezbollah and other pro-Assad forces will stop or be significantly reduced at a critical point. Russian parliamentarians claim cessation will not apply to the areas around Aleppo controlled by DAESH or Al-Nusra Front, but that remains to be seen. In either case it is a trap.
That ceasefire will happen just as Syrian forces, backed by Russia are on the brink of a major victory in Aleppo, breaking the DAESH supply lines to Erdogan’s Turkey, the patron of DAESH along with the Saudi monarchy. Second, there is no demand that DAESH or Al-Nusra cease “hostilities.” That means Russia has agreed to stop support of Assad but DAESH is no party to the deal, leaving it free to rearm with Turkish and Saudi support. Now the plot thickens and gets very dangerous.
Janus-faced Washington
Washington policy–the policy of the USA military-industrial complex and their Wall Street bankers– has in no way changed. That’s clear. I find no convincing evidence to the contrary. They plan to destroy Syria as a functioning nation, to finish the destruction of Iraq begun in 1991, and to spread that destruction now to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, to Turkey, and across the entire oil and gas-rich Middle East. They are simply using other means to that end given the “game-changing” presence of Russia since September 30.
While State Secretary John Kerry was working the “soft cop” routine with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in the run-up to the February 12 Munich talks, on February 10 a Pentagon spokesman falsely accused the Russian military of hitting two hospitals in Aleppo, even though, by prior agreement, it was US aircraft that operated over the city on that day. The US Pentagon spokesman, Colonel Steve Warren, charged that Russian aircraft in Syria were using “dumb” bombs, “indiscriminately scattering those bombs across populated areas regardless of whether those populated areas have women and children, civilians or hospitals,” charges denied by Moscow.
Two days later in Munich, Lavrov, on behalf of Moscow, apparently compromised on its offer to impose a ceasefire in three weeks and instead accepted one week, a potentially devastating setback for the near-victory of the Syrian National Army forces to retake Aleppo and seal the Turkey DAESH supply route. It’s interesting that that decision came only nine days after Henry Kissinger met with Putin in Moscow. We may never know if there was a connection. Then on February 12, Vladimir Dzhabarov, first deputy chairman of the committee for international affairs at the Federation Council, told TASS that the areas still occupied by terrorists such as DAESH and Al-Nusra were not covered by the Munich ceasefire.
The Pentagon is also quietly putting “boots on the ground” in Iraq. War jargon in Washington has become so dehumanized in the era of drone warfare that we no longer speak of the soldiers, merely their “boots.” They are preparing a major military move in Syria whether through Turkish and Saudi proxies or direct, or both, despite the nice sounding words about humanitarian aid and UN supervised Syrian elections in 18 months. At the same time, US military veterans are preparing the propaganda in the US for a ten-year siege before the US could drive the last DAESH terrorist out of the oil-rich Mosul, the heart of north Iraqi oil production.
On January 22 in an interview with CNBC Defense Secretary Ash Carter stated that the US intends to defeat Islamic State’s greatest strongholds: the northern Iraqi city of Mosul and the IS “capital” Raqqa, in Syria.
“We’re looking for opportunities to do more and there will be boots on the ground, and I want to be clear about that. But it’s a strategic question whether you are enabling local forces to take and hold rather than trying to substitute for them,” Carter said. “We’re prepared to do a great deal because we have the finest fighting force the world has ever seen. We can do a lot ourselves,” Carter said.
The US says it has already sent 50 special operations forces to northern Syria to gather intelligence and maintain contacts with local forces. “It is a keyhole through which one gets a lot of insight, and thereby allows us more effectively to bring the huge weight of coalition military power to bear on the battlefield in an effective way,” he stated. A leading Russian Duma parliamentarian, Vladimir Soloyvov, head of the Russian parliament’s Foreign Relations Committee, dismisses Carter’s statements as a Washington publicity move to “steal thunder in fighting terrorism in the Middle East,” a sign that some at least in the Russian policy establishment do not really know their enemy.
A spreading world war
I’m going to make a prediction which you can verify as accurate or, hopefully, not. In about two months I estimate, around late March or April it will be clear. The US Machiavellians have lured not only Turkey’s Erdogan and Saudi Arabia’s Prince Salman, but now Moscow into their trap in the Middle East. The initial losers in this unfolding deadly game will be Saudi, Turkey, Syria, Iraq and likely Russia. The ultimate losers, eventually, will also be the American Patriarchs or oligarchs behind these incessant wars of destruction, but not immediately, short of a miracle.
Look carefully at the little-reported statements in recent days of two key Washington war actors–Joe Biden and John Kerry. On January 24, Vice President Joe Biden, the one who orchestrated the US coup d’ etat in Kiev in February 2014, met with Turkish President and would-be Sultan of a neo-Ottoman imperium, Recep Erdogan. Biden told Erdogan and Prime Minister Davotoglu that Washington wanted Turkey and Iraq to “coordinate” on an emerging US military plan to take back the Iraqi city of Mosul from DAESH or the so-called Islamic State. An Obama Administration official described the Mosul attack as in “hard-core planning” stages, though not imminent.
The unnamed US “senior” official, most likely Biden, stated that the US is also selecting several hundred Sunni Arabs in Syria, as well as some Turks, who Turkey says its government has identified as “potential fighters,” to help the US close the roughly 60 miles of border with Syria that remains under Islamic State control. The source added that Washington is hoping to finalize a package in coming weeks of new technological assistance for Turkey to aid in securing that stretch of border.
Biden also strongly backed Turkey’s fight against the Turkish Kurdish PKK and said that the US would strengthen its military campaign against ISIS if there is no agreement on a political solution in Syria. Joe Biden well knows that Erdogan and Turkish MIT intelligence head, Hakan Fidan fully back DAESH and fully are out to create ethnic cleansing against the Kurds in Turkey, and in Syria. He knows because the CIA worked with Fidan, a US educated Turkish military veteran, at secret Turkish bases over the past two years to train DAESH terrorists in the Washington war against Assad.
If you are beginning to smell a big skunk here, you have a healthy sense of smell.
So now we have Washington and Erdogan bringing undesired US and Turkish troops into Iraq’s Mosul region to prepare a major military operation, with or without the agreement of Iraq’s Prime Minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has repeatedly and impotently demanded the Turkish army leave Mosul.
Why Mosul?
You may fairly ask, why Mosul? To paraphrase Bill Clinton in his 1992 famous retort to George H.W. Bush, “It’s the oil, stupid.” The US failed operation dubbed Arab Spring, the failed CIA and Obama Administration backing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and across Middle East oil states, and now their operations with Turkey in Mosul and Syria are all about the oil.
This time, however it isn’t about taking over the rich oilfields of Iraq and Syria. It’s about destroying them. The US-engineered, French-executed destruction of Qaddafi’s Libya is the model. Iraq, as Dick Cheney’s 2001 Energy Policy Task Force discovered, holds the world’s third largest proven conventional oil reserves, on a par with Iran, with Saudi reserves the largest. The area around Mosul and the Kurd-controlled Kirkuk fields nearby are the current focus of the US military strategy. In Syria, DAESH terrorists control most all Syrian oilfields, where they illegally export with aid of Erdogan’s family to world markets to finance their terror campaign against Assad’s regime.
An ominous wire report sent a shiver down my spine when I read it. On January 28, US Army Lieutenant General Sean MacFarland, head of the US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria, said that the US military was on site at the Mosul Dam to assess “the potential” for the collapse. Were it to be blown up, it would send a flood of water down the heavily populated Tigris river valley.
“The likelihood of the dam collapsing is something we are trying to determine right now… all we know is when it goes, it’s going to go fast and that’s bad,” MacFarland told reporters in Baghdad. The US State Department estimates up to 500,000 people could be killed and over one million rendered homeless should Iraq’s biggest dam collapse.
It would likely flood the large oilfields of Kirkuk on its path, rendering them inoperable. Whoever controls the Mosul Dam, the largest in Iraq, controls most of the country’s water and power resource. The dam holds back over 12 billion cubic meters of water that is crucial for irrigation in the farming areas of Iraq’s western Nineveh province. In a 2007 letter, US General David Petraeus, a key figure in the destruction of Iraq and in the creation of what became DAESH, warned Iraq’s government that “A catastrophic failure of Mosul Dam would result in flooding along the Tigris River all the way to Baghdad.”
Washington Proxy War Builds
Combine this statement by General MacFarland, head of the US-led coalition against Daesh (ISIL) in Iraq and Syria on that Mosul Dam, the Biden talks to get Turkey’s military invasion accepted by Iraq “in the war against DAESH” and the encouragement by State Secretary John Kerry of Prince Salman’s Saudi war against Yemen, as well as the recent Davos statements by Ash Carter. Add to that the fact that the Saudi and Turkish militaries just announced plans undertake joint military actions to “cooperate against common threats.”
On February 13, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu confirmed a joint Turkish-Saudi joint attack plan for invading Syria, telling press, “If we have such a strategy, then Turkey and Saudi Arabia may launch a ground operation.” xvi
Now add to that the fact that Turkish military began shelling a Syrian airbase and village recently retaken by Syrian Kurds, with the argument that the Kurds of Syria were “terrorists” like the Turkish PKK Kurds. Turkish Prime Minister Davutoglu confirmed the cross-border mortar shelling into Syria territory on February 13: “We will retaliate against every step (by the YPG),” he told state broadcaster TRT Haber. “The YPG will immediately withdraw from Azaz and the surrounding area and will not go close to it again.”
Now add the fact that this week Washington repeated that it does not regard the Syrian Kurds as terrorists and that the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) have just opened its first foreign representative office in Moscow and we begin to see the outlines of Washington’s strategy of steering heated-up and hated-up Turkey and Saudi Arabia to trigger Washington’s surrogate war, a war where Turkey, a NATO member, Saudi and the Gulf Arab oil states, find themselves in a direct military confrontation with Russia in Aleppo province of Syria. The Turkish shelling at present is clearly a testing of the waters of a war with Russia to see how, in the wake of their ceasefire agreement, they will react. Will Russia retaliate by hitting Turkish military targets, in a NATO country?
Combine all that with the quiet but strategic Pentagon deployments inside Syria and Iraq with “boots on the ground,” and we have the combination for an explosion across the oilfields of the entire Middle East that would rock the world. Truly, as the old Greek saying goes,
whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.
angelburst29 said:
angelburst29,
Thanks for this article's penetrating analysis. It really is reaffirming my "gut" feelings of the motivations behind the events.
The greed for the control of the oil seems to be showing more and more.
It reminds me of a recent Cs session which gives me some hope for Putin's possible "surprises" that may sovle "major global imbalances":
Session 14 March 2015
PressTV
Turkish jets target PKK positions in northern Iraq
http://217.218.67.231/Detail/2016/02/18/450979/Turkey-airstrikes-PKK-positions-Haftanin-Iraq/
Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:36AM
Syrian forces hit by 'Israeli bombardment,' says monitor
http://www.dw.com/en/syrian-forces-hit-by-israeli-bombardment-says-monitor/a-19055090?
euronews (in English)
18 February 2016 - euronews full morning bulletin
Published on Feb 18, 2016
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjwtYGynWs
RT
Syria frontline video: Army retakes last militant stronghold in Latakia province
Published on Feb 18, 2016
Syrian Arab Army has completely retaken the town of Kinsabba in north-western part of the country, government’ s military spokesperson announced Thursday.
Turkish jets target PKK positions in northern Iraq
http://217.218.67.231/Detail/2016/02/18/450979/Turkey-airstrikes-PKK-positions-Haftanin-Iraq/
Thu Feb 18, 2016 11:36AM
Syrian forces hit by 'Israeli bombardment,' says monitor
http://www.dw.com/en/syrian-forces-hit-by-israeli-bombardment-says-monitor/a-19055090?
The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has said that a Syrian army outpost south of Damascus was hit by "Israeli bombardment." A pro-Syrian government military source has denied the report
"The location was targeted by three missile strikes, which caused physical damage," the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said in a report.
# المرصدالسوري #SOHR
@ syriahr
# Almrsdalsora cut roads Continuing intensive strikeshttp: // www. syriahr.com/?p=156691
https://twitter.com/syriahr/status/700374040314318851
# المرصدالسوري #SOHR
@ syriahr
The official account of the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights of the account, Official Syrian, The Observatory for Human Rights # Almrsd_alsora # Almrsdalsora # SOHR
https://twitter.com/syriahr
“It is unknown whether members of Hezbollah were inside the location or not,” SOHR added, referring to an armed Lebanese Shiite movement allied with the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
However, the Reuters news agency reported that a “pro-Syrian government military source” had denied the reports.
While mystery shrouds Israel’s involvement in the five-year Syrian conflict, both Damascus and Tehran have claimed that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have launched attacks in Syria.
In December 2014, Syrian state television reported that Israeli airstrikes were carried out near the nation’s capital.
Shortly after the alleged airstrikes, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards confirmed one of its generals had been killed in the attack “by the Zionist regime’s helicopters.”
Tensions between Jerusalem and Damascus escalated in 2013 amid skirmishes between the country’s forces in the Golan Heights, occupied by Israel in 1967.
Officially, Syria and Israel remain in a state of war since a peace deal to end the nearly 50-year conflict has eluded both parties.
euronews (in English)
18 February 2016 - euronews full morning bulletin
Published on Feb 18, 2016
_https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVjwtYGynWs
RT
Syria frontline video: Army retakes last militant stronghold in Latakia province
Published on Feb 18, 2016
Syrian Arab Army has completely retaken the town of Kinsabba in north-western part of the country, government’ s military spokesperson announced Thursday.
angelburst29
The Living Force
Obama Lectures Russia on Syrian “Quagmire”
http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-lectures-russia-on-syrian-quagmire/5508719
At a press conference Tuesday following a two-day summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) held in California, President Barack Obama was confronted with a question about his administration’s intentions with regard to the escalating war in Syria.
Reflecting a growing drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and sections of the US foreign policy establishment, the reporter asked whether Obama had been “outfoxed” by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Noting that Russia’s military intervention in Syria had helped turn the tide of battle in favor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against the Western-backed “rebels,” the reporter asked whether Washington would “step up military action” in support of the Islamist militias it is backing if the city of Aleppo fell to the government offensive.
Obama’s reply was a study in imperialist hypocrisy, deceit and historical falsification. Insisting, “This is not a contest between me and Putin,” the US president set out to prove that Putin was not winning.
“The fact that Putin finally had to send his own troops and his own aircraft and invest this massive military operation was not a testament to a great strength; it was a testament to the weakness of Assad’s position,” Obama insisted.
He continued: “That if somebody is strong, then you don’t have to send in your army to prop up your ally. They have legitimacy in their country and they are able to manage it their self, and then you have good relations with them. You send in your army when the horse you’re backing isn’t effective. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
The result, he further argued, would be Russia’s finding itself “in a quagmire,” compelled to invest in “a permanent occupation of Syria,” which would “not be the best thing for Russia,” given the state of its economy.
One is prompted to ask, who is Obama to lecture Putin? But in the end, one has to acknowledge that if anyone knows whereof he speaks on questions of quagmires and permanent occupations, it is the president of the United States.
Just last October, Obama reneged on his pledge to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan before the end of his presidency in January 2017. Ten thousand US soldiers remain deployed there, nearly 15 years after the US invaded the country in 2001. US commanders have indicated they may ask for that number to be increased in the face of a mounting insurgency against the puppet government installed by Washington. The regime in Kabul, it can truly be said, lacks legitimacy and remains in power solely thanks to the US troops propping it up.
It is a similar story in Iraq, which the US invaded in 2003, toppling its government, devastating its society and causing the deaths of an estimated one million men, women and children. Roughly 4,000 US troops are back in Iraq following the ignominious June 2014 collapse of the puppet forces the US armed and trained, at the cost of some $24 billion, in the face of an offensive by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The number of US troops—which does not count another 2,500 deployed across the border in Kuwait and some 7,000 private military contractors—is expected to climb.
Then there is Libya, whose secular government Washington and its allies brought down in the US-NATO war of 2011, killing tens of thousands of civilians, murdering the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and leaving Libya in a state of permanent chaos and civil war. At Tuesday’s press conference, Obama was asked by another reporter whether another “military intervention in Libya will be necessary.” He did not rule out the idea, stressing that Washington “will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind.”
If there is a “quagmire” in the Middle East, it is of Washington’s creation, the product of unending wars for regime change aimed at imposing US hegemony over the region and its vast energy resources. Syria is an integral part of this process.
[...] Whatever the ratio of civilian deaths caused by US versus Russian airstrikes, the undeniable fact is that the suffering of the Syrian people is the product of a concerted drive by the US, NATO and Washington’s Middle East allies to topple the government of Assad and impose a puppet regime more subservient to Western interests.
[...] Meanwhile, the danger of a full-scale military confrontation in Syria between the US and Russia, the world’s two major nuclear powers, continues to grow, with Washington’s allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, seeking to provoke such a clash as a means of furthering their own regional and domestic political interests.
For its part, US imperialism, whatever the immediate tactical calculations of the Obama administration, will be driven by the setbacks it has suffered in Syria and, more fundamentally, the deepening crisis of American capitalism to ever more brutal and reckless acts of military aggression and violence.
Syria: Army Finds More Proof of Turkey's Aid to Terrorists in Aleppo (Video)
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941129000458
The Syrian army and popular forces freed two strategic villages of Masqan and Ahras in the countryside of Aleppo city from terrorists' control and found abundant proofs of Turkey's drug assistance to the militants.
Field sources in Masqan village said that the Syrian army's surprise attacks on terrorists' positions in the region made the militants flee the battlefield and facilitated the freedom of Masqan and Ahras villages.
They added that the terrorist groups had turned a school in Masqan into their medical center in which a large number of Turkey-made medical packages and drugs were found, a proof of Ankara's logistic support for the militants.
The Turkish Army, worried about the imminent collapse of terrorist-held lands in Northern Syria, has sent more military equipment and troops to one of the Turkish border cities near Syria following the recent victories of the Syrian army and Kurdish fighters against the militants in the provinces of Aleppo and Lattakia, Turkish media disclosed on Wednesday.
The city of Kilis in the Southern part of Turkey near the border with Syria and the Gaziantep-Aleppo highway has been the destination of a growing number of Turkish army troops and their modern arms and military equipment, the Turkish language news agency, Duqan reported.
Syrian Army Seizes Israel-Made Mines, Ammo Cargo of Militants in Sweida (Photos)
http://en.farsnews.com/imgrep.aspx?nn=13941128001172
Syrian army soldiers, tipped off by intelligence agents on Wednesday, ambushed a vehicle fully laden with Israeli-made mines and artillery shells on a road in the western part of Sweida province and seized its illegal cargo.
Senior Saudi Army Commanders Oppose Sending Ground Forces to Syria
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941129000604
Senior Saudi commanders in a letter to the crown prince and interior minister, Mohammed bin Nayef, underlined their opposition to the dispatch of ground troops to Syria, warning of its dire consequences.
Ten Saudi Generals have signed the letter which foresees definite defeat and failure for Riyadh if the Arab monarchy sends forces to Syria following its failure in the nearly-one-year-long war on Yemen, the NTHNEWS news website reported on Thursday.
According to the report, the text of the letter has been released in different Yemeni media and gone viral on the social media.
The idea of Riyadh’s possible ground invasion of Syria was first raised on February 4 by Ahmed Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi Defense Ministry.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are both part of an effort to create an alleged “Islam Army,” ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism in the region and consisting of 34 Sunni Islam nations.
Almost the entire range of extremist and terrorist groups are supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with their key commanders and leaders being Saudi nationals. ISIL, Al-Nusra and other extremist groups pursue the same line of ideology exercised and promoted by Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism. Hundreds of Saudi clerics are among the ranks of ISIL and Al-Nusra to mentor the militants.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/obama-lectures-russia-on-syrian-quagmire/5508719
At a press conference Tuesday following a two-day summit of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) held in California, President Barack Obama was confronted with a question about his administration’s intentions with regard to the escalating war in Syria.
Reflecting a growing drumbeat of criticism from Republicans and sections of the US foreign policy establishment, the reporter asked whether Obama had been “outfoxed” by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Noting that Russia’s military intervention in Syria had helped turn the tide of battle in favor of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad against the Western-backed “rebels,” the reporter asked whether Washington would “step up military action” in support of the Islamist militias it is backing if the city of Aleppo fell to the government offensive.
Obama’s reply was a study in imperialist hypocrisy, deceit and historical falsification. Insisting, “This is not a contest between me and Putin,” the US president set out to prove that Putin was not winning.
“The fact that Putin finally had to send his own troops and his own aircraft and invest this massive military operation was not a testament to a great strength; it was a testament to the weakness of Assad’s position,” Obama insisted.
He continued: “That if somebody is strong, then you don’t have to send in your army to prop up your ally. They have legitimacy in their country and they are able to manage it their self, and then you have good relations with them. You send in your army when the horse you’re backing isn’t effective. And that’s exactly what’s happened.”
The result, he further argued, would be Russia’s finding itself “in a quagmire,” compelled to invest in “a permanent occupation of Syria,” which would “not be the best thing for Russia,” given the state of its economy.
One is prompted to ask, who is Obama to lecture Putin? But in the end, one has to acknowledge that if anyone knows whereof he speaks on questions of quagmires and permanent occupations, it is the president of the United States.
Just last October, Obama reneged on his pledge to withdraw all US troops from Afghanistan before the end of his presidency in January 2017. Ten thousand US soldiers remain deployed there, nearly 15 years after the US invaded the country in 2001. US commanders have indicated they may ask for that number to be increased in the face of a mounting insurgency against the puppet government installed by Washington. The regime in Kabul, it can truly be said, lacks legitimacy and remains in power solely thanks to the US troops propping it up.
It is a similar story in Iraq, which the US invaded in 2003, toppling its government, devastating its society and causing the deaths of an estimated one million men, women and children. Roughly 4,000 US troops are back in Iraq following the ignominious June 2014 collapse of the puppet forces the US armed and trained, at the cost of some $24 billion, in the face of an offensive by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The number of US troops—which does not count another 2,500 deployed across the border in Kuwait and some 7,000 private military contractors—is expected to climb.
Then there is Libya, whose secular government Washington and its allies brought down in the US-NATO war of 2011, killing tens of thousands of civilians, murdering the country’s leader, Muammar Gaddafi, and leaving Libya in a state of permanent chaos and civil war. At Tuesday’s press conference, Obama was asked by another reporter whether another “military intervention in Libya will be necessary.” He did not rule out the idea, stressing that Washington “will continue to take actions where we’ve got a clear operation and a clear target in mind.”
If there is a “quagmire” in the Middle East, it is of Washington’s creation, the product of unending wars for regime change aimed at imposing US hegemony over the region and its vast energy resources. Syria is an integral part of this process.
[...] Whatever the ratio of civilian deaths caused by US versus Russian airstrikes, the undeniable fact is that the suffering of the Syrian people is the product of a concerted drive by the US, NATO and Washington’s Middle East allies to topple the government of Assad and impose a puppet regime more subservient to Western interests.
[...] Meanwhile, the danger of a full-scale military confrontation in Syria between the US and Russia, the world’s two major nuclear powers, continues to grow, with Washington’s allies, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, seeking to provoke such a clash as a means of furthering their own regional and domestic political interests.
For its part, US imperialism, whatever the immediate tactical calculations of the Obama administration, will be driven by the setbacks it has suffered in Syria and, more fundamentally, the deepening crisis of American capitalism to ever more brutal and reckless acts of military aggression and violence.
Syria: Army Finds More Proof of Turkey's Aid to Terrorists in Aleppo (Video)
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941129000458
The Syrian army and popular forces freed two strategic villages of Masqan and Ahras in the countryside of Aleppo city from terrorists' control and found abundant proofs of Turkey's drug assistance to the militants.
Field sources in Masqan village said that the Syrian army's surprise attacks on terrorists' positions in the region made the militants flee the battlefield and facilitated the freedom of Masqan and Ahras villages.
They added that the terrorist groups had turned a school in Masqan into their medical center in which a large number of Turkey-made medical packages and drugs were found, a proof of Ankara's logistic support for the militants.
The Turkish Army, worried about the imminent collapse of terrorist-held lands in Northern Syria, has sent more military equipment and troops to one of the Turkish border cities near Syria following the recent victories of the Syrian army and Kurdish fighters against the militants in the provinces of Aleppo and Lattakia, Turkish media disclosed on Wednesday.
The city of Kilis in the Southern part of Turkey near the border with Syria and the Gaziantep-Aleppo highway has been the destination of a growing number of Turkish army troops and their modern arms and military equipment, the Turkish language news agency, Duqan reported.
Syrian Army Seizes Israel-Made Mines, Ammo Cargo of Militants in Sweida (Photos)
http://en.farsnews.com/imgrep.aspx?nn=13941128001172
Syrian army soldiers, tipped off by intelligence agents on Wednesday, ambushed a vehicle fully laden with Israeli-made mines and artillery shells on a road in the western part of Sweida province and seized its illegal cargo.
Senior Saudi Army Commanders Oppose Sending Ground Forces to Syria
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13941129000604
Senior Saudi commanders in a letter to the crown prince and interior minister, Mohammed bin Nayef, underlined their opposition to the dispatch of ground troops to Syria, warning of its dire consequences.
Ten Saudi Generals have signed the letter which foresees definite defeat and failure for Riyadh if the Arab monarchy sends forces to Syria following its failure in the nearly-one-year-long war on Yemen, the NTHNEWS news website reported on Thursday.
According to the report, the text of the letter has been released in different Yemeni media and gone viral on the social media.
The idea of Riyadh’s possible ground invasion of Syria was first raised on February 4 by Ahmed Asiri, a spokesman for the Saudi Defense Ministry.
Turkey and Saudi Arabia are both part of an effort to create an alleged “Islam Army,” ostensibly aimed at combating terrorism in the region and consisting of 34 Sunni Islam nations.
Almost the entire range of extremist and terrorist groups are supported by Saudi Arabia and Turkey, with their key commanders and leaders being Saudi nationals. ISIL, Al-Nusra and other extremist groups pursue the same line of ideology exercised and promoted by Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism. Hundreds of Saudi clerics are among the ranks of ISIL and Al-Nusra to mentor the militants.
angelburst29
The Living Force
Russia Is Fed up With NATO-MSM Complex False Flag Attacks (Excellent video! - English subtitles)
http://russia-insider.com/en/military/russia-fed-nato-msm-complex-false-flag-attacks-video/ri12906
The Russian MoD spokesman aptly exposed the total rubbish coming from the US military and western mass media.
Just imagine, Russia offers the US and NATO cooperation, even supplying mission details and targeting maps, yet in return have one of their pilots shot out of the sky and US A-10s bombing behind Russia's back only to be blamed for it all after the fact.
RMoD Press Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov delivered a brilliant run down of their ‘Western partners’ at a press briefing on their actions in Syria held on February 6, 2016. Interestingly, the culprits are starting to be called out by name.
A few selected statements:
“It has come to the point that pictures of Aleppo, destroyed long before the start of Russia’s operation in Syria, are presented by leading American and European channels as the results of alleged Russian bombardments.”
“Rights activists’ nonsense from London is one thing, but if it’s declared by a Pentagon representative posing as a military professional, that’s another (…) First of all, Colonel Warren is likely to be disappointed… Russian aircraft were not operating near Aleppo yesterday….
Only aviation of the anti-ISIS coalition flew over the city yesterday: warplanes and attack UAVs."
“As was previously promised to our American partners, this information will not remain hidden any more. Yesterday at 13:55 (MSK), two U.S. Air Force A-10 attack aircraft entered Syrian air space from Turkey and reaching Aleppo by the shortest path, made strikes against objects in the city… For some reason, Colonel Warren did not make this mission publicly known in the literal or even figurative sense.”
“…everybody already knows that detachments of the Syrian opposition are sharing reconnaissance data with us quite effectively. Today,
most of them are cooperating with the Syrian government.”
“If it keeps going this way, the Russian MoD will have to hold two briefings each time: One for the Russian side and another for those guys from the coalition who consider themselves professionals.”
Hat’s off to The Saker for pointing out the Major’s frank and informative statements that will have many ‘think tankers’ back at their drawing boards.
http://russia-insider.com/en/military/russia-fed-nato-msm-complex-false-flag-attacks-video/ri12906
The Russian MoD spokesman aptly exposed the total rubbish coming from the US military and western mass media.
Just imagine, Russia offers the US and NATO cooperation, even supplying mission details and targeting maps, yet in return have one of their pilots shot out of the sky and US A-10s bombing behind Russia's back only to be blamed for it all after the fact.
RMoD Press Spokesman Major General Igor Konashenkov delivered a brilliant run down of their ‘Western partners’ at a press briefing on their actions in Syria held on February 6, 2016. Interestingly, the culprits are starting to be called out by name.
A few selected statements:
“It has come to the point that pictures of Aleppo, destroyed long before the start of Russia’s operation in Syria, are presented by leading American and European channels as the results of alleged Russian bombardments.”
“Rights activists’ nonsense from London is one thing, but if it’s declared by a Pentagon representative posing as a military professional, that’s another (…) First of all, Colonel Warren is likely to be disappointed… Russian aircraft were not operating near Aleppo yesterday….
Only aviation of the anti-ISIS coalition flew over the city yesterday: warplanes and attack UAVs."
“As was previously promised to our American partners, this information will not remain hidden any more. Yesterday at 13:55 (MSK), two U.S. Air Force A-10 attack aircraft entered Syrian air space from Turkey and reaching Aleppo by the shortest path, made strikes against objects in the city… For some reason, Colonel Warren did not make this mission publicly known in the literal or even figurative sense.”
“…everybody already knows that detachments of the Syrian opposition are sharing reconnaissance data with us quite effectively. Today,
most of them are cooperating with the Syrian government.”
“If it keeps going this way, the Russian MoD will have to hold two briefings each time: One for the Russian side and another for those guys from the coalition who consider themselves professionals.”
Hat’s off to The Saker for pointing out the Major’s frank and informative statements that will have many ‘think tankers’ back at their drawing boards.
I doubt that Turkey + SA will risk a war with Russia without NATO. They have to force Russia in such a way that she has to strike inside the Turkish Border.
Targets may be the relentless Turkish Artillery brigades that operate along the border. But the build up of SA fighter jets inside Turkey hints to something much more.
Russia has air- superiority. But its outnumbered and its air-defense systems could be overrun if both Turkey and SA goes all in. If that happens, all Turkish air bases become targets immediately after. That would be Russia’s number one priority, and Russia has the capability to make it happen.
I don’t see anything right now that Erdogan + SA will back of and if it so happens that all the vassals of US/empire sing along with this obvious trap being set up against Russia. WW3 will happen.
The US Empire either falls apart by disobeying vassals. Or WW3 will happen.
Targets may be the relentless Turkish Artillery brigades that operate along the border. But the build up of SA fighter jets inside Turkey hints to something much more.
Russia has air- superiority. But its outnumbered and its air-defense systems could be overrun if both Turkey and SA goes all in. If that happens, all Turkish air bases become targets immediately after. That would be Russia’s number one priority, and Russia has the capability to make it happen.
I don’t see anything right now that Erdogan + SA will back of and if it so happens that all the vassals of US/empire sing along with this obvious trap being set up against Russia. WW3 will happen.
The US Empire either falls apart by disobeying vassals. Or WW3 will happen.
angelburst29
The Living Force
Putin thinks there is no alternative to political settlement in Syria
http://rbth.com/news/2016/02/19/putin-thinks-there-is-no-alternative-to-political-settlement-in-syria_569283
Russia stands for diplomatic settlement of the Syrian crisis, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said.
"Everyone, including Russia, is interested in preservation of the territorial and political integrity of all countries in the region, among them Syria, and everyone, including President Putin, thinks that there is no alternative to political settlement of that problem," he told reporters.
The presidential press secretary commented on the pledge of Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, to achieve full restoration of the territorial integrity, and a later statement of Russian Permanent Representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who said in an interview with Kommersant, that the position of Damascus was against Russia's diplomatic efforts.
He also recalled Putin's words that terrorism needed to be defeated in Syria to settle the Syria crisis.
A journalist said that al-Assad's statement actually demonstrated his refusal to engage in the Syria truce. "It [the truce] is now being discussed, wait, let us not jump the gun" Peskov said.
As to whether Churkin's advice, that al-Assad should follow the Russian lead in the Syrian crisis settlement, was the official position of Russia, Peskov said that such phrases should not be viewed outside the context, and noted that Churkin was the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN, and "this should be kept in mind."
Obama admits US-ISIS terror link
http://ahtribune.com/politics/533-obama-isis.html
Call it a Freudian slip, but US President Barack Obama appears to have come clean, for once, on the connection between American foreign policy and the so called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group.
In an address earlier this week to the leaders of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), gathered in California, Obama was answering questions from news reporters on various international topics. On the matter of terrorist groups expanding their foothold in Libya, the president said the following: “With respect to Libya…we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared.”
In casual parlance the phrase “go after” can mean “to destroy”. But the more literal meaning and perhaps the one that Obama inadvertently let slip is simply “to follow”–as in a partnered way.
In that case, what Obama is referring to is the actual foreign policy function of ISIS and its related al Qaeda terror network. Wherever these groups appear, then Washington appoints itself to follow them under the pretext of fighting terrorism. This pretext works very efficiently to nullify problems of international law. When the US sends its military into a foreign country to ostensibly combat terrorism then it is untrammeled by legal objections that it is violating other countries’ sovereignty. What would normally be seen as a gross violation –a military invasion by the US –is neatly transformed into an “anti-terror” operation. And if the incumbent foreign government complains about the “benevolent US assistance” then it can be toppled because it is “siding with the terrorists”.
This is, of course, the whole rationale behind the so-called War on Terror that Washington crafted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Just uttering the phrase War on Terror gives Washington license to invade and ransack any foreign state it chooses, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than one million people were killed by US forces “hunting down terrorists”.
Before that, the official pretexts were “War on Communism”or “War on Drugs”. But with the collapse of the “Evil Soviet Empire”, the first of these pretexts became redundant. Although, Washington and its NATO allies are trying their best to revive the “Russian Scare”by demonizing Vladimir Putin as the “new Hitler in Europe”. As for the War on Drugs, it didn’t quite have the required kick to pump up the Pentagon’s $600 billion annual budget, or to enthuse the American public, many of whom rather enjoy drugs anyway.
But the War on Terror, now that is, or at least was, a satisfying wheeze. It also has the added benefit of allowing federal authorities to crack down on civil rights and make all sorts of invasive controls over individual liberty, as in the latest controversy of the FBI demanding that Apple give them a digital key for unlocking phones and computers.
The primary function, however, remains: the terror groups, whether they go by the name of al Qaeda or ISIS, give Washington the convenient cover to militarily invade any country on the globe. The real agenda being regime change or commandeering the natural resources of the target country for the gratification of Wall Street banks and other American corporations –in the exact same scam that pertained in the old days of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who later confessed to being a henchman on behalf of US capitalism, by overthrowing governments in Central America and the Caribbean during the early 1900s.
Admittedly, sometimes the terrorists do get whacked by the Pentagon. No doubt about it that Obama and his generals have killed numerous al Qaeda-linked operatives with assassination drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Many more innocent civilians have also been murdered along the way by US drones.
The assassination of terror cadres by Washington may seem like a contradiction to the overall argument here that there is a mutual connection between the two. However, we shouldn’t think of Washington as a monolith. There are no doubt people within the US establishment who are dedicated to genuinely fighting terrorism, and sometimes they succeed.
But that doesn’t negate the central point that the US has covertly created these same terrorist groups to expedite its own foreign policy and geopolitical ambitions. We can’t go into the full history here, but it is well documented that the CIA engendered, mobilized and weaponized al Qaeda “the database” to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. It wasn’t just the CIA. British MI6, French DGSE and Pakistani SIS were involved, as were the Saudi regime who provided the billions of dollars of finance and fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology that perversely empowers cadres to kill anyone –men, women and children –whom is designated an “infidel”. In other words, perfect proxy killers for the powers-that-be.
Despite the propaganda pumped out in the Western mainstream media of a US-led coalition “fighting terrorism” i n Syria, the hard fact is that al Qaeda, ISIS and a plethora of other terrorist mercenary brigades were sent into Syria by the same US-led coalition for the purpose of regime change against the Russian and Iranian-allied government of President Bashar al-Assad. Readers can look up the candid admission of Lt General Michael Flynn, the former chief of US Defense Intelligence Agency as to the cynical calculations that Washington made in unleashing the terrorists on Syria.
If the US were really fighting terrorism in Syria then how do you explain this headline from McClatchy News referring to the huge discrepancy in Russian bombing raids compared with American. “Russia hit 1,888 targets in Syria in a week; the US count? Just 16”.
Face it. Until Russia intervened last September, the ISIS terror network had proliferated under US “bombing”to such an extent that Syria was in danger of being overthrown (as according to Washington’s plan).
Having failed in that mission largely because of Russia’s military intervention over the past five months, the fallback option provided by the terror groups is that they could be used to justify an outright military invasion of Syria by the US-led coalition, in the form of NATO-member Turkey and Saudi Arabia along with the other American-Arab puppet-regimes.
As Obama let slip at the ASEAN summit this week: “Wherever ISIS or al Qaeda appears, we will go after them.”
Well said Mr President. For once, you told the plain truth.
PS. The ASEAN venue where Obama was speaking at in Sunnylands, California is called “Rancho Mirage”. Kind of appropriate, don’t you think?
http://rbth.com/news/2016/02/19/putin-thinks-there-is-no-alternative-to-political-settlement-in-syria_569283
Russia stands for diplomatic settlement of the Syrian crisis, Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov has said.
"Everyone, including Russia, is interested in preservation of the territorial and political integrity of all countries in the region, among them Syria, and everyone, including President Putin, thinks that there is no alternative to political settlement of that problem," he told reporters.
The presidential press secretary commented on the pledge of Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, to achieve full restoration of the territorial integrity, and a later statement of Russian Permanent Representative to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, who said in an interview with Kommersant, that the position of Damascus was against Russia's diplomatic efforts.
He also recalled Putin's words that terrorism needed to be defeated in Syria to settle the Syria crisis.
A journalist said that al-Assad's statement actually demonstrated his refusal to engage in the Syria truce. "It [the truce] is now being discussed, wait, let us not jump the gun" Peskov said.
As to whether Churkin's advice, that al-Assad should follow the Russian lead in the Syrian crisis settlement, was the official position of Russia, Peskov said that such phrases should not be viewed outside the context, and noted that Churkin was the Russian Permanent Representative to the UN, and "this should be kept in mind."
Obama admits US-ISIS terror link
http://ahtribune.com/politics/533-obama-isis.html
Call it a Freudian slip, but US President Barack Obama appears to have come clean, for once, on the connection between American foreign policy and the so called Islamic State (ISIS) terror group.
In an address earlier this week to the leaders of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), gathered in California, Obama was answering questions from news reporters on various international topics. On the matter of terrorist groups expanding their foothold in Libya, the president said the following: “With respect to Libya…we will go after ISIS wherever it appears, the same way we went after al Qaeda wherever they appeared.”
In casual parlance the phrase “go after” can mean “to destroy”. But the more literal meaning and perhaps the one that Obama inadvertently let slip is simply “to follow”–as in a partnered way.
In that case, what Obama is referring to is the actual foreign policy function of ISIS and its related al Qaeda terror network. Wherever these groups appear, then Washington appoints itself to follow them under the pretext of fighting terrorism. This pretext works very efficiently to nullify problems of international law. When the US sends its military into a foreign country to ostensibly combat terrorism then it is untrammeled by legal objections that it is violating other countries’ sovereignty. What would normally be seen as a gross violation –a military invasion by the US –is neatly transformed into an “anti-terror” operation. And if the incumbent foreign government complains about the “benevolent US assistance” then it can be toppled because it is “siding with the terrorists”.
This is, of course, the whole rationale behind the so-called War on Terror that Washington crafted in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. Just uttering the phrase War on Terror gives Washington license to invade and ransack any foreign state it chooses, as in Afghanistan and Iraq, where more than one million people were killed by US forces “hunting down terrorists”.
Before that, the official pretexts were “War on Communism”or “War on Drugs”. But with the collapse of the “Evil Soviet Empire”, the first of these pretexts became redundant. Although, Washington and its NATO allies are trying their best to revive the “Russian Scare”by demonizing Vladimir Putin as the “new Hitler in Europe”. As for the War on Drugs, it didn’t quite have the required kick to pump up the Pentagon’s $600 billion annual budget, or to enthuse the American public, many of whom rather enjoy drugs anyway.
But the War on Terror, now that is, or at least was, a satisfying wheeze. It also has the added benefit of allowing federal authorities to crack down on civil rights and make all sorts of invasive controls over individual liberty, as in the latest controversy of the FBI demanding that Apple give them a digital key for unlocking phones and computers.
The primary function, however, remains: the terror groups, whether they go by the name of al Qaeda or ISIS, give Washington the convenient cover to militarily invade any country on the globe. The real agenda being regime change or commandeering the natural resources of the target country for the gratification of Wall Street banks and other American corporations –in the exact same scam that pertained in the old days of Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, who later confessed to being a henchman on behalf of US capitalism, by overthrowing governments in Central America and the Caribbean during the early 1900s.
Admittedly, sometimes the terrorists do get whacked by the Pentagon. No doubt about it that Obama and his generals have killed numerous al Qaeda-linked operatives with assassination drone strikes in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia and Yemen. Many more innocent civilians have also been murdered along the way by US drones.
The assassination of terror cadres by Washington may seem like a contradiction to the overall argument here that there is a mutual connection between the two. However, we shouldn’t think of Washington as a monolith. There are no doubt people within the US establishment who are dedicated to genuinely fighting terrorism, and sometimes they succeed.
But that doesn’t negate the central point that the US has covertly created these same terrorist groups to expedite its own foreign policy and geopolitical ambitions. We can’t go into the full history here, but it is well documented that the CIA engendered, mobilized and weaponized al Qaeda “the database” to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. It wasn’t just the CIA. British MI6, French DGSE and Pakistani SIS were involved, as were the Saudi regime who provided the billions of dollars of finance and fundamentalist Wahhabi ideology that perversely empowers cadres to kill anyone –men, women and children –whom is designated an “infidel”. In other words, perfect proxy killers for the powers-that-be.
Despite the propaganda pumped out in the Western mainstream media of a US-led coalition “fighting terrorism” i n Syria, the hard fact is that al Qaeda, ISIS and a plethora of other terrorist mercenary brigades were sent into Syria by the same US-led coalition for the purpose of regime change against the Russian and Iranian-allied government of President Bashar al-Assad. Readers can look up the candid admission of Lt General Michael Flynn, the former chief of US Defense Intelligence Agency as to the cynical calculations that Washington made in unleashing the terrorists on Syria.
If the US were really fighting terrorism in Syria then how do you explain this headline from McClatchy News referring to the huge discrepancy in Russian bombing raids compared with American. “Russia hit 1,888 targets in Syria in a week; the US count? Just 16”.
Face it. Until Russia intervened last September, the ISIS terror network had proliferated under US “bombing”to such an extent that Syria was in danger of being overthrown (as according to Washington’s plan).
Having failed in that mission largely because of Russia’s military intervention over the past five months, the fallback option provided by the terror groups is that they could be used to justify an outright military invasion of Syria by the US-led coalition, in the form of NATO-member Turkey and Saudi Arabia along with the other American-Arab puppet-regimes.
As Obama let slip at the ASEAN summit this week: “Wherever ISIS or al Qaeda appears, we will go after them.”
Well said Mr President. For once, you told the plain truth.
PS. The ASEAN venue where Obama was speaking at in Sunnylands, California is called “Rancho Mirage”. Kind of appropriate, don’t you think?
angelburst29
The Living Force
Why is US storing new tanks in hidden Norwegian caves? (Video)
http://www.thelocal.no/20160219/why-is-the-us-storing-new-tanks-in-hidden-norwegian-caves
Once dormant Cold War era caves are being restocked by the US Marines.
US Marines are using Cold War era Norwegian caves to store new tanks, artillery and other military equipment to ramp up their presence near the Nato-Russia border, CNN reported on Thursday
"Any gear that is forward-deployed both reduces cost and speeds up our ability to support operations in crisis, so we're able to fall in on gear that is ready-to-go and respond to whatever that crisis may be," Col. William Bentley, said in a Marine video posted to Facebook:
According to a Marines statement, the military began using the caves to store military equipment in 1981. When Cold War tensions subsided, the US military transferred the costs of maintaining the caves to Norway, Magnus Nordenman, the director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told CNN.
But with Russia flexing its muscles in the region, the cave complex is now back in active use. Nordenman told CNN that the caves hold enough equipment to support some 15,000 Marines.
Heather Conley, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Europe Program, told CNN that given the tense current relationship between Nato and Russia, northern Europe is now being viewed as a “theatre of operations”.
Now that we have a very new security context with Russia, it now makes sense to rethink what is needed," she said.
Russian aggression in the Nordics has been an ongoing concern for Norway and its neighbours in recent years.
In 2015, it was revealed that Russia rehearsed military takeovers of northern Norway, the Swedish island of Gotland and the Danish island of Bornholm.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish intelligence services have all reported that Russia is one of the biggest threats in the region.
Just last week, the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) singled Russian spying out as having major “damage potential” for Norwegian interests.
The Marines statement said that more than 16,000 troops will use equipment stored in the Norwegian caves later this month for cold weather training exercises.
The Marines have released video showing the Norwegian army assisting the Americans in learning how to best operate tanks and Amphibious Assault Vehicles in icy conditions.
U.S. military returns to Iceland
http://thebarentsobserver.com/security/2016/02/us-military-returns-iceland
Keflavik Air Base outside Reykjavik is to be base for U.S. military aircraft again, nearly ten years after the last forces left the country.
The U.S. Navy’s return to Keflavik revives an American presence that ended when the service shifted its focus in Europe away from the North Atlantic and toward the Mediterranean.
The Navy is asking for funds to upgrade an aircraft hangar at its former base in Keflavik, Iceland, as part of the Defense Department’s fiscal 2017 budget request, Navy officials say to Stars and Stripes. The hangar will house P-8 Poseidon aircraft, successor to the P-3 Orion once stationed at the base.
Established in 1951, the base is strategically located midway between the U.S. East Coast and Europe, making it ideal for patrolling the frigid waters between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K.
Naval Air Station Keflavik was home to thousands of servicemembers who supported Navy and Air Force fighter jets, tankers and rescue helicopters before closing in 2006.
For now, the Navy is only interested in deploying maritime patrol aircraft for short durations, as needed, the official said. The Navy could eventually establish regular patrol rotations at the base, the official said, which would likely resemble the Navy’s maritime patrol force at its air base in Sigonella, Sicily, where squadrons rotate out every six months.
“Iceland has become increasingly concerned with the Russian activity,” Work said in an interview with Defense News. “The Russians have long done transit flights where they pass close by Iceland, but they’ve recently made several circumnavigation flights – flying completely around the island nation. As a result, “Iceland is interested in increasing military cooperation.”
Russian submarines are also patrolling the North Atlantic more frequently than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
The United States has a long relationship with Iceland, and by treaty since 1951 continues to be responsible for the defense of the country. Iceland has no military, but the country’s coast guard fulfills most military missions, and is responsible for maintaining Keflavik as a military installation. The last U.S. forces left Iceland in 2006.
U.S. aircraft occasionally still use the base’s facilities. Two F-16s landed there recently when they experienced mechanical difficulties flying across the Atlantic. A US Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance and patrol aircraft also visited the base over several days in April to assess the feasibility of operating the aircraft at Keflavik, from where P-3 Orions regularly flew missions during and after the Cold War.
Since 2008, Iceland’s air space has been patrolled by NATO allies as part of the Icelandic Air Policing operation.
http://www.thelocal.no/20160219/why-is-the-us-storing-new-tanks-in-hidden-norwegian-caves
Once dormant Cold War era caves are being restocked by the US Marines.
US Marines are using Cold War era Norwegian caves to store new tanks, artillery and other military equipment to ramp up their presence near the Nato-Russia border, CNN reported on Thursday
"Any gear that is forward-deployed both reduces cost and speeds up our ability to support operations in crisis, so we're able to fall in on gear that is ready-to-go and respond to whatever that crisis may be," Col. William Bentley, said in a Marine video posted to Facebook:
According to a Marines statement, the military began using the caves to store military equipment in 1981. When Cold War tensions subsided, the US military transferred the costs of maintaining the caves to Norway, Magnus Nordenman, the director of the Transatlantic Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council, told CNN.
But with Russia flexing its muscles in the region, the cave complex is now back in active use. Nordenman told CNN that the caves hold enough equipment to support some 15,000 Marines.
Heather Conley, the director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Europe Program, told CNN that given the tense current relationship between Nato and Russia, northern Europe is now being viewed as a “theatre of operations”.
Now that we have a very new security context with Russia, it now makes sense to rethink what is needed," she said.
Russian aggression in the Nordics has been an ongoing concern for Norway and its neighbours in recent years.
In 2015, it was revealed that Russia rehearsed military takeovers of northern Norway, the Swedish island of Gotland and the Danish island of Bornholm.
Norwegian, Swedish and Danish intelligence services have all reported that Russia is one of the biggest threats in the region.
Just last week, the Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) singled Russian spying out as having major “damage potential” for Norwegian interests.
The Marines statement said that more than 16,000 troops will use equipment stored in the Norwegian caves later this month for cold weather training exercises.
The Marines have released video showing the Norwegian army assisting the Americans in learning how to best operate tanks and Amphibious Assault Vehicles in icy conditions.
U.S. military returns to Iceland
http://thebarentsobserver.com/security/2016/02/us-military-returns-iceland
Keflavik Air Base outside Reykjavik is to be base for U.S. military aircraft again, nearly ten years after the last forces left the country.
The U.S. Navy’s return to Keflavik revives an American presence that ended when the service shifted its focus in Europe away from the North Atlantic and toward the Mediterranean.
The Navy is asking for funds to upgrade an aircraft hangar at its former base in Keflavik, Iceland, as part of the Defense Department’s fiscal 2017 budget request, Navy officials say to Stars and Stripes. The hangar will house P-8 Poseidon aircraft, successor to the P-3 Orion once stationed at the base.
Established in 1951, the base is strategically located midway between the U.S. East Coast and Europe, making it ideal for patrolling the frigid waters between Greenland, Iceland and the U.K.
Naval Air Station Keflavik was home to thousands of servicemembers who supported Navy and Air Force fighter jets, tankers and rescue helicopters before closing in 2006.
For now, the Navy is only interested in deploying maritime patrol aircraft for short durations, as needed, the official said. The Navy could eventually establish regular patrol rotations at the base, the official said, which would likely resemble the Navy’s maritime patrol force at its air base in Sigonella, Sicily, where squadrons rotate out every six months.
“Iceland has become increasingly concerned with the Russian activity,” Work said in an interview with Defense News. “The Russians have long done transit flights where they pass close by Iceland, but they’ve recently made several circumnavigation flights – flying completely around the island nation. As a result, “Iceland is interested in increasing military cooperation.”
Russian submarines are also patrolling the North Atlantic more frequently than at any time since the end of the Cold War.
The United States has a long relationship with Iceland, and by treaty since 1951 continues to be responsible for the defense of the country. Iceland has no military, but the country’s coast guard fulfills most military missions, and is responsible for maintaining Keflavik as a military installation. The last U.S. forces left Iceland in 2006.
U.S. aircraft occasionally still use the base’s facilities. Two F-16s landed there recently when they experienced mechanical difficulties flying across the Atlantic. A US Navy P-8A Poseidon maritime surveillance and patrol aircraft also visited the base over several days in April to assess the feasibility of operating the aircraft at Keflavik, from where P-3 Orions regularly flew missions during and after the Cold War.
Since 2008, Iceland’s air space has been patrolled by NATO allies as part of the Icelandic Air Policing operation.
angelburst29
The Living Force
Russia Calls for UNSC Meeting on Potential Turkish Troops in Syria
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035052191/russia-unsc-turkey-syria.html
Russia will request a UN Security Council meeting amid possible Turkish plans to send troops to Syria, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Friday.
Russia also plans to introduce a resolution demanding to cease all actions undermining Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
"The situation is becoming more tense due to increased tensions on the Syrian-Turkish border and Turkey's stated plans to send troops to northern Syria… In this regard, Russia intends to convene a UN Security Council meeting today to discuss the matter," the ministry said in a statement.
Obama, Erdogan Discuss 'Situation in Syria' in Friday Phone Call
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035064303/obama-erdogan-syria-discussion.html
US President Barack Obama discussed over the telephone the recent developments in war-torn Syria with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a briefing on Friday.
Earlier on Friday, Erdogan said he would discuss with Obama the US stance on Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Ankara accuses of terrorism.
Erdogan claimed half of the US weapons allocated for the Syrian opposition fell in the hands of Daesh, also known as the Daesh, as well as the PYD.
Turkey claims that Syrian Kurds have links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is fighting for Kurdish independence from Turkey, and is considered a terrorist organization by Ankara.
Hollande Calls for Syrian Deescalation to Avoid Risk of Russia-Turkey War
http://sputniknews.com/world/20160219/1035062935/france-russia-turkey-opinion.html
French President Francois Hollande said that France urges the early resumption of talks between Syrian government and opposition delegates, a cessation of hostilities and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the population.
French President Francois Hollande called for a de-escalation in Syria on Friday to avoid a potential war between Russia and Turkey.
France urges the early resumption of talks between Syrian government and opposition delegates, a cessation of hostilities and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the population, he added.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday that Moscow planned to request a UN Security Council meeting given its concerns of possible plans by Turkey to send troops to Syria.
The meeting is scheduled to be held at 20:00 GMT.
UNSC to Meet on Syria Friday Afternoon at Russia's Request
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035061190/un-syria-russia-meeting.html
The UN Security Council has scheduled a meeting on the issue of Syria on Friday afternoon in New York, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
UNITED NATIONS — Russia's Mission to the UN tweeted that "Russia has called for a UNSC meeting on Syria today at 3:00pm (8:00 p.m. GMT)."
Earlier in the day, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow will request a UN Security Council meeting given its concerns of possible plans by Turkey to send troops to Syria.
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035052191/russia-unsc-turkey-syria.html
Russia will request a UN Security Council meeting amid possible Turkish plans to send troops to Syria, Russia's Foreign Ministry said Friday.
Russia also plans to introduce a resolution demanding to cease all actions undermining Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity.
"The situation is becoming more tense due to increased tensions on the Syrian-Turkish border and Turkey's stated plans to send troops to northern Syria… In this regard, Russia intends to convene a UN Security Council meeting today to discuss the matter," the ministry said in a statement.
Obama, Erdogan Discuss 'Situation in Syria' in Friday Phone Call
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035064303/obama-erdogan-syria-discussion.html
US President Barack Obama discussed over the telephone the recent developments in war-torn Syria with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest said in a briefing on Friday.
Earlier on Friday, Erdogan said he would discuss with Obama the US stance on Syria's Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Ankara accuses of terrorism.
Erdogan claimed half of the US weapons allocated for the Syrian opposition fell in the hands of Daesh, also known as the Daesh, as well as the PYD.
Turkey claims that Syrian Kurds have links to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), which is fighting for Kurdish independence from Turkey, and is considered a terrorist organization by Ankara.
Hollande Calls for Syrian Deescalation to Avoid Risk of Russia-Turkey War
http://sputniknews.com/world/20160219/1035062935/france-russia-turkey-opinion.html
French President Francois Hollande said that France urges the early resumption of talks between Syrian government and opposition delegates, a cessation of hostilities and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the population.
French President Francois Hollande called for a de-escalation in Syria on Friday to avoid a potential war between Russia and Turkey.
France urges the early resumption of talks between Syrian government and opposition delegates, a cessation of hostilities and the delivery of humanitarian aid to the population, he added.
The Russian Foreign Ministry said on Friday that Moscow planned to request a UN Security Council meeting given its concerns of possible plans by Turkey to send troops to Syria.
The meeting is scheduled to be held at 20:00 GMT.
UNSC to Meet on Syria Friday Afternoon at Russia's Request
http://sputniknews.com/politics/20160219/1035061190/un-syria-russia-meeting.html
The UN Security Council has scheduled a meeting on the issue of Syria on Friday afternoon in New York, UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters.
UNITED NATIONS — Russia's Mission to the UN tweeted that "Russia has called for a UNSC meeting on Syria today at 3:00pm (8:00 p.m. GMT)."
Earlier in the day, the Russian Foreign Ministry said Moscow will request a UN Security Council meeting given its concerns of possible plans by Turkey to send troops to Syria.
Ocean
The Living Force
The US just told Russia where some of its troops are in Syria
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-russia-special-forces-syria-2016-2
The US has given Russia a vague idea of where its special forces are operating in Syria. But that doesn't guarantee there won't be any future conflicts on the country's increasingly messy battlefield.
And there's also the possibility that the Russians won't keep the sensitive information to themselves.
"I don't have any assurances, really, from the Russians," Lt. Gen. Charles Brown, commander of the US Air Forces Central Command, told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.
"But we told them these are the ... general areas, where we have coalition forces and we don’t want them to strike there because all it's going to do is escalate things. And I don't think the Russians want to escalate against the coalition," he added.
Brown's comments were the first confirmation from US officials that the US has provided such information to Russia. The US began sending special forces into Syria in December. Their location has been kept publicly secret for security purposes.
Though the US is operating in Syria to fight the terrorist group ISIS, both by running airstrikes and deploying special forces, Russia became involved in the country's civil war mostly to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad under the guise of fighting ISIS (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh).
Experts said that while this coordination with Russia could help protect US troops, the information could also fall into the wrong hands.
"Given that the Assad regime and ISIS have ways to communicate, I would hope the Russians do not share the information with anyone," Fred Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former special adviser for transition in Syria under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told Business Insider in an email.
Even if Russia did provide certain assurances to the US about protecting such location information, Hof said they would be "worthless."
"Russian assurances would be worthless in any event, and I would assume that the Russians will share the information with other actors; surely with the Assad regime," Hof said. "Assad, after all, has an air force: the Russians can claim they passed the information to help protect Americans. But Assad also has the ways and means to convey information to ISIS."
What complicates matters further is the chaotic nature of the Syrian battlefield — rebels are fighting to oust Assad, and jihadist groups like ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front are fighting both the moderate rebels and Assad's forces. The US is fighting ISIS, but not Assad. And Russia, a major ally of Syria, says it's fighting ISIS even though it mostly targets anti-Assad rebels.
"Syria is a very messy battlefield," Michael Kofman, a Russia expert and public-policy fellow at the Wilson Center, told Business Insider. "There’s nothing clean about war."
And even if Russia knows vaguely where US special forces are located, the information isn't specific enough to eliminate any chance of conflict.
"If Russia decides to go after after the Islamic State … there's definitely a chance that they could take out US special forces and they won’t know they're there," Kofman said. "The US will tell them a large geographic area … and that's all the Russians are going to get."
Still, Russia has so far generally avoided areas of Syria where the US is operating, and giving Russia a vague idea of where US special forces are is better than telling them nothing, Kofman said.
"It would be completely reckless to send your guys there and not do the bare minimum coordination with Russia," he said. "If [there's a conflict], the first question that will be asked here is, 'did you try to coordinate with them at all?’ … If you didn't, then it’s not their fault."
Hof made a similar assessment.
"I imagine the reasoning is to deny to the Russians any excuse for bombing American military personnel," he said of the US providing special-forces location information.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook emphasized at the Thursday briefing that the coordination between the US and Russia was done out of an "abundance" of caution.
"This was done geographical areas writ-large, not specific locations and not times," he said. "... This was a step we took to try to maintain [the operators'] safety in a dangerous situation."
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-russia-special-forces-syria-2016-2
The US has given Russia a vague idea of where its special forces are operating in Syria. But that doesn't guarantee there won't be any future conflicts on the country's increasingly messy battlefield.
And there's also the possibility that the Russians won't keep the sensitive information to themselves.
"I don't have any assurances, really, from the Russians," Lt. Gen. Charles Brown, commander of the US Air Forces Central Command, told reporters during a briefing on Thursday.
"But we told them these are the ... general areas, where we have coalition forces and we don’t want them to strike there because all it's going to do is escalate things. And I don't think the Russians want to escalate against the coalition," he added.
Brown's comments were the first confirmation from US officials that the US has provided such information to Russia. The US began sending special forces into Syria in December. Their location has been kept publicly secret for security purposes.
Though the US is operating in Syria to fight the terrorist group ISIS, both by running airstrikes and deploying special forces, Russia became involved in the country's civil war mostly to prop up the regime of President Bashar al-Assad under the guise of fighting ISIS (also known as the Islamic State, ISIL, or Daesh).
Experts said that while this coordination with Russia could help protect US troops, the information could also fall into the wrong hands.
"Given that the Assad regime and ISIS have ways to communicate, I would hope the Russians do not share the information with anyone," Fred Hof, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former special adviser for transition in Syria under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, told Business Insider in an email.
Even if Russia did provide certain assurances to the US about protecting such location information, Hof said they would be "worthless."
"Russian assurances would be worthless in any event, and I would assume that the Russians will share the information with other actors; surely with the Assad regime," Hof said. "Assad, after all, has an air force: the Russians can claim they passed the information to help protect Americans. But Assad also has the ways and means to convey information to ISIS."
What complicates matters further is the chaotic nature of the Syrian battlefield — rebels are fighting to oust Assad, and jihadist groups like ISIS and the Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra Front are fighting both the moderate rebels and Assad's forces. The US is fighting ISIS, but not Assad. And Russia, a major ally of Syria, says it's fighting ISIS even though it mostly targets anti-Assad rebels.
"Syria is a very messy battlefield," Michael Kofman, a Russia expert and public-policy fellow at the Wilson Center, told Business Insider. "There’s nothing clean about war."
And even if Russia knows vaguely where US special forces are located, the information isn't specific enough to eliminate any chance of conflict.
"If Russia decides to go after after the Islamic State … there's definitely a chance that they could take out US special forces and they won’t know they're there," Kofman said. "The US will tell them a large geographic area … and that's all the Russians are going to get."
Still, Russia has so far generally avoided areas of Syria where the US is operating, and giving Russia a vague idea of where US special forces are is better than telling them nothing, Kofman said.
"It would be completely reckless to send your guys there and not do the bare minimum coordination with Russia," he said. "If [there's a conflict], the first question that will be asked here is, 'did you try to coordinate with them at all?’ … If you didn't, then it’s not their fault."
Hof made a similar assessment.
"I imagine the reasoning is to deny to the Russians any excuse for bombing American military personnel," he said of the US providing special-forces location information.
Pentagon spokesman Peter Cook emphasized at the Thursday briefing that the coordination between the US and Russia was done out of an "abundance" of caution.
"This was done geographical areas writ-large, not specific locations and not times," he said. "... This was a step we took to try to maintain [the operators'] safety in a dangerous situation."
