The Americans have promised that Syria will become Sunni territory to the Saudis.

 

The Americans will do anything to prevent the secular and multi-religious government of Assad to survive.

 

It's highly possible that in the near future the Americans will even betray the US-based cleric Fethullah Gülen as a gift to the Turks for supporting the US "war effort" and stop Turkey's deal with the Russians for a new pipeline.

 

John Kerry is the least trustworthy diplomat on the planet. He wants to give Syria as a subvassal to Saudi Arabia, NO MATTER THE COST TO THE POPULATION OF SYRIA, so that the Saudis can place their own pipeline through Syria then Turkey. The American plan is simple: reduce the reliance of Europe on Russian gas to sink the Russian economy and provide their own US companies with a monopoly on gas to Europe. At the same time, this would reduce the influence of Iran in the region... THIS PROJECT, I REPEAT, AT ANY COST TO THE SYRIAN POPULATION. Kerry is " un gros menteur"... Kerry is "ein großer Wichser"...

 

 

 

The Western media loves conflict – the bloodier the better – and will never let the truth get in the way of a good war. More searing truthtelling from John Pilger.

THE exoneration of a man accused of the worst of crimes, genocide, made no headlines. Neither the BBC nor CNN covered it. The Guardian allowed a brief commentary. Such a rare official admission was buried or suppressed, understandably. It would explain too much about how the rulers of the world rule.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague has quietly cleared the late Serbian president, Slobodan Milošević, of war crimes committed during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, including the massacre at Srebrenica.

Far from conspiring with the convicted Bosnian-Serb leader Radovan Karadžić, Milošević actually “condemned ethnic cleansing”, opposed Karadžić and tried to stop the war that dismembered Yugoslavia. Buried near the end of a 2,590-page judgement on Karadzic last February, this truth further demolishes the propaganda that justified NATO’s illegal onslaught on Serbia in 1999.

Milošević died of a heart attack in 2006, alone in his cell in The Hague, during what amounted to a bogus trial by an American-invented “international tribunal”. Denied heart surgery that might have saved his life, his condition worsened and was monitored and kept secret by U.S. officials, as WikiLeaks has since revealed.

Milošević was the victim of war propaganda that today runs like a torrent across our screens and newspapers and beckons great danger for us all. He was the prototype demon, vilified by the western media as the “butcher of the Balkans” who was responsible for “genocide”, especially in the secessionist Yugoslav province of Kosovo. Prime Minister Tony Blair said so, invoked the Holocaust and demanded action against “this new Hitler”. David Scheffer, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes [sic], declared that as many as “225,000 ethnic Albanian men aged between 14 and 59” may have been murdered by Milocevic’s forces.

This was the justification for NATO’s bombing, led by Bill Clinton and Blair, that killed hundreds of civilians in hospitals, schools, churches, parks and television studios and destroyed Serbia’s economic infrastructure.  It was blatantly ideological; at a notorious “peace conference” in Rambouillet in France, Milošević was confronted by Madeleine Albright, the U.S. secretary of state, who was to achieve infamy with her remark that the deaths of half a million Iraqi children were “worth it”.

Albright delivered an “offer” to Milošević that no national leader could accept. Unless he agreed to the foreign military occupation of his country, with the occupying forces “outside the legal process”, and to the imposition of a neoliberal “free market”, Serbia would be bombed. This was contained in an “Appendix B”, which the media failed to read or suppressed. The aim was to crush Europe’s last independent “socialist” state.

Milosevic exonerated, as the NATO war machine moves on - https://t.co/Cijo1Y4srh
This story has been completely ... pic.twitter.com/dMAYkFfzM8

— VeteransTodayNetwork (@veteranstoday) August 8, 2016

Once NATO began bombing, there was a stampede of Kosovar refugees “fleeing a holocaust”. When it was over, international police teams descended on Kosovo to exhume the victims of the “holocaust”. The FBI failed to find a single mass grave and went home. The Spanish forensic team did the same, its leader angrily denouncing “a semantic pirouette by the war propaganda machines”. The final count of the dead in Kosovo was 2,788. This included combatants on both sides, and Serbs and Roma murdered by the pro-NATO Kosovo Liberation Front. There was no genocide. The NATO attack was both a fraud and a war crime.

All but a fraction of America’s vaunted “precision guided” missiles hit not military but civilian targets, including the news studios of Radio Television Serbia in Belgrade. Sixteen people were killed, including cameramen, producers and a make-up artist. Blair described the dead, profanely, as part of Serbia’s “command and control”. In 2008, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Carla Del Ponte, revealed that she had been pressured not to investigate NATO’s crimes.

This was the model for Washington’s subsequent invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and, by stealth, Syria. All qualify as “paramount crimes” under the Nuremberg standard; all depended on media propaganda. While tabloid journalism played its traditional part, it was serious, credible, often liberal journalism that was the most effective — the evangelical promotion of Blair and his wars by the Guardian, the incessant lies about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction in the Observer and the New York Times, and the unerring drumbeat of government propaganda by the BBC in the silence of its omissions.

At the height of the bombing, the BBC’s Kirsty Wark interviewed General Wesley Clark, the NATO commander. The Serbian city of Niš had just been sprayed with American cluster bombs, killing women, old people and children in an open market and a hospital. Wark asked not a single question about this, or about any other civilian deaths.

Others were more brazen. In February 2003, the day after Blair and Bush had set fire to Iraq, the BBC’s political editor, Andrew Marr, stood in Downing Street and made what amounted to a victory speech.

He excitedly told his viewers that Blair had

“... said they would be able to take Baghdad without a bloodbath, and that in the end the Iraqis would be celebrating. And on both of those points he has been proved conclusively right.”

 

Today, with a million dead and a society in ruins, Marr’s BBC interviews are recommended by the U.S. embassy in London.

Marr’s colleagues lined up to pronounce Blair “vindicated”.

The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, said:

“There’s no doubt that the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially to the Middle East … is now increasingly tied up with military power.”  

This obeisance to the United States and its collaborators as a benign force “bringing good” runs deep in western establishment journalism. It ensures that the present-day catastrophe in Syria is blamed exclusively on Bashar al-Assad, whom the West and Israel have long conspired to overthrow — not for any humanitarian concerns, but to consolidate Israel’s aggressive power in the region. The jihadist forces unleashed and armed by the U.S., Britain, France, Turkey and their “coalition” proxies serve this end. It is they who dispense the propaganda and videos that becomes news in the U.S. and Europe, and provide access to journalists and guarantee a one-sided “coverage” of Syria.

The city of Aleppo is in the news. Most readers and viewers will be unaware that the majority of the population of Aleppo lives in the government-controlled western part of the city. That they suffer daily artillery bombardment from western-sponsored al-Qaida is not news. On 21 July, French and American bombers attacked a government village in Aleppo province, killing up to 125 civilians. This was reported on page 22 of the Guardian; there were no photographs. 

Having created and underwritten jihadism in Afghanistan in the 1980s as Operation Cyclone – a weapon to destroy the Soviet Union – the U.S. is doing something similar in Syria. Like the Afghan Mujahideen, the Syrian “rebels” are America’s and Britain’s foot soldiers. Many fight for al-Qaida and its variants; some, like the Nusra Front, have rebranded themselves to comply with American sensitivities over 9/11. The CIA runs them, with difficulty, as it runs jihadists all over the world.

The immediate aim is to destroy the government in Damascus which, according to the most credible poll (YouGov Siraj), the majority of Syrians support, or at least look to for protection, regardless of the barbarism in its shadows. The long-term aim is to deny Russia a key Middle Eastern ally as part of a NATO war of attrition against the Russian Federation that eventually destroys it.

The nuclear risk is obvious, though suppressed by the media across “the free world”. The editorial writers of the Washington Post, having promoted the fiction of WMD in Iraq, demand that Obama attack Syria. 

Hillary Clinton, who publicly rejoiced at her executioner’s role during the destruction of Libya, has repeatedly indicated that, as president, she will “go further” than Obama.

Gareth Porter, a samidzat journalist reporting from Washington, recently revealed the names of those likely to make up a Clinton cabinet, who plan an attack on Syria. All have belligerent cold war histories.

The former CIA director, Leon Panetta, says that

“... the next president is gonna have to consider adding additional special forces on the ground."

What is most remarkable about the war propaganda now in floodtide is its patent absurdity and familiarity. I have been looking through archive film from Washington in the 1950s, when diplomats, civil servants and journalists were witch-hunted and ruined by Senator Joe McCarthy for challenging the lies and paranoia about the Soviet Union and China. Like a resurgent tumour, the anti-Russia cult has returned.

In Britain, the Guardian’s Luke Harding leads his newspaper’s Russia-haters in a stream of journalistic parodies that assign to Vladimir Putin every earthly iniquity. When the Panama Papers leak was published, the front page said Putin and there was a picture of Putin, never mind that Putin was not mentioned anywhere in the leaks.

Revealed: the $2bn offshore trail that leads to Vladimir Putin - https://t.co/8Uya4DwhQH What people try hide is truth, what the truth i...

— Kevin Stewien (@StewienKevin) April 9, 2016

Like Milošević, Putin is Demon Number One. It was Putin who shot down a Malaysian airliner over Ukraine. Headline: “As far as I’m concerned, Putin killed my son.” No evidence required. It was Putin who was responsible for Washington’s documented (and paid for) overthrow of the elected government in Kiev in 2014. The subsequent terror campaign by fascist militias against the Russian-speaking population of Ukraine was the result of Putin’s “aggression”. Preventing Crimea from becoming a NATO missile base and protecting the mostly Russian population who had voted in a referendum to rejoin Russia – from which Crimea had been  annexed – were more examples of Putin’s “aggression”. Smear by media inevitably becomes war by media. If war with Russia breaks out, by design or by accident, journalists will bear much of the responsibility.

In the U.S., the anti-Russia campaign has been elevated to virtual reality. The New York Times columnist Paul Krugman – an economist with a Nobel Prize – has called Donald Trump the “Siberian Candidate” because Trump is Putin’s man, he says. Trump had dared to suggest, in a rare lucid moment, that war with Russia might be a bad idea. In fact, he has gone further and removed American arms shipments to Ukraine from the Republican platform. “Wouldn’t it be great if we got along with Russia,” he said.

This is why America’s warmongering liberal establishment hates him. Trump’s racism and ranting demagoguery have nothing to do with it. Bill and Hillary Clinton’s record of racism and extremism can out-trump Trump’s any day. (This week is the 20th anniversary of the Clinton welfare “reform” that launched a war on African-Americans). As for Obama: while American police gun down his fellow African-Americans the great hope in the White House has done nothing to protect them, nothing to relieve their impoverishment, while running four rapacious wars and an assassination campaign without precedent.

The CIA has demanded Trump is not elected. Pentagon generals have demanded he is not elected. The pro-war New York Times – taking a breather from its relentless low-rent Putin smears – demands that he is not elected. Something is up. These tribunes of “perpetual war” are terrified that the multi-billion-dollar business of war by which the United States maintains its dominance will be undermined if Trump does a deal with Putin, then with China’s Xi Jinping. Their panic at the possibility of the world’s great power talking peace – however unlikely – would be the blackest farce were the issues not so dire.

“Trump would have loved Stalin!” bellowed Vice-President Joe Biden at a rally for Hillary Clinton.

With Clinton nodding, he shouted:

“We never bow. We never bend. We never kneel. We never yield. We own the finish line. That’s who we are. We are America!”

In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn has also excited hysteria from the war-makers in the Labour Party and from a media devoted to trashing him. Lord West, a former admiral and Labour minister, put it well. Corbyn was taking an “outrageous” anti-war position “because it gets the unthinking masses to vote for him”.

In a debate with leadership challenger Owen Smith, Corbyn was asked by the moderator:

“How would you act on a violation by Vladimir Putin of a fellow NATO state?”

Corbyn replied:

“You would want to avoid that happening in the first place. You would build up a good dialogue with Russia … We would try to introduce a de-militarisation of the borders between Russia, the Ukraine and the other countries on the border between Russia and Eastern Europe. What we cannot allow is a series of calamitous build-ups of troops on both sides which can only lead to great danger.”

Pressed to say if he would authorise war against Russia “if you had to”, Corbyn replied:

“I don’t wish to go to war. What I want to do is achieve a world that we don’t need to go to war.”
The line of questioning owes much to the rise of Britain’s liberal war-makers. The Labour Party and the media have long offered them career opportunities. For a while, the moral tsunami of the great crime of Iraq left them floundering, their inversions of the truth a temporary embarrassment. Regardless of Chilcot and the mountain of incriminating facts, Blair remains their inspiration, because he was a “winner”.

Dissenting journalism and scholarship have since been systematically banished or appropriated, and democratic ideas emptied and refilled with “identity politics” that confuse gender with feminism, and public angst with liberation, and wilfully ignore the state violence and weapons profiteering that destroys countless lives in faraway places, like Yemen and Syria, and beckon nuclear war in Europe and across the world.

The stirring of people of all ages around the spectacular rise of Jeremy Corbyn counters this to some extent. His life has been spent illuminating the horror of war. The problem for Corbyn and his supporters is the Labour Party. In America, the problem for the thousands of followers of Bernie Sanders was the Democratic Party, not to mention their ultimate betrayal by their great white hope. In the U.S., home of the great civil rights and anti-war movements, it is Black Lives Matter and the likes of Codepink that lay the roots of a modern version.

For only a movement that swells into every street and across borders and does not give up can stop the warmongers.

Next year, it will be a century since Wilfred Owen wrote the following; every journalist should read it and remember it:

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

 

Find out more about the internationally acclaimed and award-winning journalism of John Pilger at johnpilger.com or follow him on Twitter @johnpilger.

 

Social media users in Saudi Arabia called for a boycott of Microsoft after their search engine Bing translated "Daesh", the Arabic name for the Islamic State group, into "Saudi Arabia". 

#ترجمه_bing_تصف_السعوديه_بداعش

@bing shame on you pic.twitter.com/v3iP4KnMmM

— ibrahim abdullah (@hemo53578) August 25, 2016

The hashtag '#Microsoft_Insults_Saudi' appeared on Twitter as users expressed their outrage at the mistranslation.

Mamdouh Najjar, a senior in Saudi's branch of Microsoft, apologised for the "unintentional error". He told Huffington Post Arabi that the error could be caused when large groups of more than 1,000 people submit translation suggestions, the machine automatically thinks that the suggestion is the preferred one. 

اعتذر بأسمي شخصيا كموظف بالشركة للشعب السعودي العظيم وهذا البلد الغالي على قلوبنا جميعا عن هذا الخطاء الغير مقصود#مايكروسوفت_تسيء_للسعوديه

— د. ممدوح نجار (@Mamdouhnajjar) August 26, 2016

 

Translation: As an employee of this company [Microsoft], I personally apologise to the people of great Saudi Arabia, which is a country very close to our hearts, for the unintentional error

Saudi citizens called for a boycott

#مايكروسوفت_تسيء_للسعودية
الشعب السعودي بصوت واحد:
تمت المقاطعة #bing 

 

HANGZHOU, China — The image of a 5-year-old Syrian boy, dazed and bloodied after being rescued from an airstrike on rebel-held Aleppo, reverberated around the world last month, a harrowing reminder that five years after civil war broke out there, Syria remains a charnel house.

But the reaction was more muted in Washington, where Syria has become a distant disaster rather than an urgent crisis. President Obama’s policy toward Syria has barely budged in the last year and shows no sign of change for the remainder of his term. The White House has faced little pressure over the issue, in part because Syria is getting scant attention on the campaign trail from either Donald J. Trump or Hillary Clinton.

That frustrates many analysts because they believe that a shift in policy will come only when Mr. Obama has left office. “Given the tone of this campaign, I doubt the electorate will be presented with realistic and intelligible options, with respect to Syria,” said Frederic C. Hof, a former adviser on Syria in the administration.

 

The lack of substantive political debate about Syria is all the more striking given that the Obama administration is engaged in an increasingly desperate effort to broker a deal with Russia for a cease-fire that would halt the rain of bombs on Aleppo.

Those negotiations moved on Sunday to China, where Secretary of State John Kerry met for two hours with the Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, at a Group of 20 meeting. At one point, the State Department was confident enough to schedule a news conference, at which the two were supposed to announce a deal.

 

read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/05/world/middleeast/obama-syria-foreign-policy.html?_r=0

 

 

The US are desperate to stop the bombing of Aleppo because their paid mercenaries — say Al Qaeda and Al Nusra or whatever they call themselves these days, under the cover of being "moderate" rebels (read nasty terrorists but not as nasty as ISIS) — are being pounded into a pulp, with of course inevitable collateral damage. The Syrian government also wants the bombing to stop but it wants the American paid mercenaries to surrender first. 

This would mean a win for Syria and a loss for the US. Unacceptable proposition to John Kerry-the catholic crusader on behalf of the Saudis. So Obama is wriggling as much as possible, to delay the outcome until his seat is taken over by Madam Lafemme Clinton who will bomb the shit out of Damascus and do more collateral damage in the style of the bombing of Libya, Dresden and Japan. Happy days...

 

The Syria Riddle: How It May Turn Into the First BRICS War     BY PEPE ESCOBAR

 

 

The Global Majority should be on full alert. The Greater Idiblistan attack is part of a complex interconnected operation.

The timeline tells the story.

November 18: Ronen Bar, Israel’s Shin Bet chief, meets with heads of MIT, Turkey’s intel.

November 25: NATO Chief Mark Rutte meets with Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan.

November 26: Salafi-jihadis assembled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), formerly Nusa Front, supported by Turkish intel, plus a hefty Rent-a-Jihadi coalition, launch a lightning-fast attack against Aleppo.

The Rent-a-Jihadi offensive originated in Greater Idlibistan. That’s where tens of thousands of jihadis were holed up, according to the – now proven failed – 2020 Damascus-Moscow strategy, which Turkey had to grudgingly accept. The Rent-a-Jihadi mob comprises scores of mercenaries who crossed over from – where else – Turkey: Uighurs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Ukrainians, even ISIS-K imports.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmail Baghaei, earlier their week, confirmed the Salafi-jihadi offensive was coordinated by US/Israel.

Baghaei did not mention Turkey, even as he stressed the terror attack happened immediately after Israel accepted a ceasefire with Hezbollah – already broken by Tel Aviv dozens of times – and after Netanyahu publicly accused Syrian President Bashar al-Assad of “playing with fire” by allowing the transit of modern Iranian missiles and military equipment via Syria to Hezbollah.

Right before the ceasefire, Tel Aviv smashed virtually all communication routes between Syria and Lebanon. Netanyahu subsequently stressed that the focus now is on “the Iranian threat”, essential to smash the Axis of Resistance.

According to a Syrian special services source, talking to RIA Novosti, Ukrainian advisers played the key role in the capture of Aleppo – providing drones and American satellite navigation and electronic warfare systems, and teaching Syrian collaborators and Islamic Party of Turkestan operatives how to use them.

Syrian Arab Army (SAA) communications were completely jammed by these electronic warfare systems: “The assault groups and drones were equipped with encrypted GPS devices and extensive use of AI, so that the use and navigation of attack UAVs and kamikaze drones took place from a long distance.”

The mechanism was set in place months ago. Kiev made a straightforward deal with Salafi-jihadis: drones in exchange for batches of takfiris to be weaponized against Russia in the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine.

What is Turkey really up to?

The practical role of Turkey in the Salafi-jihadi Greater Idlibistan offensive is as murky as it gets.

Over the past weekend, Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan, significantly also a former intel chief, denied any Turkish role. No one – apart from the NATO sphere – believes it. No Salafi-jihadi in northwest Syria can as much as strike a match without a Turkish intel green light – as the Ankara system funds and weaponizes them.

The official Turkey line is to support the Syrian – Salafi-jihadi – “opposition” as a whole while slightly deploring the Greater Idlibistan offensive. Once again, classic hedging. Yet the logical conclusion is that Ankara may have just buried the Astana process – by betraying their political partners Russia and Iran.

Erdogan and Hakan Fidan, so far, have failed to explain to the whole of West Asia – as well as the Global South – how this sophisticated Rent-a-Jihadi op could have been set up by US/Israel without any knowledge whatsoever by Turkey.

And in case this would have been a trap, Ankara simply has no sovereign power to denounce it.

What the facts do spell out is that a new front has de facto been opened against Iran; US/Israel Divide and Rule carries the potential to completely smash the Tehran-Ankara entente; and key Russian – mostly aerospace – assets will have to be diverted from Ukraine to support Damascus.

There’s no mystery: for years, Ankara has been dying to control Aleppo – even indirectly, to “stabilize” it for business (to the benefit of Turkish companies) and also to allow the return of a lot of relatively wealthy Aleppo refugees currently in Türkiye. In parallel, occupying Aleppo is also an American project: in this case to seriously undermine the Axis of Resistance to the benefit of Tel Aviv.

What else is new: Sultan Erdogan – now a BRICS partner – once again is in the hot seat. Worse: vis a vis two key BRICS members. Moscow and Tehran expect a lot of detailed explaining. There’s nothing that Putin abhors more than outright betrayal.

Erdogan took the initiative, and called Putin – introducing a twist: he focused on Russia-Turkey economic relations. After the tsunami of sanctions against Russia, Turkey turned into the key, privileged bridge between Moscow and the West. Besides, there are substantial Russian investments in Turkey: gas, nuclear, food imports. Both players always approached the war in Syria connected to geoeconomics.

Rent-a-Jihadi mobs on a roll

Meanwhile, the facts are again implacable. HTS, the former Al-Nusra Front, may not be strictly ISIS; it is rather a Turkey ISIS. Commander Abu Mohammed al-Joulani, de facto Emir of the ultra-dodgy rebrand, ditched all al-Qaeda variants plus ISIS to form HTS. He does command an array of Rent-a-Jihadis – mostly from the Heartland. And he is a darling of Turkey’s MIT. Ergo, a darling of Israel/NATO.

CIA/Pentagon, each operating their own network, weaponized 21 out of 28 Syrian militias, Salafi-jihadi and otherwise, organized by Turkey’s MIT into a sort of mercenary “national army” in Greater Idlibistan, according to Turkish think tank SETA.

Syrian analyst Kevork Almassian has shown how the proverbial “former Israeli officials” admitted supplying the Greater Idlibistan gang with funds, weapons, ammunition and even medical treatment.

Former Israeli Army Colonel Mordechai Kedar openly admitted support for “rebels” to “remove triangle of Hezbollah, Iran and Assad”. The “rebels”, he said, even manifested their desire to “open Israeli embassies in Damascus and Beirut”.

HTS is the latest incarnation of one of the collective West’s favorite toys: the “moderate rebel” (remember Obama/Hillary?) Allegiance is nearly 100% to Ankara. They hate Shi’ites and Alawites – and run an extensive prison network.

It’s HTS Salafi-jihadis who forced the complete surrender of Aleppo – without a fight – and filmed themselves in front of the legendary Citadel. From 2012 to 2016, only a few dozen SAA soldiers managed to successfully defend the citadel, even when they were completely surrounded.

Since the start of the war in 2011, Damascus has never met such a devastating defeat like the fall of Aleppo. Iraq lived something tragically similar with the fall of Mosul in 2014. It’s fair to argue that the absolute majority of Syrians are against the 2020 Russia-Turkey-Iran deal which in fact prevented the liberation of Idlib: a major strategic blunder.

It gets worse – because the problem actually started in 2018, when the Turks were not even in Afrin, and the liberation of Hama/Idlib was interrupted for the sake of liberating the suburbs of Damascus. It’s from there that tens of thousands of jihadis were transferred to Idlib.

When we got to 2020 it was already too late: Idlib was defended by none other than the Turkish Army.

The SAA, when it comes to Idlib, proved itself to be an asleep-at-the wheel disaster. They did not upgrade their defenses, did not integrate the use of drones, did not prepare tactical defense against FPV kamizake drones and observation drones, did not pay attention to the scores of foreign spies. No wonder the Rent-a-Jihadi mob found no resistance to take most of Aleppo in 48 hours.

After the 2020 deal, Iran and pro-Iran forces left Syria, especially in the provinces of Aleppo and Idlib. These sectors were transferred to the SAA. As for Russian businesses, which were already not exactly interested in being sanctioned by going against the Western blockade against Damascus, they were snubbed by the local clans, tribes and families.

This time, it was clear for months that HTS was preparing an offensive. Warnings were sent to Damascus. But the Syrians trusted the deal with Turkey and the re-established relations with Arab nations. Big mistake.

All that yields at least two serious lessons for Russia. From now on, whatever happens, Moscow will have to reign in these incestuous – and corrupt – Syrian networks to actually help defending the nation’s sovereignty. And what happened in Idlib shows that the war against the banderistas in Kiev will have to go all the way to the Dniester, and not stop at the borders of the Donetsk republic.

War on the road – in a connectivity crossroads

So far, HTS and the Rent-a-Jihadi mobs are not making too many mistakes. They are trying to occupy all roads feeding Aleppo to impose further battles as far away from the city as possible, so they have time for a complete take over.

War in West Asia is an on the road affair. Either with horses in the desert or with Toyotas. Not much is mined, and there’s no mud like in Ukraine. So the Syrian war is in constant flux – and always on the road. HTS is already using the M4 highway from Idlib and advancing on sectors of the crucial M5 from Aleppo to Damascus.

Meanwhile, the lineaments of a counter-offensive are being put in place. From Iraq, tens of thousands of Shi’ite, Yazidi and Christian militias from Kata’ib Hezbollah, the Fatemiyoun Brigade, and Hashd al-Shaabi (the Popular Mobilization Units, PMUs, very experienced in the fight against ISIS) entered Syria in the northeast via the al-Bukamal crossing.

The 25th division/Tiger Forces of respected commander Suhail Al-Hassan, in fact the best Syrian forces, are on the move alongside tribal militias.

Syria is an absolutely key connectivity crossroads – harking back to the Ancient Silk Roads. If the US/Israel combo achieves their perennial dream of regime change in Damascus, they block the crucial transit point for Iran to the Eastern Mediterranean.

They would also enable/force Qatar to finally build a pipeline to provide natural gas to Europe through Syria, one of Brzezinski’s gambits to replace Russian natural gas – and a dossier I was  examining in detail already 12 years ago.

The US Deep State’s tactics are not exactly a novelty; trying to divert Russia by focusing on Syria; stretching Moscow out; and relieving pressure on Ukraine, right before the signing of the very serious Russia-Iran comprehensive strategic partnership.

But there are complicating factors for the US. Saudi Arabia, which was an avid terror supporter at the start of the war on Syria, changed its policy after Russia got involved in 2015. And now Riyadh is also a – still sitting on the fence – BRICS partner. Saudi Arabia, Egypt and UAE, significantly, are supporting Assad against the HTS goons.

Syria is absolutely crucial for Russia’s overall West Asia-African strategy. Damascus is a key Russian connection to Africa – where Moscow is de facto deploying its full global power, as I recently witnessed in South Africa, with some intriguing add-ons in the form of de facto counter-sanctions against Western oligarchs, whose positions across Africa are being serially undermined.

BRICS members Russia and Iran have no other choice: they need to fix, by whatever means necessary, the incompetence displayed by Damascus and the SAA, so they may maintain their access to the Eastern Mediterranean, Lebanon, Iraq and beyond. That implies a very serious move: Russia deviating key assets from the battle in Novorossiya to preserve a relatively sovereign Syria.

Sleepwalking into the First BRICS War

As it stands, the SAA seems to have set up a still fragile defense line in the villages north of Hama. Fabled Gen Javad Ghaffari, former number two to Gen Soleimani, a specialist in all war on terror vectors, has arrived from Iran to help. By the way, in 2020 he wanted to go all the way to Idlib. That’s why Assad demanded he would have to leave; Damascus opted to freeze the war. Now it’s a completely different ball game.

The Rent-a-Jihadi/NATO Greater Idlibistan mob has zero air defenses. They are now being hit virtually non-stop by Russia/Syrian jets.

The situation in Aleppo is dramatic. The HTS-led terror gangs have control over virtually the whole Red Zone, and the rare sectors not yet invaded are under siege. They are also advancing on the Aleppo-Raqqa front, but so are the US-supported Kurds: that means a NATO advance. In the desert, everything is eerily silent.

The Russian Army had only 120 people in Aleppo. Those that survived left. So what’s ahead for Russia? The best possible medium-term scenario would be to concentrate on Lattakia; teach Syrian soldiers how to fight Russian-style; and direct them on how to properly liberate their own nation.

The immediate step is to realize the dire consequences of offering a safe haven for tens of thousands of terrorists in Greater Idlibistan back in 2020.

The next step is to fully understand that if Moscow negotiates a sort of Minsk-3 with NATO – which is essentially what Trump would push for – Kiev will become Idlib 2.0. And the banderista gangs will make sure that there will be new – fallen – Aleppos inside the Russian Federation.

The Global Majority should be on full alert. The Greater Idiblistan attack is part of a complex interconnected operation – with chaos deployed as the preferential tool – aimed to turn West Asia upside down and literally set it on fire. That may well be metastasizing into the First BRICS War.

 

https://www.unz.com/pescobar/the-syria-riddle-how-it-may-turn-into-the-first-brics-war/

 

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

 

Syria is the mother of all mysteries. Even the Romans couldn’t figure out all the intrigues, plots, factions, coups and assassinations that were common there. Nor could they understand or deal with its hotbed of religions and weird sects.

Two thousand years later, not much has changed. This week, irregular forces of a former al-Qaida outfit named Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) appeared out of the countryside and seized Syria’s second most important city, Aleppo. Syria’s dormant 14-year-old civil war suddenly went critical. A few days later, the newly re-emergent Tahrir stormed the important Syrian city of Hama. In both cases, Syrian government forces of the ruling al-Assad family simply and inexplicably melted away after fighting the jihadists for 14 years.

I have a personal interest in this fight. In 2017, my Eric S. Margolis Foundation to protect animals joined the Four Paws group out of Vienna to mount the daring rescue of an entire zoo in Aleppo. The wretched animals there, bears, huge tigers, lions, dogs, and chimps had been trapped in the city’s private zoo by years of war. While they starved, the war between various jihadist factions and government troops raged as Aleppo, once Syria’s second city, was relentlessly reduced to rubble.

I also went to Hama while trying to visit the magnificent Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers. There, the troops of President Hafez al-Assad (father of the current ruler Bashar,) were slugging it out with jihadists. Tens of thousands died in the fighting. Much of Hama was also reduced to ruins.

A sizeable portion of Syria’s 23 million people are Alawites, a mysterious breakaway Muslim sect from the Shias that many majority Sunni Muslims call heretics. Turkey’s minority Alevi Muslims are often confused with the Alawis, whom they brand as heretics. Poor Alawis flocked to the army where they eventually seized power, led by iron-fisted General Hafez al-Assad. Lebanon’s Druze, a mysterious mountain sect, are sometimes close to the Alawites. Maronite Christians also are highly influential, so too Druze and Armenians. Lebanon’s civil war, which I covered, ran from 1975 to 1990 until the Syrian Army ended the bloody conflict.

As a veteran war correspondent, it seems to me that at least many foreign powers are now backing HTS. The US and Israel have been trying to overthrow the Assad regimes since 2011. Israel wanted to cement its hold on the strategic Golan Heights that it captured from Syria. The US, which now occupies the oil producing NE third of Syria, has at least 9,000 troops there and, with Israel, helps the jihadists while publicly denouncing them.

Turkey, whose leader hates Assad, is also highly active in Syria and is most likely providing logistic support to HTS and other jihadist groups while also battling leftist Kurdish groups. Add Russian air units near Latakia, occasional help from Hezbollah groups and minor operations from small Iranian forces. In short, the evolving war in Syria looks increasingly like the awful, madhouse Thirty Year’s War in the 1600’s.

Interestingly, Israel’s far right coalition leaders keep referring to their ambition to ‘remake the face of the Mideast.’ This obviously refers to genocide in Gaza, the open-air prison camp for Palestinians driven in 1948 from their homes in what is today Galilee.  But Israel’s expansionist hard right also has its gaze fixed on Lebanon around the Litani River, the region’s last remaining free water source. It has also long coveted southern Syria, including Damascus, and overthrowing President Bashar al-Assad, a staunch supporter of the Palestinians. Remember, also, that large parts of Iraq are now occupied by US ground forces and air bases. So, a ‘new face’ of the Levant may be indeed emerging out of its current chaos.

from EricMargolis.com.

 

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/whats-going-on-in-syria/

 

READ FROM TOP.

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

 

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

 

PLEASE DO NOT BLAME RUSSIA IF WW3 STARTS. BLAME YOURSELF.

 

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too much of counting on other countries to then stabilize and help support government formation...