Syria

[ghulam muhammed]

WAITING FOR RELIEF

FEBRUARY 24, 2014: The United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA) Commissioner General, Filippo Grandi entered Yarmouk camp during the resumption of UNRWA’s humanitarian aid distribution this morning. He was shocked by the condition of the Palestine refugees he spoke to and the extent of war damage done to homes.

“I am deeply disturbed and shaken by what I observed today. The Palestine refugees with whom I spoke were traumatized by what they have lived through, and many were in evident need of immediate support, particularly food and medical treatment. What I have seen and heard today underlines the timeliness of the UN Security Council resolution 2139 on Humanitarian Access and the need for all sides to implement the resolution without fail.”

Yarmouk Camp has been sealed since July 2013, resulting in acute and widespread deprivation, including severe malnutrition, while civilian residents are constantly exposed to the threat of death, injuries and trauma of the armed conflict.

UNRWA welcomes the support of Syrian authorities to resume distribution Monday. During his three day visit to Syria, Grandi was encouraged by assurances given by the authorities that access will be maintained and expanded, and ultimately lead to the safe return of Palestine refugees to their homes.

“We hope that the positive developments in Yarmouk can give momentum to peaceful dialogue between all parties so that there can be humanitarian access for all civilians in Syria who have suffered enough”, said Grandi.

UNRWA reiterates the demands of the international community for the full and unhindered humanitarian access to all conflict-affected communities in Syria.

[img]http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x60 ... 1/qh73.jpg[/img]

[Conscíous]

Clean-up is such a bother without a bulldozer. Here, Syrian troops display characteristic respect for dead rodents by giving them the old heave-ho with a spotless one conveniently located in Al-’Utayba.

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[Conscíous]

A Syrian pilot told his family that he will sortie over his house with his Su-24 in a village in the countryside of Lattakia after a mission. In this footage his little son " Zuhair" appears waving and jumping happily while his father jet pass over.
http://youtu.be/v45dca4C-5A

[ghulam muhammed]

Activists: Syria conflict death toll hits 150,344

BEIRUT (AP) — The death toll in Syria's three-year conflict has exceeded 150,000, an activist group said Tuesday as fighting raged across the country, including an attack in the north that killed at least 31 people including 9 children.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said that it has documented 150,344 deaths in the conflict that started in March 2011. The figure includes civilians, rebels, and members of the Syrian military. It also includes militiamen, fighting alongside President Bashar Assad's forces and foreign fighters battling for Assad's ouster on the rebels' side.

The Observatory bases its tally on the information the group receives from a network of informants on the ground inside Syria.

In January, the U.N. said it had stopped updating its own tally of the Syrian dead because it can no longer verify the sources of information that led to its last count of at least 100,000 in late July.

Of the 150,344 people who died in the conflict, the majority — or 75,487 — were civilians, including 7,985 children and 5,266 women, The Observatory said. The number also includes 26,561 rebel fighters and 35,601 Syrian soldiers as well as 22, 879 Assad-loyal fighters and 11,220 foreign fighters battling on the opposition side.
(link deleted)l

[ghulam muhammed]

The Debunkation* of Assadist Media

For two years, a media led propaganda and smear campaign conducted by Assad loyalists and political allies has been running rampant on social media and on major state controlled news organisations such as SANA, PressTV, Fars and RussiaToday, spreading falsified images and unverified video footage to a huge audience attempting to vastly exaggerate and falsify abuses of some rebel battalions; generalise crimes on all groups; and cover up documented crimes against humanity committed by the Assad regime.

On Sunday 23rd March, rebels in Syria launched offensive (of which AlNusra, an AlQaeda affiliated group, was but one of many participants) into Latakia province via Idlib and East Latakia (AlAnfal offensive). Among the towns and villages seized from Assad regime troops in the advance, was Kessab and its Turkey border crossing. Three days later the world was hit by the largest viral social media disinformation campaign in history.

A cacophony of hoax images, misused videos, and Syrian State TV reports (including the 80 killed 12 beheaded story, which was then taken and cited by tens of smaller outlets giving the illusion of a large source basin) spread through social media like wildfire. Once again, Assad is pulling the minorities propaganda card.

(deleted link)

[ghulam muhammed]

An introduction to syria – its history and its present revolutionary struggles

Before discussing syria in its present state, we must first acknowledge that what we see today is a result of a 48-year-old dictatorship, not a 3-year-old revolution.

http://muqawameh.wordpress.com/2014/08/ ... struggles/

[ghulam muhammed]

Needs soar as number of Syrian refugees tops 3 million

UNHCR -The UN Refugee Agency reports that Syria's intensifying refugee crisis will today pass a record 3 million people, amid reports of horrifying conditions inside the country. These include cities where populations are surrounded, people are going hungry and civilians are being indiscriminately killed.

"Almost half of all Syrians have now been forced to abandon their homes and flee for their lives. One in every eight Syrians has fled across the border, fully a million more than a year ago. A further 6.5 million are displaced within Syria. Over half of those uprooted are children," UNHCR said in a statement released on Friday in Geneva.

UNHCR and other aid agencies say increasing numbers of families are arriving in a shocking state, exhausted, scared and with their savings depleted. Most have been on the run for a year or more, fleeing from village to village before taking the final decision to leave.

"There are worrying signs too that the journey out of Syria is becoming tougher, with many people forced to pay bribes at armed checkpoints proliferating along the borders. Refugees crossing the desert into eastern Jordan are being forced to pay smugglers hefty sums (US$100/£60 a head or more) to take them to safety," the statement said.

"Syrians are now the world's largest refugee population under UNHCR care, second only in number to the decades-long Palestinian crisis. The Syria operation is now the largest in UNHCR's 64-year history," the statement said.

António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees , said the Syrian crisis "has become the biggest humanitarian emergency of our era, yet the world is failing to meet the needs of refugees and the countries hosting them." He added that the response to the Syrian crisis had been generous, "but the bitter truth is that it falls far short of what's needed."

In addition to worsening security, the latest refugee arrivals report increasing difficulty in finding work; rocketing food and commodity prices; and failing services. A packet of bread in one village near the city of Idlib costs ten times more this year than last, according to a new arrival in Jordan.

The UNHCR statement said a growing share of new arrivals – up to 15 per cent in Jordan, for example – were suffering from long-term medical conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and cancer, and left because they were no longer able to get adequate health care at home.

Donors have contributed more than US$4.1 billion (£2.4 billion) to successive regional response plans since 2012. However more than US$2 billion (£1.2 billion) more is needed by the end of this year to meet the urgent needs of refugees. Most urgently, more than 2.4 million people are expected to need support in the coming weeks to prepare for winter.

http://www.unhcr.org.uk/news-and-views/ ... llion.html

[ghulam muhammed]

‘West crying for refugees with one eye, aiming gun with the other’ – Assad (FULL INTERVIEW)

In a rare interview with Russian media outlets, RT among them, Syrian leader Bashar Assad spoke about global and domestic terrorism threats, the need for a united front against jihadism, Western propaganda about the refugee crisis and ways to bring peace to his war-torn nation.

http://www.rt.com/news/315482-assad-ter ... interview/

[ghulam muhammed]

Blood for Oil: Syria Is the Ultimate Pipelinestan War

No it is not known for having much oil itself - but it's the logical path for Middle East gas en route to EU

Syria is an energy war. With the heart of the matter featuring a vicious geopolitical competition between two proposed gas pipelines, it is the ultimate Pipelinestan war, the term I coined long ago for the 21st century imperial energy battlefields.

It all started in 2009, when Qatar proposed to Damascus the construction of a pipeline from its own North Field – contiguous with the South Pars field, which belongs to Iran – traversing Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria all the way to Turkey, to supply the EU.

Damascus, instead, chose in 2010 to privilege a competing project, the $10 billion Iran-Iraq-Syria, also know as «Islamic pipeline». The deal was formally announced in July 2011, when the Syrian tragedy was already in motion. In 2012, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed with Iran.

Until then, Syria was dismissed, geo-strategically, as not having as much oil and gas compared to the GCC petrodollar club. But insiders already knew about its importance as a regional energy corridor. Later on, this was enhanced with the discovery of serious offshore oil and gas potential.

The «Assad must go» obsession in Washington is a multi-headed hydra. It includes breaking a Russia-Iran-Iraq-Syria alliance (now very much in effect as the «4+1» alliance, including Hezbollah, actively fighting all strands of Salafi Jihadism in Syria). But it also includes isolating energy coordination among them, to the benefit of the Gulf petrodollar clients/vassals linked to US energy giants.

Thus Washington’s strategy so far of injecting the proverbial Empire of Chaos logic into Syria; feeding the flames of internal chaos, a pre-planed op by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the endgame being regime change in Damascus.

An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar. Iranian gas from South Pars would be traded in an alternative basket of currencies.

READ FULL ARTICLE :-

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/b ... ar/ri11709

[ghulam muhammed]

Bashar Al-Assad Has More Popular Support than the Western-Backed “Opposition”: Poll

In the view of Syrians, the country’s president, Bashar al Assad, and his ally, Iran, have more support than do the forces arrayed against him, according to a public opinion poll taken last summer by a research firm that is working with the US and British governments.

The poll’s findings challenge the idea that Assad has lost legitimacy and that the opposition has broad support.

The survey, conducted by ORB International, a company which specializes in public opinion research in fragile and conflict environments, found that 47 percent of Syrians believe that Assad has a positive influence in Syria, compared to only 35 percent for the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and 26 percent for the Syrian Opposition Coalition.

At the same time, more see Assad’s ally, Iran, as having a favorable influence (43%) than view the Arab Gulf States—which back the external opposition, including Al Nusra and ISIS—as affecting Syria favorably (37%).

An in-country face-to-face ORB poll conducted in May 2014 arrived at similar conclusions. That poll found that more Syrians believe the Assad government best represents their interests and aspirations than believe the same about any of the opposition groups.

The poll found that 35 percent of Syrians saw the Assad government as best representing them (20% chose the current government and 15% chose Bashar al-Assad). By comparison, the level of the support for the opposition forces was substantially weaker:

• Al-Nusra, 9%
• FSA, 9%
• “Genuine” rebels, 6%
• ISIS, 4%
• National Coalition/transitional government, 3%

The sum of support for the opposition forces, 31 percent, was less than the total support for Assad and his government.

The persistence of the myth that Assad lacks support calls to mind an article written by Jonathan Steele in the British newspaper the Guardian on 17 January 2012, less than one year into the war. Under a lead titled, “Most Syrians back President Assad, but you’d never know it from western media,” Steele wrote:

Suppose a respectable opinion poll found that most Syrians are in favor of Bashar al-Assad remaining as president, would that not be major news? Especially as the finding would go against the dominant narrative about the Syrian crisis, and the media consider the unexpected more newsworthy than the obvious.

Alas, not in every case. When coverage of an unfolding drama ceases to be fair and turns into a propaganda weapon, inconvenient facts get suppressed. So it is with the results of a recent YouGov Siraj poll…ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go.

Steele reminds us that Assad has had substantial popular support from the beginning of the war, but that this truth, being politically inconvenient, is brushed aside, indeed, suppressed, in favor of falsehoods from US, British and French officials about Assad lacking legitimacy.

Steele’s observation that inconvenient facts about Assad’s level of support have been “ignored by almost all media outlets in every western country whose government has called for Assad to go,” raises obvious questions about the independence of the Western media. Private broadcasters and newspapers are, to be sure, formally independent of Western governments, but they embrace the same ideology as espoused by key figures in Western governments, a state of affairs that arises from the domination of both media and governments by significant corporate and financial interests. Major media themselves are major corporations, with a big business point of view, and Western governments are made up of, if not always “in-and-outers” from the corporate world, by those who are sympathetic to big business.

Wall Street and the corporate world manifestly have substantial interests in the Middle East, from securing investment opportunities in the region’s vast energy resources sector, the construction of pipelines to carry natural gas to European markets (cutting out Russia), access to the region’s markets, and the sale of military hardware to its governments. Saudi Arabia, for example, a country of only 31 million, has the world’s third largest military budget, ahead of Russia, much of its spent buying expensive military equipment from Western arms manufacturers. Is it any wonder that Western governments indulge the Riyadh regime, despite its fondness for beheadings and amputations, official misogyny, intolerance of democracy, propagation of the violently sectarian Islamist Wahhabi ideology that inspires Al-Qaeda, Al-Nusra and ISIS, military intervention in Bahrain to crush a pro-democracy uprising, and a war of aggression on Yemen?

FULL ARTICLE :-

http://www.globalresearch.ca/bashar-al- ... ll/5495643

[ghulam muhammed]

War in Syria: Up to 40,000 civilians are starving in besieged Madaya, say campaigners

Miles from the border with Lebanon, residents of a Syrian town are being forced to eat insects, plants and even cats after a siege lasting six months, hemmed in by land mines and Hezbollah forces

Lebanese Shia militia, which has been fighting on the side of president Bashar al-Assad in the Syrian conflict, was effectively holding civilians hostage in order to gain leverage over two embattled Shia towns in Syria’s northern Idlib province.

The towns, Kafrayya and Fua, are besieged by members of the Islamist umbrella group Jaish al-Fatah, he said. One of its members, the Islamist group Ahrar al-Sham was among the groups that had been battling pro-government forces in the strategic town of Zabadani, which lies close to Madaya.

Mr Assaf claimed that, as part of its efforts to force the coalition to relinquish Kafrayya and Fua, Hezbollah had forced residents in the areas surrounding the predominantly Sunni Muslim Madaya to move into the town. It was slowly forcing them to starve in a bid to ease conditions for the two Shia towns, he said.

It is a view echoed by the pro-opposition monitoring group the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which has claimed that the Syrian army and Hezbollah is using Madaya as a tool to break the sieges against Shia civilians. It accused the international community of “silence” in the face of extreme human suffering. Earlier this week an exchange of wounded fighters and civilians from Zabadani, Kafraya and Fua took place in a rare UN-backed local truce. But Madaya remains encircled.

The siege has now lasted for almost 200 days and it has been months since aid was last allowed into the town.

Food ran out two months ago, and conditions have rapidly deteriorated in the subsequent weeks.

The price of food has spiralled uncontrollably, with a 1kg bag of rice costing as much as $100. One photograph showed a car for sale in exchange for 10kg of rice or 5kg of baby milk formula. The vehicle was incorrectly attributed to Mr Alloush, according to Mr Ibrahim. “I wish Mr Jamil had a car,” the activist said. “He could sell it rather than dying like that. The poor man used to have a bike and nothing more.” He added: “All those who have cars, they are offering them for sale.”

The activists said that they had tried and failed to raise the plight of the entrapped inhabitants of Madaya. They have become convinced that no one cares.

Mr Ibrahim said that he and fellow residents had resorted to wishing that they were dead. He said: “How do we feel about the world? If you don’t care about us, please just help us to die like humans, not like that. Ask someone to bomb us and forget about us.”

FULL ARTICLE :-

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 93386.html

[Conscíous]

Everyday.. We are getting closer to the end of this war against the Syrian people

How do I know this?
The Wahabi, Salafi and Takfiri rats dying in the frontline are young boys.. Just like in the second World war, when Hitler was on his last leg and only the young were left to defend Berlin..

Let those ignoramus saudi send there troops.. Stupid rats can't even beat sandel wearing Yemenia, how are they going to defeat hezbollah ??

Long Live the freedom fighters of Syria..

[qutub_mamajiwala]

saudi is not sending any troops to syria.
it is clear hog -wash for the world.
dont buy into any saudi crap.
if they really wanted, they could accomodate all the refugees.
they have all the land , money and food in the world--only 3 basic things which is needed.
but instead they want to built mosques in europe for the refugees.
pray --how do u worship with empty stomachs.?
bullshit taimyya ideology

[Conscíous]

The saudis wet dream to establish a Sunni caliphate has gone down the drain . All there head chops are rotting out in the desert and have become a good food source for the wild animals..

This rats are not worthy for a proper burial. All they can do is scream Allah Akbar and point there little finger..
There are bunch of pedophilia whom deserve nothing better.

I read on RT.com that the Saudis were already sending jets to turkey.. And turkey has already started shelling the SAA..
I guess we will find out in a few days..

[Conscíous]

Turkey confirms attacks against SAA and Kurdish forces in Syria -- and says more is coming

Continue reading : http://russia-insider.com/en/turkey-con ... ce/ri12830

[Conscíous]

Thousands of soldiers from regional countries are set to participate in a military maneuver in Saudi Arabia, media reports say.

Saudi media said some 350,000 forces from the Persian Gulf Arab states and a number of other countries will take part in the Saudi-led military maneuver in the area of Hafer al-Batin in northern Saudi Arabia.

Some 2,540 warplanes, 20,000 tanks and 460 helicopters will also participate in the exercise, dubbed “North Thunder.”

In 18 days of maneuvers, the airspace over northern Saudi Arabia will be closed.

Continue reading : http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2016/02/09 ... th-Thunder

[Conscíous]

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As Turkey and Saudi Arabia edge closer to sending ground forces into Syria at the behest of the United States, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has warned that an escalation of the conflict could lead to another war in the world.

Read more: http://sputniknews.com/russia/20160212/ ... z40GO8cs3S

[Conscíous]

The military maneuver features 2,540 warplanes, 20,000 tanks and 460 helicopters from 20 different nations.
Armed forces from 20 countries gathered in northern Saudi Arabia on Sunday for the start of "the most important" military exercise ever staged in the Middle East, according to the Saudi state news agency SPA.

The exercise, dubbed "Thunder of the North,| features some 350,000 forces from Persian Gulf Arab states and allies such as Chad, Egypt, Jordan, Sudan and Pakistan, said SPA.

"http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/2 ... -0022.html"

[Conscíous]

Washington should think more than twice about allowing Turkey and Saudi Arabia, its Sunni allies, militarily to engage their Shiite enemies in Syria. Allowing Sunni supremacists into a deeper sectarian war is not a rational way to block Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. And it certainly will not serve America's interests.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are too weak militarily to damage Russia's interests. It is a Russian trap -- and precisely what the Russians are hoping their enemies will fall into.
(link deleted)

[Conscíous]

Rats lost the war: Surrender talks is what "peace talks" really are

According to the US secretary of state, the ceasefire deal will permit the transportation of humanitarian supplies to besieged areas and promote a political end to the conflict


Read more: http://sputniknews.com/politics/2016022 ... z40wSWIkUL

[Conscíous]

Syria combat footage: Anti-tank missiles vs jihadi infantry in battle for Latakian town (GRAPHIC)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnuzIsOP6lE

[Conscíous]

When The SAA & Hezbollah Ruin Your Trip to Rome
Read more at http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=dd7_1456 ... lAaDq9q.99

[Conscíous]

Reasons why Syrians support President Assad

It may be surprising to some that the Syrian people still support Pres. Bashar al Assad. The western media has gone to great lengths to portray him as an evil dictator. However, Syrian residents are not affected by western media, and have a different view of their leader.

Syrians see Pres. Assad as a reformer. They have witnessed numerous laws passed for their benefit, and a constant focus on anti-corruption measures. They witnessed the abolition of the one-party rule, and now over 30 political parties are registered. They watched him call for a new constitution to be drafted, and it was ratified in 2012.

Syria has millions of civil servants, and they watched as their salaries were repeatedly and routinely increased by order of the President from 2000 until present. Doctors, professors, teachers, and all the millions of civil servants have personally benefited from Pres. Assad.

During the several years of the worst fighting in Homs, Syria the Syrians watched as Pres. Assad kept the Syrian Army slowly advancing, without unnecessary loss of life. Some critics wanted a quicker military response in Homs, in order to free Homs and allow the residents to return home and rebuild. However, Pres. Assad preferred the slow and steady method of using force and patience combined.

Syria is the only secular country in the Middle East. This was established many decades ago, and when Pres. Assad came to office in summer of 2000 he maintained this form of government. The Syrian people have become very used to the secular nature of Syrian government, and social life. There are 18 different religious sects in Syria. The government and institutions are all secular and protect the rights of all Syrians. In Syria there is no ruling sect, all sects are represented throughout the government, Parliament and military.

Syria has a long history of a policy of resistance to the occupation of Palestine. This has been engrained in the collective thinking of the Syrian population, regardless of religious affiliation, or social status. The suffering of the Palestinian people is always on the minds, and in the hearts of Syrians. Pres. Assad is viewed as a champion of this resistance position. The Syrian people would not take kindly to any softening of this stance. Part of the moral fabric of the Syrian society is the resistance ideology.

Pres. Assad is a well known brand. The long length in office of his father put Pres. Bashar al Assad front and center in the political limelight. Syrians enjoy the safety of continuity, as opposed to radical change which can bring negative changes.

In the June 3, 2014 Presidential election millions of Syrians participated at over 9,600 polling stations across the country. Tens of thousands inundated the Syrian embassy in Lebanon to vote and thousands more came from around the world to vote in Syria because their host countries denied them the right to vote at the local Syrian diplomatic mission. Syrian abroad voted in 36 Syrian Embassies around the world. This was the first competitive election since the new Constitution was approved in 2012. The voting by Syrians living or taking refuge in Lebanon was massive. Voting in Beirut needed to be extended by a full day. Similarly, the voting inside Syria on June 3, 2014 exceeded expectations and polls remained open until midnight to accommodate the huge numbers of Syrians waiting to vote. Insurgents increased their shelling of civilian areas in Damascus and Aleppo but otherwise the election was conducted peacefully and without attacks on voting stations. There was a large international observers delegation dispersed around the country. The Higher Judicial Committee of the Constitutional Court reported the results:

15,840, 575 were eligible to vote, both inside Syria and outside.

442,108 ballots were disqualified, for irregularities. (3.8%)

11,634,412 voted (73.4%)

Results of the election were presented by the Speaker of the Parliament:

Dr. Bashar al Assad received: 10,319,723 votes, 88.7% of the vote.

Dr. Hassan al Nouri received: 500,272 votes, 4.3% of the vote

Mr. Maher Hajjar received: 372,301 votes, 3.2% of the vote

Syrians value education. A University degree is the goal of many Syrians, and a source of pride among families. Given the fact that Pres. Assad is the most highly educated President in the world, with a prestigious Medical degree from UK, they are collectively proud of his intelligence. They have also noted his balanced personality. They feel he is neither too soft, nor too hard. They see him as fair and balanced. He has shown them a great deal of patience and perseverance during almost 5 years of international attacks on Syria.

http://ahtribune.com/world/north-africa ... assad.html

[Conscíous]

Another Pipeline War

The fossil fuel industry’s business model is to externalize its costs by clawing in obscene subsidies and tax deductions—causing grave environmental costs, including toxic pollution and global warming. Among the other unassessed prices of the world’s addiction to oil are social chaos, war, terror, the refugee crisis overseas, and the loss of democracy and civil rights abroad and at home.

As we focus on the rise of ISIS and search for the source of the savagery that took so many innocent lives in Paris and San Bernardino, we might want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and petroleum here on our own shores.

America’s unsavory record of violent interventions in Syria—obscure to the American people yet well known to Syrians—sowed fertile ground for the violent Islamic Jihadism that now complicates any effective response by our government to address the challenge of ISIS. So long as the American public and policymakers are unaware of this past, further interventions are likely to only compound the crisis. Moreover, our enemies delight in our ignorance.

As the New York Times reported in a Dec. 8, 2015 front page story, ISIS political leaders and strategic planners are working to provoke an American military intervention which, they know from experience, will flood their ranks with volunteer fighters, drown the voices of moderation and unify the Islamic world against America.

To understand this dynamic, we need to look at history from the Syrians’ perspective and particularly the seeds of the current conflict. Long before our 2003 occupation of Iraq triggered the Sunni uprising that has now morphed into the Islamic State, the CIA had nurtured violent Jihadism as a Cold War weapon and freighted U.S./Syrian relationships with toxic baggage.

During the 1950’s, President Eisenhower and the Dulles brothers rebuffed Soviet treaty proposals to leave the Middle East a cold war neutral zone and let Arabs rule Arabia. Instead, they mounted a clandestine war against Arab Nationalism—which CIA Director Allan Dulles equated with communism—particularly when Arab self-rule threatened oil concessions. They pumped secret American military aid to tyrants in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon favoring puppets with conservative Jihadist ideologies which they regarded as a reliable antidote to Soviet Marxism. At a White House meeting between the CIA’s Director of Plans, Frank Wisner, and Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, in September of 1957, Eisenhower advised the agency, “We should do everything possible to stress the ‘holy war’ aspect.”

The CIA began its active meddling in Syria in 1949—barely a year after the agency’s creation. Syrian patriots had declared war on the Nazis, expelled their Vichy French colonial rulers and crafted a fragile secularist democracy based on the American model. But in March of 1949, Syria’s democratically elected president, Shukri-al-Kuwaiti, hesitated to approve the Trans Arabian Pipeline, an American project intended to connect the oil fields of Saudi Arabia to the ports of Lebanon via Syria. In his book, Legacy of Ashes, CIA historian Tim Weiner recounts that in retaliation, the CIA engineered a coup, replacing al-Kuwaiti with the CIA’s handpicked dictator, a convicted swindler named Husni al-Za’im. Al-Za’im barely had time to dissolve parliament and approve the American pipeline before his countrymen deposed him, 14 weeks into his regime.

Following several counter coups in the newly destabilized country, the Syrian people again tried democracy in 1955, re-electing al-Kuwaiti and his Ba’ath Party. Al-Kuwaiti was still a Cold War neutralist but, stung by American involvement in his ouster, he now leaned toward the Soviet camp. That posture caused Dulles to declare that “Syria is ripe for a coup” and send his two coup wizards, Kim Roosevelt and Rocky Stone to Damascus.

Two years earlier, Roosevelt and Stone had orchestrated a coup in Iran against the democratically elected President Mohammed Mosaddegh after Mosaddegh tried to renegotiate the terms of Iran’s lopsided contracts with the oil giant, BP. Mosaddegh was the first elected leader in Iran’s 4,000 year history, and a popular champion for democracy across the developing world. Mosaddegh expelled all British diplomats after uncovering a coup attempt by UK intelligence officers working in cahoots with BP.

Mosaddegh, however, made the fatal mistake of resisting his advisors’ pleas to also expel the CIA, which they correctly suspected, and was complicit in the British plot. Mosaddegh idealized the U.S. as a role model for Iran’s new democracy and incapable of such perfidies. Despite Dulles’ needling, President Truman had forbidden the CIA from actively joining the British caper to topple Mosaddegh.

When Eisenhower took office in January 1953, he immediately unleashed Dulles. After ousting Mosaddegh in “Operation Ajax,” Stone and Roosevelt installed Shah Reza Pahlavi, who favored U.S. oil companies, but whose two decades of CIA sponsored savagery toward his own people from the Peacock throne would finally ignite the 1979 Islamic revolution that has bedeviled our foreign policy for 35 years.

Flush from his Operation Ajax “success” in Iran, Stone arrived in Damascus in April 1956 with $3 million in Syrian pounds to arm and incite Islamic militants and to bribe Syrian military officers and politicians to overthrow al-Kuwaiti’s democratically elected secularist regime. Working with the Muslim Brotherhood, Stone schemed to assassinate Syria’s Chief of Intelligence, its Chief of the General Staff and the Chief of the Communist Party and to engineer “national conspiracies and various strong arm” provocations in Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan that could be blamed on the Syrian Ba’athists.

The CIA’s plan was to destabilize the Syrian government, and create a pretext for an invasion by Iraq and Jordan, whose governments were already under CIA control. Roosevelt forecasted that the CIA’s newly installed puppet government would “rely first upon repressive measures and arbitrary exercise of power.”

But all that CIA money failed to corrupt the Syrian military officers. The soldiers reported the CIA’s bribery attempts to the Ba’athist regime. In response, the Syrian army invaded the American Embassy taking Stone prisoner. Following harsh interrogation, Stone made a televised confession to his roles in the Iranian coup and the CIA’s aborted attempt to overthrow Syria’s legitimate government.

The Syrian’s ejected Stone and two U.S. Embassy staffers—the first time any American State Department diplomat was barred from an Arab country. The Eisenhower White House hollowly dismissed Stone’s confession as “fabrications and slanders,” a denial swallowed whole by the American press, led by the New York Times and believed by the American people, who shared Mosaddegh’s idealistic view of their government.

Syria purged all politicians sympathetic to the U.S. and executed them for treason. In retaliation, the U.S. moved the Sixth Fleet to the Mediterranean, threatened war and goaded Turkey to invade Syria. The Turks assembled 50,000 troops on Syria’s borders and only backed down in the face of unified opposition from the Arab League whose leaders were furious at the U.S. intervention.

Even after its expulsion, the CIA continued its secret efforts to topple Syria’s democratically elected Ba’athist government. The CIA plotted with Britain’s MI6 to form a “Free Syria Committee” and armed the Muslim Brotherhood to assassinate three Syrian government officials, who had helped expose “the American plot.” (Matthew Jones in The ‘Preferred Plan’: The Anglo-American Working Group Report on Covert Action in Syria, 1957). The CIA’s mischief pushed Syria even further away from the U.S. and into prolonged alliances with Russia and Egypt.

Following the second Syrian coup attempt, anti-American riots rocked the Mid-East from Lebanon to Algeria. Among the reverberations was the July 14, 1958 coup, led by the new wave of anti-American Army officers who overthrew Iraq’s pro-American monarch, Nuri al-Said. The coup leaders published secret government documents, exposing Nuri al-Said as a highly paid CIA puppet. In response to American treachery, the new Iraqi government invited Soviet diplomats and economic advisers to Iraq and turned its back on the West.

continue reading here; http://ecowatch.com/2016/02/25/robert-k ... eline-war/

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Saudi Air Force Deploys to Support Turkey's Military Intervention in Syria

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh5jLTwNUHE

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Great footage from the liberation of Palmyra

Artillery, tanks, ATGM, and Airstrikes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYTSJKpIj04

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Assad to take Aleppo City and southern countryside, largest force concentration Syria has ever seen poised for attack

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Syrian Army, Hezbollah mobilize men to restart southern Aleppo operations

The large-scale offensive by the extremist rebels at Tal Al-‘Eiss has forced the Syrian Arab Army’s High Command to reconsider their postponement of the southern Aleppo operations after a long hiatus to concentrate on Palmyra and Khanasser. According to a senior officer from the Syrian Arab Army’s 4th Mechanized Division, the Syrian Armed Forces, Hezbollah, and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have sent a large convoy of soldiers to the southern Aleppo front in order to restart their imperative offensive to clear the remaining villages under extremist rebel control on the Idlib border. Currently, the Syrian Armed Forces and Hezbollah have a large number of soldiers at the towns of Al-Safirah and Hader in southern Aleppo; however, they do not have enough men there to launch a major offensive to retake Tal Al-‘Eiss and Al-Zorbah.
(link deleted)

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The Daesh Chronicles: The “We-Told-You-So” Story

The recent terror attacks in the EU must have a direct link to the fact that the anti-Syrian coalition, including the EU has 1) ignored all warnings about the rise of Jihadis, 2) facilitated their movement into Syria in the hope of scoring a quick and swift victory against her government, and 3) fell victim to political correctness in accepting refugee swarms that included terrorists that it (ie the EU) have helped create in the first place.

continue reading here→(Link deleted)

[ghulam muhammed]

Why Does Israel Support ISIS?

From the outset of the foreign-sponsored insurrection in Syria, Israel has decidedly backed the armed opponents of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Reports have shown that Israeli forces have been providing safe haven, hospital care and even weaponry to anti-Assad militants, including to the most radical outfits like ISIS and Al-Nusra Front. On top of material and logistical aid, the Israeli air force has unleashed dozens of air strikes on Syrian regime and allied Hezbollah targets throughout the conflict.

Top Israeli officials have repeatedly stressed that they would “prefer” an ISIS victory in Syria over an Assad victory.

Dore Gold, the director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry, said of Israel’s objective in Syria:

At the end of the day, when some kind of modus vivendi is reached inside of Syria, it is critical from the Israeli standpoint that Syria does not emerge as an Iranian satellite incorporated fully into the Iranian strategic system.

Michael Oren, Israel’s former ambassador to the US, remarked:

If we have to choose between ISIS and Assad, we’ll take ISIS. ISIS has flatbed trucks and machine guns. Assad represents the strategic arch from Tehran to Beirut, 130,000 rockets in the hands of Hezbollah, and the Iranian nuclear program.

Israel’s Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon expressed an identical sentiment, saying:

In Syria, if the choice is between Iran and the Islamic State, I choose the Islamic State. They don’t have the capabilities that Iran has. Our greatest enemy is the Iranian regime that has declared war on us. Iran tried to open a terror front against us on the Golan Heights.

The barbaric, savage atrocities conducted by ISIS in Syria and Iraq garners tremendous bad press for Islam in general, which translates into good or less negative coverage of Israel and its criminal activities. ISIS’s cruel and unusual methods of execution (i.e., beheadings, crucifixions, immolations, drownings, stoning, throwing people off of buildings, etc.), which it openly flaunts in macabre propaganda videos, provokes extremely bad headlines which have obscured any sense of proportional coverage of Israel’s ongoing brutality against the Palestinians. With ISIS dominating the headlines and TV newsreels, Israel escapes international opprobrium and has a free hand to act.

By using the word “Islamic” in their official title, ISIS’s atrocious acts of brigandry are automatically associated with Islam generally by the less-than-astute general public, which induces fear and animosity towards the entire religion and any group associated with it. Knowing this, Netanyahu and other Israeli imperialists have employed guilt-by-association fallacies to demonize the Muslim groups in conflict with Israel by falsely equating them to ISIS; groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, both of which have condemned the atrocities of ISIS, and the latter organization being on the frontline in Syria in the fight against the terror group. Hostility towards Islam in this day and age usually induces feelings of sympathy and affinity for the Jews and Israel, whose main rivals are Arab and Muslim countries and groups.

Zionist regime officials have continuously said that they would rather see ISIS victorious over the regime of Bashar al-Assad because Assad is the “keystone” in an Iranian-Hezbollah-Syrian arc of defiance against Israel. Over the years Assad has allowed Syrian territory to be used as a transit space for Iranian shipments of munitions to Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon as well as Hamas and other resistance factions in occupied Palestine. Assad is also an opponent of Israeli imperialism who has demanded Tel Aviv return all usurped territory in the Golan Heights back to Syria. For geostrategic and economic reasons, Israel wants to hold on to the pilfered lands it stole from Syria in the 1967 war.

It is Zionist Jews, Americans, Europeans, Russians and Chinese who control most of the world’s economic resources, and who have the most powerful militaries. While Ziocons and their right-wing dupes promote scare stories about the erroneous spectre of an utterly implausible future “Caliphate” ruling over a subjugated West, the US-NATO-Zionist power bloc literally is dividing and conquering the Middle East, murdering millions, toppling regimes one after the other, and pilfering the world’s resources for corporate cartels. The few Muslim countries that have some semblRTICLEance of regional power, like Turkey, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, are slaves and lapdogs of the US, NATO and Israel. The Muslim-majority countries rebelling against this power bloc – countries like Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Palestine, etc. – have either already been totally annihilated through a Western or Israeli war or a Western/Israeli-backed insurgency, or are presently on the chopping block to be removed and replaced by loyal marionettes.

READ FULL ARTICLE :-

http://nonalignedmedia.com/2016/04/why- ... port-isis/

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World played with fire in Syria, scholar says

John Rosenthal is a European-based journalist and political analyst who writes on European politics and transatlantic issues.
He has also written extensively about the Syrian Civil War.

His articles have appeared in such publications as Al-Monitor, World Affairs, The Wall Street Journal Europe, Les Temps Modernes, and Die Weltwoche. He is the author of the recent book The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion.

The BRICS Post recently interviewed Rosenthal about developments in Syria.

TBP: The Syrian military delivered ISIL it’s greatest defeat in two years by recapturing the ancient city of Palmyra on March 27. But Robert Fisk criticized Western powers for not cheering ISIL’s demise in Palmyra.

Coming a week after ISIL’s brutal attack in Brussels, shouldn’t the EU at least have seen this as payback?

Rosenthal: Like the United States, the major European powers have put themselves in an impossible position. For five years now, they have been telling us that Bashar al-Assad and the Assad “regime”, as they say, are the root of all evil in Syria – so awful that it was even worth facilitating the rise of openly jihadist forces in Syria, in order to hasten the regime’s demise.

The most extreme variant of this “root-of-all-evil” hypothesis is the idea that the Assad regime itself was responsible for the rise of ISIL and has continued, in one form or another, to collude with it.

This idea has become commonplace on both sides of the Atlantic. If ISIL is responsible for the Brussels attacks, as it claims, then, of course, Western leaders should be celebrating ISIL’s defeat at Palmyra.

But since that defeat has come at the hands of regime forces, this would be to admit they were wrong. And one thing these people will never do is admit they are wrong.

Hence the embarrassed silence vis-à-vis Palmyra.

There has been much criticism in the past few years of how Western press have covered the Syrian civil war.

As a journalist who has written about the conflict, is this criticism warranted?

Absolutely. In fact, even though my writing is 99 per cent just factual, I was less and less able to write about the conflict, because the media did not want to publish the facts in question.

One of the publications to which I had been a regular contributor – National Review Online, the website of the American conservative weekly National Review – went so far as to “bar” me from publishing.

In other words, they blacklisted me. At least this is what the journalist Michael Weiss claims, and I think Weiss is right.

The editors at National Review did not tell me I was “barred,” but they never again accepted a submission from me and eventually ceased responding altogether.

Weiss, incidentally, is one of the main American proponents of the “Assad-as-root-of-all-evil” view of the Syrian conflict, and he clearly believes that my barring was well deserved.

The reason for my barring was an article I published in June 2012 on the Houla massacre. The massacre represented a major turning point in the Syrian conflict.

Responsibility was almost instantaneously attributed to regime forces and/or affiliated militias, and Western governments responded by cutting off diplomatic relations with Damascus.

Two weeks later, however, Germany’s paper-of-record, Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, published a report suggesting that these initial attributions were mistaken and that the perpetrators of the massacre were in fact rebel forces.

I am a specialist in European languages and politics, and it struck me as normal, under the circumstances, to try to make the gist of this report accessible to the English-speaking public.

But very quickly I heard from a contact at National Review that my sources were suspected of being “beholden to Assad”.

The notion that the leading paper of Europe’s richest and most powerful nation is somehow “beholden to Assad” is downright laughable.

But it is a measure of the parochialism of some of America’s would-be “opinion-makers” that it appears to have been taken seriously by the editors at National Review.

Such insinuations – and, I suppose, the fact that I had the temerity to defend the credibility of the report against irrelevant smears – was enough to get me barred.

Another example: As you know, in April 2014 the Dutch priest Father Frans van der Lugt was killed in a rebel-controlled Christian neighborhood of Homs.

Father Frans’s death made headlines around the world and he was widely eulogized for his good works in Syria. Examining Father Frans’s publications in Dutch, however, I discovered that his own first-hand observations of the beginnings of the anti-Assad rebellion contrasted sharply with the standard view in the Western media.

Undoubtedly most significantly, Father Frans insisted that the protests that sparked the rebellion in 2011 were not strictly peaceful, as they have been almost universally presented to the Western public, but rather contained an armed and violent element from the start. He also accused rebel forces of committing atrocities and then blaming them on the regime.

By this time, needless to say, I could not even have dreamed of pitching an article on Father Frans’s observations to National Review. But I could not place one in any other Stateside outlet either, including venues with which I had an established relationship.

Despite their obvious relevance and newsworthiness – or rather: precisely because of the latter – Father Frans’s views were taboo.

If he had still been alive and his observations had become known, he would surely have been attacked as an Assad “propagandist” – as other Syria-based Christian clergy who made similar observations in fact have been.

I could give numerous other examples.

Once Washington and its European allies had established the terms of the politically “correct” narrative of the Syrian crisis, facts that failed to jibe with that narrative were unwanted and anyone who tried to report them was inevitably attacked as “pro-Assad”.

European intelligence services are now chasing ISIL veterans who returned from the Middle East to roost at home.

You’ve been writing about these networks and how ill informed European agencies have been about their sheer numbers.

Could the Brussels attack have been thwarted?

Well, if we consider just the immediate background to the attacks, it is hard to say. There is some evidence that these guys acted when they did precisely because they believed they were about to be caught.
Obviously, one cannot say that Belgian authorities have been incredibly efficient about breaking up terror plots. But neither can one say that about the French.

Although it tends to escape notice, a major component of the November Paris attacks – namely, the attack on the Bataclan Theatre – was a strictly French operation. And, of course, there was the Charlie Hebdo attack and numerous other recent attacks in France – almost all of them carried out by French jihadists.

But if we take a longer view, the answer is already implicit in your question, and I’m afraid your formulation is entirely apt. These guys have indeed come home to roost.

With the sole exception of Salah Abdeslam, all the known perpetrators of the November Paris attacks were returnees from Syria.

Four of the five suspected perpetrators of the Brussels attacks are known to have either been in Syria or attempted to get there.

By providing moral and diplomatic and, in some cases, material support to the anti-Assad jihad in Syria, and by allowing jihadist safe havens to be carved out of Syrian territory, the European powers helped to create the most important incubator of terror that the world has yet seen.

Obviously, Belgium bears less responsibility in this regard. It is not small states like Belgium that lay down the broad lines of European foreign policy. It is the major EU powers: France, Germany and, for the moment, the UK.

The problem is not one of nuts-and-bolts counter-terrorism. The problem is one of policy. By fomenting jihad in Syria, the European powers and the US have been playing with fire.

Citizens of Europe are now paying the price.

How does media coverage of Syria compare with coverage of before/after the 2003 Iraq war?

At least as concerns the US media, the situation today is incomparably worse. There was a long debate in the run-up to the war, and in the aftermath no one had any problems questioning the grounds for intervention or even indeed outright accusing the Bush administration of having lied.

This became entirely commonplace. The stifling of debate and the homogenization of the media as regards hot-button foreign policy issues really began under the Obama administration: most notably, in the context of the Libyan war.

But at the time, it was at least still possible to bring up conflicting information in “new” media and indeed in some conservative media.

I published numerous articles on the Islamist roots of the Libyan rebellion and the presence in it of Al-Qaeda-linked militants precisely at National Review Online.

In the aftermath of the war – i.e. when it no longer mattered to policy – even the mainstream US media would to some extent acknowledge this presence; and then, of course, the US experienced its own sort of “chickens-coming-home-to-roost” moment in the form of the September 2012 attack on the US mission in Benghazi.

I suppose it is because the Syrian “playbook”, so to speak, so closely resembled the Libyan one that the screws had to be turned even tighter.

http://thebricspost.com/world-played-wi ... yTq9dRXerX