This is brilliant by @ShirazMaher on the moving parts in #Syria and against the happy talk on the demise of IS.
http://bit.ly/28IulAW
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This is brilliant by @ShirazMaher on the moving parts in #Syria and against the happy talk on the demise of IS.
http://bit.ly/28IulAW
US policy in southern Syria is blundering into helping IS. And Russia is quite deliberately exacerbating this.
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/...to-save-assad/
REALLY long read but worth it....
Russia Needs the Islamic State to Save Assad
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on June 20, 2016
Quote:
After a coalition supporting the regime of Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad conquered the city of Palmyra from the Islamic State (IS) in late March, suggestions were made that this demonstrated the efficacy of the pro-Assad coalition in fighting IS, and doubtless the same will be said if and when the pro-regime forces conquer Tabqa. It isn’t true. From the time of Russia’s direct intervention in Syria on 30 September 2015 to Moscow’s announcement on 14 March 2016 that it was withdrawing “the main part” of its “military” from Syria, IS was almost untouched and al-Qaeda was barely damaged, while the Assad regime was bolstered and the moderate opposition, particularly those components supported by the West, were gravely weakened.
Despite Moscow’s claims that its mission was fighting IS or “terrorism,” Russia’s real goals can be summarized as three:
1.Rescue the Assad regime, which was assessed to be in mortal peril
2.Damage the mainstream armed opposition, especially those elements supported by the West, in order that Russia can …
3.Rehabilitate the Assad regime internationally by inter alia leaving only extremists as its opponents, depriving the international community of credible interlocutors, and therefore strengthening the Russian hand to make peace talks an instrument for re-legitimizing Assad, rather than removing him
In recent days, this basic war strategy has been seen again in southern Syria.
The Assad Regime Totters
In late March 2015, the Assad regime was swept from Idlib City, only the second provincial capital to fall, by Jaysh al-Fatah (JAF), a coalition of insurgents. JAF included Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda, Jund al-Aqsa, and Ahrar al-Sham. JAF included, too, Ajnad al-Sham, a slightly ambiguous group that appears to be more hardline, plus Liwa al-Haq, a Homs-origin Salafist group, and Jaysh al-Sunna, a non-ideological group, both of which have since been subsumed by Ahrar. JAF also at that time included Faylaq al-Sham, a much more moderate Islamist group that has since left JAF and moved into the Western orbit, and the offensive was supported by numerous U.S.-backed, FSA-branded groups.
JAF hung together after the fall of Idlib City and pushed on to take Jisr al-Shughur by late April, the gateway to Latakia Province, the coastal homeland of the Assad clan and the Alawi minority from which he hails and which has disproportionately staffed the regime’s trusted military units. By June, the regime was losing ground not only in Idlib, but in Aleppo and in the south. On 9 September 2015, the regime pulled out of Abu al-Duhour airbase, making Idlib the second province to be completely free of a regime presence—and the only one to be free of the regime and IS, which had been expelled by the moderate opposition in January and February 2014. Regime losses were then suffered in Aleppo to rebels led by the moderate Islamists of al-Jabhat al-Shamiya (The Levant Front).
It had been thirty months or more since the Assad regime had appeared in this much strategic trouble, and the regime was unable to hide it. Assad gave a very important speech on 26 July 2015 conceding, for the first time, that “there is a shortage in manpower“. This is a chronic problem for the regime: Iran has tried to solve it by raising sectarian militias, orchestrating a Shi’a jihad, and increasingly flooding in its own irregular (and now regular) forces. But the demographics were remorseless. This was the calculation behind the joint decision by Iran and Russia to step in directly.
By June, the regime’s Iranian and Russian supporters had begun preparing their intervention, assessing that the regime would fall without it. Iranian troops were moved into position and Russian air assets and even a contingent of troops were moved to Syria. In July 2015, with the nuclear accord secured, Qassem Suleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, the expeditionary wing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), went to Moscow—despite a travel ban imposed by international sanctions that ostensibly prevents him leaving Iran—to finalize the arrangements.
Meanwhile, Russia prepared the ground politically. As a recent comprehensive report by The Atlantic Council notes, Russia very specifically framed its intervention as a means of countering IS. Vladimir Putin had opened his speech at the United Nations, on 28 September 2015, by invoking the anti-Nazi struggle and calling for an international alliance “similar to the anti-Hitler coalition” to defeat IS. As ever, Moscow’s version of the “Great Patriotic War” starts with Operation BARBAROSSA in June 1941, not with the crushing of Poland in September 1939—when Moscow was in a formal alliance with the Nazis. Nor was this the only deception.
Russia Intervenes
Two days after the U.N. speech, with the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church, which called Putin’s mission a “holy war“—not dissimilar to ROC’s view of Moscow’s undeclared war in Ukraine—Russia’s bombardment of Syria began. Russia’s first wave of airstrikes did not go after IS. Russia did not even go after al-Nusra, which has laced itself into the rebellion as part of its stratagem for longevity in Syria—thus potentially providing a fig-leaf for Russian claim it was fighting “terrorism”. Instead, Russia attacked Free Syrian Army (FSA)-branded nationalist rebels like Harakat Tahrir Homs, the First Coastal Division, Jaysh al-Izza, Liwa Suqour al-Jabal, and Jaysh al-Nasr, which were or had received support through the covert programme run by the Central Intelligence Agency that has vetted and supplies around 50,000 moderate rebels throughout Syria. Indeed, the CIA quickly concluded that Russia was systematically targeting its assets in Syria. This situation was not improved by a public admission that the U.S. did not intend to risk a confrontation with Russia by providing vetted rebels with the ability to defend themselves from Russia’s air attacks.
Russia simply, blatantly, and repeatedly lied about what it was bombing. By 12 October, Russia’s Ministry of Defence had published forty-three videos of airstrikes in Syria, by The Atlantic Council’s count. Exactly one video showed an airstrike on an area held by IS. This “inaccuracy on a grand scale,” as The Atlantic Council puts it, took the form of deception about both the location and the target. The U.S. State Department on 7 October said that more than ninety percent of Russia’s airstrikes had hit non-IS targets.
Russia’s airstrikes, in fact, allowed IS to gain territory in the first two weeks of the intervention. Russia claimed on 9 October that it had killed two-hundred IS jihadists in Aleppo. Hours later—with no sign of Russian jets—IS advanced nearly ten miles north-east of Aleppo City, in areas the rebellion had held IS out of for two years, one of IS’s largest territorial gains since it took Ramadi and Palmyra in May 2015. Clearly Russia had bombed the rebels out of the way, allowing IS’s advance. “Russia’s involvement in Syria is facilitating ISIS’s territorial gains,” The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) summarized at the time. “ISIS is benefiting from Russia’s strikes on the Syrian opposition.”
This was the demarcation between an anti-IS and a pro-Assad intervention: Russia would allow—even assist—IS gains if it helped Assad, and helping IS destroy the other insurgents and make Syria into a binary choice of Assad or IS was very helpful to Assad; it is what the regime had claimed was the case, and worked at making the case, all along. In such a scenario, the regime was sure it could rely on the tacit support of the international community to put down the insurgency.
That the build-up of extremists within the insurgency in Syria—especially extremists that attack the mainstream rebellion—serves Russia’s foreign policy goals is what is behind Moscow having facilitated the travel of Jihadi-Salafists from the Caucasus to the Levant. This was reported as far back as August 2015 and in May 2016 Reuters documented six cases where the Russian state had directly or indirectly helped Islamic militants to go to Syria to wage jihad.
In the case of Saadu Sharapudinov, a jihadi from the village of Novosasitli in Dagestan who was already in the woods waging war against Russia, an offer was made by the Russian security services in December 2012 via a political official—who confirms the story—for the provision of a false passport and an airplane ticket to wherever he wanted to go. In September 2013, the FSB drove Sharapudinov to the airport “in a silver Lada car with darkened windows,” handing him a passport with a new name on it and a one-way ticket to Istanbul. This continued until at least September 2014, when Temur Djamalutdinov departed the Russian Federation, despite having been denied a passport two weeks earlier for non-payment of alimony and being on a watch-list of “Wahhabists,” with a notable uptick of state-assisted departures around the Sochi Olympics in February that year.
Continued.....
Russia’s intervention has both removed obstacles to al-Qaeda and IS, namely the rebels who can uproot and replace them, and provided the only conditions—extreme anti-civilian violence—in which al-Qaeda and IS can pose as the Sunni vanguard, a protector-of-last-resort.
Hassan Hassan @hxhassan
Read latest tweets @asseraaalsham about what's happening with regards to the petition to Southern Front. Important, important, important.
NOTE: in Arabic...really a very interesting ongoing debate being carried about the lack of support to the anti Assad forces against Assad by the Southern Front, Jordan and the US.......when they should be in the fight as they started just as the others did...against Assad and got taken over by the US and Jordan.....
No endorsement of that -- but it's key to know what's happening and how (influential) people are thinking. Important to rethink approach.
Those are tweets by influential Saleh al-Hamwi. Note also the petitions against the Southern Front were signed by v influential activists.
Those include Shk Ahmed al-Siyasnah, Shk Mohammed Surur Zine al-Abidine, military defectors, media activists in addition to Ghouta notables.
Things definitely not going well for the Putin/Assad Raqqa ground offensive in spite of hundreds of air strikes and Spetsnaz fighting along side Assad......
After capturing Khirbat Zaidan, reports now that #ISIS has captured Abu Allaj & several other Assad positions on the Ithriya-Raqqa highway
Reports Ahrar al-Sham has captured Abu al-Yaman Shamsi, Harakat Muthana Shar'i in #Daraa
1st Coastal Division's T-55 shelling pro-Regime forces on Ayn Issa front, N. #Latakia
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2V3oA4nrHc …
20/6/16
4 civilians were killed by shelling of regime army forces on Al_Bolail area in Deir Ezzor city
Jaish Al-Islam claims it retook Bahariyah from pro-Assad after it destroyed a T-72 & 1 BMP, E. #Ghouta, #Damascus. http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=33....530657&z=14&m …
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...war-on-doctors
LONG READ...really worth it...
Annals of War
June 27, 2016 Issue
The Shadow Doctors
The underground race to spread medical knowledge as the Syrian regime erases it.
By Ben Taub
Assad’s government has killed almost seven hundred medical personnel.
BTW....when I was wounded in VN my SF medic walked our 16 year old Cambodian nurse through the extraction of the frag, cleaning the wound and then post op recovery to final stitching in a dusty/dirty med bunker on the Cambodian border a long way from anything resembling a "clean" Army field hospital....he just watched and quietly walked her through it ....so I fully understand this article in ways many SWJ readers cannot......Quote:
]On a recent Tuesday evening in London, the surgeon David Nott attended a dinner at Bluebird, an upscale Chelsea restaurant. The room was packed with doctors, renowned specialists who had come for the annual consultants’ dinner of the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, one of Britain’s leading medical establishments. As waiters set down plates of lamb and risotto, Nott checked his phone and found a series of text messages. “Hi David,” it began. “This is an urgent consultation from inside Syria.” Attached was a photograph of a man who had been shot in the throat and the stomach.
The image had been sent by a young medical worker in Aleppo. He had removed several bullets from the patient’s small intestine, but he wasn’t sure what to do about the wound in the throat. For the past hour, the man had been slowly dying on the operating table while the medical worker awaited instructions.
“Sorry, didn’t see your message till now,” Nott typed under the table. “Is the neurology ok?” It was: a bullet had pierced the trachea and the esophagus, but it hadn’t damaged the spinal cord. Nott told the medical worker to insert a plastic tube into the bullet hole, to provide an even supply of air. Then, he instructed, sew up the digestive tract with a strong suture, and, “to buttress the repair,” partly detach one of the neck muscles and use it to cover the wound.
Nott returned to his lamb, which had gone cold. There were around fifty specialists in the room—many more than there are in the opposition-controlled half of Aleppo, where, in 2013 and 2014, Nott had trained medical students, residents, and general surgeons to carry out trauma surgeries far beyond their qualifications. Several had since been killed, and Nott often checked in with the others, especially when he saw reports that Syrian or Russian aircraft had attacked hospitals around the city.
In the past five years, the Syrian government has assassinated, bombed, and tortured to death almost seven hundred medical personnel, according to Physicians for Human Rights, an organization that documents attacks on medical care in war zones. (Non-state actors, including ISIS, have killed twenty-seven.) Recent headlines announced the death of the last pediatrician in Aleppo, the last cardiologist in Hama. A United Nations commission concluded that “government forces deliberately target medical personnel to gain military advantage,” denying treatment to wounded fighters and civilians “as a matter of policy.”
Thousands of physicians once worked in Aleppo, formerly Syria’s most populous city, but the assault has resulted in an exodus of ninety-five per cent of them to neighboring countries and to Europe. Across Syria, millions of civilians have no access to care for chronic illnesses, and the health ministry routinely prevents U.N. convoys from delivering medicines and surgical supplies to besieged areas. In meetings, the U.N. Security Council “strongly condemns” such violations of international humanitarian law. In practice, however, four of its five permanent members support coalitions that attack hospitals in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan. The conditions in Syria have led to a growing sense among medical workers in other conflict zones that they, too, may be targeted.
Despite the onslaught, doctors and international N.G.O.s have forged an elaborate network of underground hospitals throughout Syria. They have installed cameras in intensive-care units, so that doctors abroad can monitor patients by Skype and direct technicians to administer proper treatment. In besieged areas, they have adapted hospitals to run on fuel from animal waste. Nott, for his part, trained almost every trauma surgeon on the opposition side of Aleppo, as part of a daring effort to spread medical knowledge as the government strives to eradicate it.
As a child, Nott constructed hundreds of model airplanes from kits and from scratch, and hung them from the ceiling of his bedroom, in Worcester. His dream was to fly commercial jets, and in secondary school he earned his pilot’s license. But his father, an Indo-Burmese surgeon who had married a British nurse, wanted him to become a doctor. “He used to sit there in my room, forcing me to learn,” Nott told me when I visited him at his private clinic in London, last month. Nott, who is fifty-nine, speaks softly, and has a calm, professorial demeanor. In 1978, he enrolled in the medical program at Manchester University, where he marvelled at human anatomy. “The most exciting machine is a human being,” he said. “It’s actually the same as an airplane or a helicopter. They both have an engine. They both require fuel.”
Shortly before Christmas in 1993, Nott was working as a general surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital, in London, when he saw a television report from Sarajevo. For twenty months, the city had been under siege by the Bosnian Serb Army, and the program showed a field hospital in need of staff. The next day, Nott volunteered with Médecins Sans Frontières, and on Christmas Eve he left for a three-month stay in Sarajevo, where he worked at a facility that had been so severely damaged by shelling and sniper fire that people called it Swiss Cheese Hospital.
After that trip, Nott took long periods of unpaid leave from his jobs at various London hospitals to volunteer for humanitarian-aid agencies in other areas afflicted by war and natural disaster. He operated on thousands of patients in more than twenty countries—including Afghanistan, Sierra Leone, Haiti, and Nepal—often with rudimentary equipment and insufficient supplies of medication and donor blood. The conditions forced him to learn an array of surgical techniques that in London would all have been carried out by different specialists.
In 2008, on the day that Nott arrived at an M.S.F. hospital in Rutshuru, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he found a sixteen-year-old orphan whose arm had been improperly amputated. The stump was infected, and the muscles were gangrenous. Without a forequarter amputation—a complicated procedure in which the entire shoulder is removed, usually as a last resort to halt the spread of cancer—the boy would die. Nott had never done the operation, so he sent a text message to Meirion Thomas, who was Lead Surgeon at the Royal Marsden Hospital, in London. Minutes later, Thomas replied, “Start on clavicle. Remove middle third.” He sent nine more steps, and signed off, “Easy!” The boy recovered.
At the time, military doctors in Iraq and Afghanistan were adopting a transformative approach to the worst battlefield-trauma cases. Typically, surgeons treated life-threatening abdominal bleeds from gunshots and bomb blasts by cutting open the abdomen, searching for the damaged organs and arteries, repairing them, and stitching up the incisions. The fixes could take hours, and patients often died on the operating table after their body temperature plummeted.
Continued......
What has the Obama/Rhodes/NSC WH and the UNSC response been to this?....just more Assad and Putin air strikes on hospitals, doctors and field hospitals...all designed to destroy medical facilities and kill medical personnel....and patients previously wounded from Russian/Assad air strikes, barrel bombs, IRAMs and cluster munitions......
HECK the US AF and the entire US national level IC with literally billions of USDs in ISR assets available to them in this part of the world COULD NOT/WOULD NOT identify who conducted night time precision air strikes destroying recently two hospitals killing patients, families and medical personnel. There needs a serious answer as to why that is.....some say in the ME that the Obama/Rhodes WH fully support these Russian actions in order to then keep Assad in power as he is an "Iranian ally"....."perception" is a powerful force in this region.....
Providing the RuAF a "get out of jail pass" and a not so subtle US YES nod to continue their hospital air strikes....
So is the US complicit as well as Assad and Putin...possibly.....might be the answer
The Islamic State (ISIS) has reportedly pushed Syrian regime forces back out of the province of Raqqa in a large counter-offensive which has killed 40 soldiers, afflicting a serious setback on the regimes two-week old offensive against the militants there.
“Daesh [ISIS] has managed to drive out regime troops from the administrative borders of Raqqa province after a fierce counter-offensive,” the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor reported.
ISIS launched this counter-offensive late on Sunday as the regime forces closed in on the town of Tabqa, home to a former airbase and Syria’s largest dam. Tabqa is 40 kilometers upstream, west, of the provincial capital city of Raqqa, ISIS’s primary city stronghold in Syria.
The Syrian Observatory reported on Monday that the regime has been forced to 40km from Tabqa airport after previously being only 7km away from it.
Fearing losing Tabqa - and the regime successfully securing a foothold in Raqqa for the first time since August 2014 - ISIS poured hundreds reinforcements into that key town from Raqqa city.
The Observatory estimates that 40 of the regime forces were killed, including an officer, while no fewer than 21 ISIS militants were killed. This brings the total casualties in the regimes Raqqa offensive to 93 dead regime forces and 126 dead ISIS militants, according to the Observatory’s estimates.
Damascus launched the offensive into Raqqa in early June with Russian air support. The Russians previously helped the regime retake the ancient city of Palmyra from ISIS late last March.
NOTE: The regime loses are higher than mentioned and the article does not refer to potential Russian loses.....as they were also in the fighting.
Impressive #RuAF incendiary strikes taking place in Aleppo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pM6ixJSTLc …
What's next after #Assad-forces & #Russia failed to get a foothold
in #Raqqa province (like former Tabqa Airbase) ?
Ahrar Al-Sham improving shelling capabilities with drone monitoring in #Zahraa, #Aleppo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3RvW0dLEvQ …
JaI rebels have liberated Talet al-Bahariya & several positions around it in Marj, E. Ghouta after several days of clashes w/ regime forces
Jaish Nasr targeted with #TOW a BMP in Al-Buweida barrier, N. #Hama.
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=en&lat=35....695538&z=13&m …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNuEhOFYYaM …
So now the Russian backed regime offensive on Ghouta is falling apart. Will Latakia be the only lasting legacy of Putin's gamble?
Pro #Assad veteran @TulsiGabbard claims 'US is waging an illegal war to overthrow the government of Assad.'
Video comments from two Shia women working with Iraqi Shia militias and Hezbollah troops.....epitomizes what the Obama/Rhodes WH has totally failed to understand with their full scale tilt to Iran as the regional hegemon......
"We are serving the Shia militias so that the banner of Hussein flies over the cities of the Sunnis"
Plain & Direct.
+10 different rebel towns/villages in #Aleppo & its suburbs were targeted by #Russia|n airstrikes today w/ regular/incendiary cluster bombs
AND the Obama/Rhodes WH says absolutely nothing..........
Quds Force leader Qassem Soleimani has moved on from Iraq's Fallujah to supervise the battles in Aleppo, Syria.
http://en.farsnews.com/newstext.aspx?nn=13950331001125 …
From #US-backed to #Russian-backed in only 24 hrs.
#Iran is on the winning track these days.
Let's see for how long.
APPEARS Soleimani cannot seem to pick the "winning side".....
Iran is losing badly and needs as much help as they can muster right now.....
Russian bomb attacks on civilians continued south of #Damascus this morning.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4-q2Y8n0CE …
Footage
Jaish al-Nasr TOW misses #Assad regime BMP in northern #Hama (too short distance).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNuEhOFYYaM …
Another Russian "vodka moment"....."massive human right violations" but Russia does not count itself as a violator even after a massive cluster and WP munitions attacks and constant air strikes on hospitals....
https://www.almasdarnews.com/article...a-peace-talks/ | Al-Masdar News
Moscow stresses urgent need for Syria peace talks
Maybe the Russians like talking to themselves as I seriously doubt the HNC is returning any time soon as nothing was done to deliver aid as even Russia/US stated would happen and then the Russians unleashed a massive bombing campaign AGAINST FSA not against IS.....Quote:
Russia called on Tuesday for a swift resumption of stalled Syrian peace talks, saying it was the only way to halt “massive violations” of human rights perpetrated in the five-year-old conflict. Russia, a strong ally of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, launched air strikes in September to support the Syrian Arab Army (SAA) against Islamist rebels and Islamic State fighters, and is backing an offensive on rebel-held areas of the northern city of Aleppo. It supports proposals for a political settlement under which some Syrian opposition figures would be brought into a Syrian unity government – steps which rebels and their foreign backers say do not go far enough. “The only way to find a solution to the Syria crisis and stop the massive violations is to promptly convene talks with a broad spectrum of Syrian opposition which includes Syria Kurds,” Aleksei Goltiaev, senior counselor at Russia’s mission to UN in Geneva, told the U.N. Human Rights Council. “Only Syrians, without diktat, have the right to decide (their future),” Goltiaev said.
Russian MoD is all over the map about their use and or not use of cluster munitions and WP cluster munitions..........
Russian state military media @zvezdanews claims RuAF uses incendiary cluster bombs at Aleppo (warcrime)
Looks like a 9M22S rocket carrying a 9N510 warhead. It's an incendiary cluster munition used by Russia in Ukraine.
An interesting side incident.......
Insider info: Syrian billionaire Motaz Al Khayat was arrested in Doha last night for unknown reasons. He was v close to Sheikha Mouza.
Doha Police raided his Yacht while docked in Four Seasons Marina, handcuffed him & 3 other top executives with him. Left other guests alone.
Khayat went from a nobody to tycoon in less than 5 years when he subcontracted Sheikh Mouza's villa outside Damascus in 2010.
Sheikha Mouza liked his work..the rest is history. in 2011 he moved 2 Qatar, was given Qatari citizenship..and added 9 zeros to his income.
Soon after he moved to Doha he pretty much got into every business sector possible. It is estimated he is worth $4.4bln (he's under 35).
Courageous nurses rescue children after an air raid on a hospital in #Aleppo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xC-xNAwVOUw …
What looks like a #RuAF Tu-142 over northern Homs, June 18th.
Manbij: #YPG under heavy attacks by #ISIS. Photo of a destroyed #YPG Humvee west of #Manbij today.
NOTICE...no more mentioning of the SDF.....