Turkey is in favour of a ground operation into neighbouring Syria but only with its allies, a senior Turkish official said, as a UN envoy held talks in Damascus aimed at saving a troubled ceasefire plan.

Key points:

• Turkey advocates ground operation in Syria
• Russia denies claims it bombed Syrian hospitals
• Turkey, Russia exchange barbs

 

"We want a ground operation with our international allies," the official told reporters in Istanbul.

"There is not going to be a unilateral military operation from Turkey to Syria," the official said, but added: "Without a ground operation it is impossible to stop the fighting in Syria."

Turkey sees the ouster of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as essential to end Syria's five-year war and is highly critical of Iran and Russia over their support for the Damascus regime.

"We are asking the coalition partners that there should be a ground operation," the official said.

Turkish artillery has struck at Kurdish militia targets in Syria over the past few days, putting Ankara at odds with the United States which supports the Syrian Kurds fighting Islamic State group jihadists.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told parliament Turkey would continue to take preventative measures to avoid becoming involved in the war in Syria.

Turkey's military earlier said its artillery had returned fire "in kind" into Syria on Tuesday, marking Ankara's fourth straight day of shelling across the border.

Russia denies strikes on Syrian hospitals

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said Russia is not bombing hospitals and schools in northern Syria, calling such reports "unsubstantiated accusations."

"Once again, we categorically reject and do not accept such statements," he said when asked whether Russian planes bombed hospitals in Syria, including one supported by Doctors Without Borders (MSF).

"Especially since every time, those who make such statements are unable to prove in any way their unsubstantiated accusations."

The MSF confirmed its hospital was hit, without assigning blame.

Strikes on hospitals in Idlib and Azaz killed almost 50 civilians including children, according to the United Nations, with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon saying the raids violated international law and undermined efforts to end the five-year conflict.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-17/kremlin-denies-russian-strikes-on-syria-hospitals/7175026

 

 

Syrian militants say they have received “excellent quantities” of missiles from their foreign backers to help them stand against the government troops north of the province of Aleppo. According to a militant commander, the ground-to-ground Grad missiles have been used to target army positions beyond the front line. The commander added that the missiles have been given to the militants since the start of their offensive on Aleppo. Foreign-backed militants have been receiving arms, aids, and training from the opponents of the Syrian government and have been the main cause of years of war in Syria which has claimed the lives of over 260,000 people

 

The CIA is supplying Syrian rebels with anti-tank weapons to fight Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's ground troops.

The decision to help the rebels comes after growing frustration by the US with Russia, which has entered the war in support of Assad. While the US and Russia both agree that ISIS should be eradicated, the two countries do not agree on who should be in power in Syria.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-is-supplying-syrian-rebels-with-weapons-2015-10?IR=T

The CIA program got underway before the Pentagon one, in early 2014, with the goal of propping up the flagging rebellion against Assad’s rule by delivering training, small arms, ammunition and the antitank missiles, which have proved instrumental in eroding the government’s key advantage over the lightly armed rebel force — its tanks and heavy armor.

Supplied mostly from stocks owned by Saudi Arabia, delivered across the Turkish border and stamped with CIA approval, the missiles were intended to fulfill another of the Obama administration’s goals in Syria — Assad’s negotiated exit from power. The plan, as described by administration officials, was to exert sufficient military pressure on Assad’s forces to persuade him to compromise — but not so much that his government would precipitously collapse and leave a dangerous power vacuum in Damascus.

Instead, the Russian military intervened to shore up the struggling Syrian army — an outcome that was not intended.

“A primary driving factor in Russia’s calculus was the realization that the Assad regime was militarily weakening and in danger of losing territory in northwestern Syria. The TOWs played an outsize role in that,” said Oubai Shahbandar, a Dubai-based consultant who used to work with the Syrian opposition.

“I think even the Americans were surprised at how successful they’ve been,” he added.

It was no accident, say U.S. officials and military analysts, that the first targets of Russian airstrikes in Syria were the locations where the rebels armed with TOW missiles have made the most substantial gains and where they most directly threaten Assad’s hold over his family’s heartland in the coastal province of Latakia.

Those areas were also where the first offensive since the Russian intervention was launched, with columns of Syrian armored vehicles and tanks setting out from government strongholds into the countryside of the provinces of Hama and Idlib.

What the TOWs have done, White said, is “offset the regime’s advantage in armor. The TOWs have cut away at that edge, and that’s what we’ve seen playing out. It’s like the Stingers in Afghanistan.”

 

 

Meanwhile people die and get displaced... The US imperialism is stunning in its audacity and in fobbing the blame... The war could be stopped tomorrow, should the USA stop their aggression.

 

Syrian president Bashar al-Assad has blamed Europe's refugee crisis on Western support for "terrorists", as people fleeing his country's civil war stream towards the European Union.

In his first public comments on the mass migration, broadcast by Russian media on Wednesday, Mr Assad said the West was "crying" for refugees flooding into Europe but its support for "terrorists" in his country lie at the roots of the crisis.

"Those refugees left Syria because of the terrorism, mainly because of the terrorists and because of the killing, and second because of the results of terrorism," he said.

"When you have terrorism, and you have the destruction of the infrastructure, you won't have the basic needs of living.

"So, the West is crying for them, and the West is supporting terrorists since the beginning of the crisis when it said that this was a peaceful uprising."

Syria's government labels all those involved in the anti-Assad uprising and ensuing civil war as terrorists, including Western-backed rebels.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-16/assad-says-only-syrian-people-can-decide-if-he-quits/6781176

 

 

Washington: It's no surprise that Chechens have turned up to fight in Syria – for the so-called Islamic State, for other rebel forces fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad and even for the regime itself.

Chechnya, their predominantly Muslim homeland in the North Caucasus, has been in conflict with Moscow since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, fighting two brutal wars which ultimately put their mountain republic in the hands of a pro-Moscow Chechen warlord. Chechens know jihad.

And it's hardly surprising that Russian President Vladimir Putin has turned up in Syria, putting his air force and other armed services at the disposal of the once-beleaguered Assad, son of the late Hafez al-Assad who, through serial coups, became absolute ruler of Syria in 1971; and who, during and after the Cold War, gave Moscow a foothold in the Middle East. Putin knows a vacuum when he sees one.

The Russian intervention in Syria has been a game-changer. Assad's regime is now on the offensive in what had been a stalemated conflict. Backed on the ground by Iranian, Lebanese and Iraqi fighters, he is regaining territory and threatening the rebels' hold on much of Aleppo, Syria's biggest city.

The streets of Aleppo, once Syria's largest city and commercial heart, earlier this month. Photo: AP

The answer might best be found in the ruins of Chechnya or in Ukraine, where Putin brazenly annexed the Crimean Peninsula in 2014 and continues to foment instability in Kiev and across Europe by orchestrating a headstrong separatist movement - to which Washington and the European Union have responded with economic sanctions, which some observers reckon are becoming old hat given the more immediate crises of the Middle East and the urgent need to accommodate as much as corral the Russians.

"Putin's trying to change the topic from Ukraine, and maybe he's been successful on that," Carnegie Europe scholar Thomas de Waal told The Boston Globe.

Joining the dots between Syria and Chechnya, De Waal spoke of a Russian style of conflict that dovetailed with Assad's merciless shelling of opposition strongholds.

"Overwhelming force [is] your basic strategy," he said. "You treat every enemy city as Berlin, and you pulverise it. There is no subtlety, no regard for collateral damage or civilians."

The uncertain outcome in Ukraine, where Moscow's decisive, below-the-radar military and economic intervention was conducted in parallel with a seeming indifference to decisions made via diplomatic channels, in which it too participated.

Less than a military victory, Putin was more intent on continued instability and the role it gave him in the diplomatic process of managing that instability – even at the cost of having sanctions imposed on him.

Just as Putin foreshadowed George W. Bush's "you're with us or against us" rhetoric in justifying ruthless attacks that reduced the Chechen capital Grozny to rubble, the Russian leader's strategy in Syria seems bent on a similarly destructive us-and-them outcome.

As collated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the victims of Russian air strikes include 965 IS fighters killed, compared with 1233 non-IS rebels and as many as 1380 civilians.

Putin's targeting of non-Islamic State forces, while echoing the Assad line that all non-regime fighters are terrorists, points to an outcome  in which the last armies standing are those of the regime and IS, leaving the US and its allies two options: back the Assad regime or withdraw.

A civil war rebadged as a counter-terrorism operation is much easier to fight because human and civil rights get sidelined; bombing becomes indiscriminate; and there is no distinction between civilians and insurgents. Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev describes "pacified" Chechnya as "one of the business cards of Russia – a good, unique example in history of [the] combat of terrorism".

As Russia engaged in Syria late in 2015, Moscow analyst Maxim Trudolyubov wrote in The New York Times: "[The Chechen] war defined Mr Putin as a leader. His goal, then in Chechnya [and] now in Syria, is to tame a restive region by giving a free hand to a loyal warlord, no matter how brutal, who will crush all jihadists, separatists and rivals in order to maintain stability."

And as in Ukraine, diplomacy buys time – while arguing that its bombing missions in Syria would continue until March 1, the Russians were party to a negotiation last week that called for a "cessation of hostilities" within a week – but days later Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a conference that its chances of success were only 49 in 100.

In the process, however, Moscow has talked its way back to the centre of events in the Middle East – and a humbled Washington looks on as Russia's battlefield decisions narrow American options.

Moscow justifies its interventions as responses to decisions in the West – its campaign in Ukraine was part of its response to the eastward expansion of NATO, and it supports Assad because of Western demands for regime change, which took place with such disastrous results in Iraq and Libya.

And in Putin's intervention there are the threads of a compromise solution to the Syrian crisis that were it to come to pass, would cause Washington and some European capitals to gulp, but which would appeal mightily to Middle Eastern leaders who don't let democratic niceties get in the way of their hold on power.

By making it clear that it is more interested in preserving the Syrian regime than it is in preserving Assad the man, Moscow has opened the possibility that the region's leaders will welcome Russia as a superpower player who will protect their tinpot regimes.

And in investing so much in his Syrian adventure, Putin will expect to dislodge Iran as the principal foreign patron of Damascus – an outcome that would have the Sunni princes of the Gulf gleefully somersaulting. Even a few Western leaders might jump at the prospect of seeing Tehran brought down a peg or two.

In the Putin book, as in the Assad book, a leader does not settle with "terrorists" – he eliminates them. And if whole communities are deemed to be "terrorist", their destruction becomes a logical objective and ultra-violence a legitimate tool.

The different approaches of Washington and Moscow prompted this assessment by a Syrian official escorting foreign journalists in Latakia, on the Mediterranean coast: "They're not like the Americans – when they get involved, they do it all the way."

Indeed. With a pliant news media and the swagger of the dictator he almost is, Putin will have a freer hand than any government whose citizens get to vote in meaningful elections and who tire of war.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/to-understand-vladimir-putins-mission-in-syria-look-at-chechnya-and-ukraine-20160217-gmw9te.html#ixzz40UfAaudZ 
Follow us: @smh on Twitter | sydneymorningherald on Facebook


The US empire has messed up in a few places: Libya, Iraq, Egypt, Yemen. Some countries like Vietnam have come good to their own weird ways, some are still transitional like Korea. Overall, US dealing with the Middle East has not been very good. woeful. Even their friendship with the Saudis is basically the same rigmarole between Russia and Syria. Love with despots.

But the main point here is that the Saudis, via their paid up "terrorists" (Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, ISIS) are trying to destabilise Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen and to some extend Lebanon, in order to get their style of Wahhabism (including ISIS) take over the entire middle east, cornering the Shia of Iran and Iraq, out of the loop and out of the lucrative oil fields. It's a religious war in which some looting is also in the deal. Of course the Saudis will deny doing such. Bollocks. The US position has been worse than crap. It has decided to get rid of Assad by helping the "moderates" thus let the Wahhabis take over.

The war is unfortunate for a lot of people. Should Assad had gone, by now the Moderates terrorists in Syria would be fighting ISIS and loosing. ISIS would be taking over the Damascus government today. Syria has been caught between a rock and a hard place and Putin chose to blow up the rock and smash the hard place.

The US used to do this as well, but overall the Ruskies are better at it. There are many people in Syria who are in favour of Assad, BECAUSE HE and his Russian friend Putin IS THEIR ONLY PROTECTION AGAINST AN ALL INVASION FROM ISIS. Assad affords them religious freedom and general equality as well as EDUCATION, while ALL THE OTHERS, from the "moderate" fighters to ISIS do not. 

Meanwhile the Kurds can take care of themselves while helping Assad stay in power. That is why the Turks hate the Kurds, apart from the Kurds' demand of independence in Turkey.

 

 

 

See unfortunate toon at top.

 

 

Trevor Thrall and John Glaser make an excellent case against U.S. support for the war on Yemen:

Beyond placating overexcited Saudi fears of a U.S. strategic tilt towards Iran, there simply is no moral, legal, or strategic justification for what the U.S. is doing in Yemen.

As I’ve said many times over the last ten and a half months, the war on Yemen is indefensible and U.S. support for it is disgraceful. Thrall and Glaser do a good job summing up most of the reasons why the intervention is wrong, why U.S. involvement is foolish, and how the war actually harms U.S. security interests. They’re entirely right that the war on Yemen has nothing to do with Saudi and Gulf state self-defense. They are also right to point out that the “legitimacy” of the government that the Saudis are seeking to restore is hard to take seriously:

A better description would be to call the Hadi government a tool of Saudi Arabia, since Saudi Arabia not only brokered the deal that allowed him to replace Saleh but also enabled him to return to Yemen after the Houthis drove him from the country. Arguing that the Saudis are responding to a call for help is essentially to argue that the Saudis asked themselves to intervene in Yemen.

The Saudi-led intervention has been a costly failure for the U.S.-backed coalition. More important, it has inflicted enormous harm on the civilian population, wrecked the country’s infrastructure, brought its health care system to the brink of collapse, starved millions of people of basic necessities, destabilized the entire country, and stoked sectarian hatred. All of these things will have enduring, destructive consequences for Yemen and its neighbors for decades to come, and we won’t know the full costs of this ill-conceived, reckless intervention until long after the current fighting is brought to an end.

The war on Yemen is still mostly ignored in the West and especially in the U.S., but the Obama administration’s support for the war is one of the most appalling U.S. policy decisions of the last forty years. It is terrible example of what happens when a great power foolishly enables reckless client governments in their most destructive behavior, and it should be a cautionary tale against ever doing anything like it in the future. The U.S. should of course halt its support for the war and press the Saudis and their allies to stop their senseless, ineffective campaign, but there has been so little criticism of or dissent from administration policy that this seems unlikely to happen anytime soon.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/larison/end-u-s-support-for-the-indefensible-war-on-yemen/

 

 

Russia has called an urgent meeting of the UN Security Council to discuss what it describes as the deteriorating situation on the Turkish-Syrian border and Turkey's plans to send troops into Syria.

A statement posted on Friday on the foreign ministry's website said Russia intends to submit a draft council resolution calling on Turkey to "cease any actions that undermine Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity" in the meeting later on Friday.

Turkey's military has been pushing ahead with its cross-border artillery shelling campaign against US-backed Syrian Kurdish fighter positions in Syria.

Erdogan's charge

For his part, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said US-supplied weapons have been used against civilians by Syrian Kurdish fighters.

US support for the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which it considers a useful ally in the fight against Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group, has angered Turkey and risks driving a wedge between the NATO allies.

 

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/02/russia-calls-unsc-meeting-turkey-syria-actions-160219145512626.html

 

Erdogan is not very popular in Europe, nor liked by the US. He might wish to tone down a tad, but the US and the Saudis need Turkey to launch "moderate" extremist Sunni raids against Assad. By now ISIS in in the forgotten basket, though the Saudis would not mind if ISIS conquered the whole of Syria, bring the Saudis's influence right to the door of Europe... Russia will of course bring more firepower and help the Kurds against Turkey "as required"... It's not going to get pretty.

 

 

The United States and Russia have announced a ceasefire in war-torn Syria will come into effect on February 27.

The second ceasefire plan in as many weeks calls on the warring parties to stop fighting by the end of the week, but specifically excludes the Islamic State group and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front.

Those groups will still be targeted.

"If implemented and adhered to, this cessation will not only lead to a decline in violence, but also continue to expand the delivery of urgently needed humanitarian supplies to besieged areas and support a political transition to a government that is responsive to the desires of the Syrian people," US Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement.

US President Barack Obama called Russia's Vladimir Putin to discuss their joint efforts to bring about the ceasefire, the White House said, cautioning that the road ahead would not be easy.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-02-23/us-russia-announce-syria-ceasefire...

---------------

As long as the Saudis refrain from placing planes in Turkey, things might improve for Syria. But how can one "excludes the Islamic State group and the Al Qaeda franchise Al Nusra Front? Will they wear a sign saying "you can bomb us, we are excluded from the cease-fire?" I guess they will rebrand as "moderate"... as they might want to "infiltrate" and do more damage when the fire starts again....

 

 

Syria... The Sunni led revolution has destroyed the country... Daesh (ISIS) is Sunni... 

So:

 

 

Live from Geneva: UN Hypocrisy While WFP Drops Food for ISIS

MARCH 1, 2016 BY VANESSA BEELEY 

Vanessa Beeley
21st Century Wire
OpEd
“The UN World Food Program (WFP) aids for the restricted Syrian civilians in Deir Ezzor city have landed mostly in ISIS controlled territories, a source in the city’s administration said Thursday.”
A report in ALALAM states that WFP food drops have landed predominantly in ISIS held territory, despite UN claims last week that the WFP had successfully dropped 21 tonnes of aid into ISIS besieged Deir Ezzor.
“Planes dropped the humanitarian help sent by the United Nations into the territory controlled by Daesh. Just two containers ended up in the areas where the Syrian army [is located],”  the source told RIA Novosti.
This extraordinary turn of events and the UN false statement casts another shadow over UN neutrality and honesty.  Yesterday, I listened to Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,  make his address to the UN Human Rights Commission.“I am honoured to address this Council, on the eve of its second decade.  This is an anniversary that calls for more than rhetoric: it cries out for action, and decisive and co-operative leadership in defence of vital principles.”
It seems that, neither accountability nor transparency are to be included in those vital principles. The platitudes continue:
“Human rights violations are like a signal, the sharp zig-zag lines of a seismograph flashing out warnings of a coming earthquake.  Today, those jagged red lines are shuddering faster and higher…… These shocks are being generated by poor decisions, unprincipled and often criminal actions, and narrow, short term, over simplified approaches to complex questions.”
Is he describing US and NATO foreign policy? He goes on to further describe the great ‘humanitarian crisis’ but he could just as easily be the US modus operandi in Syria and the Middle East:
“This resurgent broad-based malice, irresponsibility and sometimes eye-watering stupidity, altogether acting like steam at high pressure being fed into the closed chamber of world affairs.”
Then comes the reminder of the UN’s founding principles.  Certainly useful, as it becomes harder and harder to define the UN’s purpose these days while the world is being set on fire by illegal intervention and proxy military invasions, unpunished by the Security Council.
“They [key drafters of UN Charter] knew, from bitter experience, human rights, the respect for them, the defence of them, would not menace national security – but build more durable nations, and contribute [in their words] to “a final peace”. 
When one ponders this “final peace” it is terrifyingly distant.  While the Saudi-led coalition has been pounding Yemen for almost one year with NATO & US supplied weapons and missiles, this “final peace” seems a mirage created to divert public attention away from the UN’s real purpose, which appears to be facilitation of this destruction on an unquantifiable level.
Please note, that this eloquent and moving rhetoric has failed, so far, to even mention one of the most heinous crimes against Humanity that is being carried out against the Yemeni people by the Saudi-led coalition.
Then we have a moment of clarity:
“Today we meet against a backdrop of accumulating departures from that body of institutions and laws which the States built to codify their behaviour.  Gross violations of international human rights, which clearly will lead to disastrous outcomes, are being greeted with indifference.  More and more States appear to believe that the legal architecture of the international system is a menu from which they can pick and choose, trashing what appears to be inconvenient in the short term”
A sharp intake of breath, is the High Commissioner about to address US lawlessness and flagrant flouting of International Law?
How foolish to presume that the UN might just stray from its US drawn propaganda road map. This glimmer of hope was soon extinguished by the, now familiar, descent into the tired and extensively debunked accusations against the Syrian government.
“These two great bodies of law are being violated shockingly, in multiple conflicts, with complete impunity.  In Syria, previous to the temporary cessation of hostilities which began last weekend, this had been the case for five long years.  Neighbourhoods, schools and packed marketplaces have been hit by tens of thousands of airstrikes.  Thousands of barrel bombs have been thrown out of helicopters onto streets and homes.  Mortar and artillery fire, and IEDs have been used without regard for civilian life.”
This entire paragraph is blatant propaganda, simplistic, and without any detailing of the very complexities that he has reprimanded us for ignoring previously.  The emotive, tens of thousands of airstrikes, the implication being that these are Russian and Syrian of course, no mention of the US coalition strikes that have unequivocally targeted Syrian infrastructure and civilians, rarely doing any damage to ISIS positions & failing dismally to impede their advances, prior to Russian legal intervention on the 30th September 2015.
Not forgetting, the reported  accidental arms drops to ISIS during the course of US NATO illegal intervention into Syrian airspace and territory via their proxy “boots on the ground”.
We are back full circle to “the barrel bombs.”  Barrel bombs are simple explosive devices, the barrel bomb brand name is a clever marketing ploy to transform them into a hideous device beyond the realms of ordinary warfare.  All bombs have hellish consequences but the barrel bomb, in NATO US terminology far outweighs the US, Saudi and Israeli mothers of all bombs, cluster bombs, flechette missiles, white phosphorous, and all manner of illegal killing devices designed to inflict maximum mutilation on the besieged civilian populations of Yemen and Gaza, for example.
There is a cursory mention of the devastating effects of mortars and shells but naturally this is lumped in with the Syrian Arab Army rather than defined as being from the US NATO backed terrorists embedded in civilian areas or besieging entire villages and towns throughout Syria.
No mention of the very aptly named ‘Hell Cannon‘ that have inflicted terrible damage upon the Aleppo civilians huddled for safety in the Government held areas, driven from their homes by the US backed terror factions of Al Nusra, ISIS and assorted mercenary gangs.
No mention of Turkey’s all-out-war posturing, shelling of Syria’s Kurdish areas, downing of a Russian fighter jet.  Do these acts not constitute war crimes or violations of all Geneva conventions?  Should they not be mentioned in the same breath as “increasing, and severe violations of fundamental rights and principles” ?
And on it goes:
“At least ten hospitals and other medical units have been damaged or destroyed in Syria since the beginning of January, more than one every week, and on several occasions a second strike has hit rescue operations.”
More emotive, unverified rhetoric.  We must presume that the High Commissioner is talking about the MSF hospitals, established without permission from the Syrian government and exclusively in terrorist held areas, serviced in many instances by the “Syria Civil Defence” aka The White Helmets aka Al Nusra.  The backers and donors of these “saviours of all Humanity” except humanity loyal to the Syrian Government are discussed in depth in our series of articles on their deep state roots.
Al Hussein mentions second strikes.  Let us just consider for one moment, that we are three quarters through his speech and still no mention of the war crimes being committed daily in Yemen, where second strikes are second nature as civilian first responders clamber over the rubble of a Saudi initial strike before being obliterated by the second strike as they attempt to pull smouldering bodies from the remains of homes, schools, mosques and hospitals.
Then of course, we cannot vilify the Syrian Government and Army without mentioning sieges.
“Similarly the deliberate starvation of people is unequivocally forbidden as a weapon of warfare.  By extension, so are sieges, which deprive civilians of essential goods such as food.  And yet over 450,000 people are currently trapped in besieged towns and villages in Syria, and have been, in some cases, for years.  Food, medicine and other desperately needed humanitarian aid is repeatedly obstructed.  Thousands of people may have starved to death.”
Indeed Mr High Commissioner, the people of Kafarya and Foua in Syria thank you personally for their starvation and lack of desperately needed humanitarian aid and for their ongoing suffering and loss of life under the US NATO backed terrorist siege that you claim, is impossible to bypass.

READ: Statement from Al Foua Hospital allying UN with terrorism
All of Syria is under siege, 23 million people living under sanctions and the fall out from a US NATO war of aggression being waged upon their country, with the complicity of the UN Security Council that turns a blind eye to this crushing lawlessness.
No mention of the terrorist occupations of many Syrian towns and villages, the stockpiling of food, the deliberate starvation of civilians for propaganda purposes, the caging of civilians as human shields, the very recent suicide bombings in Homs, Damascus and Deir Ezzor.
No mention of the terrorist targeting of sectarian minorities in an attempt to undermine Syria’s secular culture, the terrorist attacks on Syrian hospitals and infrastructure.  No mention of the beneficiaries of the ISIS oil trade, no mention of the theft of over 1400 factories from Aleppo by chief terrorism facilitator, Turkey.No mention of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Syrian soldiers and National Defence Forces, massacred by the western backed terrorists.  No mention of the rapes, crucifixions, massacres and beheadings, the training of child suicide bombers, by Riyadh educated Sheikh Abdullah Muhaysini, leader of the Army of Conquest [Al Nusra and Ahrar al Sham].
And still no mention of Yemen, a wholesale slaughter of civilians masterminded by NATO and the US from Riyadh control centres.Until, as an afterthought:
“And yet Syria is far from the only armed conflict in which civilians have endured frightful attacks.  Multiple medical facilities, religious sites and schools have been repeatedly attacked and bombed in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, South Sudan………..[finally] and Yemen.”
The UN Human Rights Commission was perfectly described yesterday as the polished diamond of western foreign policy.  It is the optic through which we are directed to view our governments imperialism. While our governments rape, pillage and plunder under the banner of democracy, the UN Human Rights Commission soothes our troubled soul by creating the illusion of caring two hoots about the peoples devastated by these aggressive colonialist policies.
In closing, the High Commissioner made this statement:
“I urge you to act with courage and on principle, and to take a strong stand regarding the protection of civilians.  The perpetrators of severe violations of this order must know that they will, at the first occasion, be sanctioned to the full extent of the law. […] I urge you to deploy your diplomatic power to uphold peace and advance the protection of human rights for all people, in other States and within your own”
In that case Mr High Commissioner, we await the sanctions you will impose upon Israel for their oppressive, brutal torture and execution of the Palestinian people upon whose land they spread hatred and violence.
We await the sanctions you will impose upon Saudi Arabia for the tens of thousands of Yemeni people they have mutilated, abused and displaced with NATO US manufactured missiles.
We await the sanctions you will impose upon the US for their extra judicial executions of Black and other peoples on US soil, Guantanamo Bay torture factory, and for the global misery being caused by their hostile neocolonialism.
We await the sanctions you will impose upon every member nation for its part in this global devastation and bloodshed… and we will wait for the day that the UN holds the mirror up to its own distorted, corrupted face and sees how “the fairest of them all” has become the reflection of all that is unjust and dishonourable in this world.
***Author Vanessa Beeley is a contributor to 21WIRE, and since 2011, she has spent most of her time in the Middle East reporting on events there – as a independent researcher, writer, photographer and peace activist. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of the Syria Solidarity Movement, and a volunteer with the Global Campaign to Return to Palestine. See more of her work at her personal blog The Wall Will Fall.

http://21stcenturywire.com/2016/03/01/live-from-geneva-un-hypocrisy-while-wfp-drops-food-for-isis/

 

The majority of Chechens fighting in Syria have been killed, Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov said in an interview with the RIA Novosti news agency, published Friday.

Syrian rebels used natives of the Russian republic of Chechnya as “cannon fodder,” Kadyrov said. “There are about 200 of our Chechens left. They traveled to Syria from Europe — gangs of around 20-30 people,” he said, RIA Novosti reported.

Very few Chechen citizens have left to fight abroad because the local security service is able to “control” them, Kadyrov said.

In November 2015, Kadyrov said that about 500 Chechens had traveled to Syria to fight alongside the Islamic State — 200 of whom had already been killed.

Kadyrov added that government agents had “brought back” 47 Chechen men believed to have been drafted into IS “by means of deception,” RIA Novosti reported.

In total, almost 650 criminal cases were being investigated in Russia against Russians fighting for the Islamic State, according to Prosecutor General Yury Chaika, RIA Novosti reported on Nov. 10, 2015.

Islamic State is a terrorist group banned in Russia.

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/news/article/syrian-rebels-used-chechens-as-cannon-fodder--kadyrov/564551.html

-------------------

Islamic State is a terrorist group banned in he US, Europe and a lot of other countries....

The foreign policies of Western nations have been driven by ‘messiahship’ and attempts to export their values worldwide, Sergey Lavrov said Tuesday. This approach ultimately led to the Ukrainian crisis, the ‘Arab Spring’ & the refugee crisis.

“The export of values continues to sow crises in international relations. This export of values and the demand to adhere only to a European perspective launched the crisis in Ukraine,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said.

“Exporting democracy led to the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ [and] gave birth to the export of refugees into Europe,” Lavrov said at a press conference on the results of Russian diplomacy in 2016. He also noted that from his point of view, current Western values are not traditional for Europe itself.

“If we talk about the Western, European values that we are all constantly reminded of as exemplary, they are not the values that were professed by the ancestors of modern-day Europeans, they are something new, modernized.” 

“I would describe them as post-Christian values [that] are fundamentally at odds with the values of our country, which we want to keep and pass on,” Lavrov said.

He called the attempt to impose these ‘post-Christian values’ on Russia “indecent from the humane point of view,” and “a colossal mistake and unacceptable revaluation of one’s own influence on international relations.”

The top Russian diplomat pointed to the West’s attempts to impose democracy on the Middle East and summarized the gruesome outcome, especially regarding the local Christian populations.

“After the outbreak of hostilities in the Middle East, the number of Christians in Iraq has decreased four times, in Syria – dramatically more,” he said, adding that this “once again confirms the inhuman character of the ‘liberal values’ for which ‘authoritarian regimes’ are being destroyed.”

He also noted that Moscow is highly concerned that the international community is still unable to create a united front against terrorism.

read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/373993-lavrov-speech-messianism-values/

The Rukban camp, which houses up to 25,000 refugees is located in the US-controlled zone around its unauthorised military base at Al-Tanf, making it almost impossible for humanitarian workers to access the area.

"The American side cynically seeks to take advantage of the situation concerning the spread of the coronavirus and is putting pressure on the UN leadership to bring 'humanitarian aid' to the Rukban refugee camp under the guise of diagnostic tools to feed controlled militants", the interagency coordinating headquarters of Russia and Syria said in a joint statement on Saturday.

The military stressed that the disastrous situation in the camp is a result of the illegal occupation of the area by American forces, noting that the refugees should be returned to their homes in the territory under the control of the Syrian government.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/202003281078738466-us-plans-to-transf...

 

 

Read from top.