Pay attention at the Saudi Arabia thread, Outlaw: guess, you're going to find the context interesting.
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Russia'n night airstrikes on Jandoul RB & Bani Zaid to stop #FSA advance on #YPG hold Shiekh Maqsud in #Aleppo
Rebels (#FSA) captured Khirbet Butamiah, recaptured air-defense barrier and clashes for Tell Rishah intersection
Worth watching as this German blogger starting monitoring Syria three years ago and then shifted to Ukraine monitoring and now is a political editor by BILD a MSM German media outlet.
From #Debaltseve 2 #Aleppo,
from #Minsk 2 #Munich.
My assessment on @HromadskeTV in ENG/UKR
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU6kPE_rJaI&t=7m43s …
Russia tasty looking but poisoned apple:
Excluding #Nusra means 80% of all rebel groups opposing it as they have some sort of ties w/ them.
Syria #Quneitra #Daraa #Ghouta Alwiya Al-Furqan will not ACCEPT the ceasefire because it EXCLUDES #JabhatalNusra
Assad ethnically CLEANSED the country.
There is NO WAY,elex could be IN ANY WAY "democratic" as long as people didn't return & he is there!
I will post my comments on this development later today as I am waiting to see if a couple of things fall into place this morning after the Assad election announcement ..especially any responses to this from Russian or Iranian sides.
I have questioned in the past when Russian entered Syria who is really the proxy in Syria...the Iranians and or Russia???
If certain things fall into place today after the Assad election announcement I will show exactly how Putin was "played" by Iranian non linear warfare AND in fact Russia is actually the proxy for Iran in Syria.....and how non linear warfare allows for that to actually function.
US Spox Mark Toner: ''We believe YPG is not affiliated w PKK..'' -
A cutout would try plausible deniability. PYD doesn't pretend not to be PKK: http://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs...pkk-connection …
AFP news agency
@AFP
#BREAKING Russia will do "whatever necessary" to ensure Damascus observes ceasefire, Putin says
BUT WAIT Putin just keeps saying the same thing after every round of his mercenaries fighting with the Ukrainian UAF.....since he signed but has never fulfilled Minsk 2 so why is he trying to cover up that fact when he claims a ceasefire for Syria..."will work as he will do everything necessary"......
Reference Russian disinformation warfare concerning Syria..refers to the author of the recent Boston Globe article carried by SWJ.....Kinzer..
https://kyleorton1991.wordpress.com/...he-modern-era/
Assad and Academics: Disinformation in the Modern Era
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on February 22, 2016
Introduction
Very long read but worth it for a number of reasons......Quote:
From the beginning of Syria’s war, the regime of Bashar al-Assad, enabled by Iran and Russia, has run a very elaborate media war to portray itself as the victim of an international conspiracy, wherein its only opponents are terrorists from al-Qaeda and its offshoots who are being used by foreigners—namely the Gulf States, Turkey, Israel, and the United States—to overthrow a defiant “resistance” State.
The other part of this strategic messaging is aimed at the West, which Assad otherwise accuses of supporting jihadi-Salafist terrorism against him: Assad is the only alternative to the terrorists, it says, so the West should support him. War criminal he might be, he will protect the minorities—his role in endangering them by starting a sectarian war against the Sunni majority and bolstering the takfiris within the insurgency to cannibalize all legitimate or engageable armed opposition, notwithstanding—and has no immediate plans to fly planes into Western skyscrapers. (That the leading edge of Assad’s ground forces are made up of radically sectarian, foreign Shi’a jihadists under Iran’s control, some of them Iraqis responsible for killing a quarter of the 4,000 U.S. soldiers who fell in Mesopotamia, and are integrated into a State-run terrorist network that has struck Western and Jewish targets the world over, gets left out.)
For Assad and his allies, it helps if this propaganda is not only delivered by regime spokesman but independent analysts, journalists, academics, and politicians. In the last ten days two salient examples have emerged: Stephen Kinzer, a veteran journalist, including for The New York Times, who wrote in The Boston Globe, and Jeffrey Sachs, an academic economist working at Columbia University, who wrote in The Huffington Post. Mixing together conspiracy theories, half-truths, and outright lies—disinformation, to give it an old name—both Kinzer and Sachs told a version of the regime’s narrative. Why they did this is best-known to them.
A Matter of Framing
A central point of misinformation in both Sachs’ and Kinzer’s articles is that the U.S. is hell-bent on overthrowing Assad. When Syria’s uprising broke out, “the CIA and the anti-Iran front of Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey saw an opportunity to topple Assad quickly and thereby to gain a geopolitical victory,” Sachs writes. Note the list of States that Sachs cites as being ranged against Assad. In many ways, it has to be said, Sachs can be forgiven for thinking this. In 2011 and since, those interested in containing Iran were advocating for the Assad regime’s overthrow: Iran’s gateway into the Arab world, its lifeline to the terrorist Hizballah in Lebanon, and increasingly an Iranian vassal regime on NATO’s doorstep. But in reality, U.S. policy has been essentially the exact opposite.
While President Obama said Assad must “step aside” in August 2011 and drew a “red line” around chemical weapons of mass destruction in August and December 2012, he never had any intention of enforcing either; the overarching goal was to stay out of Syria. In December 2011, Obama told Nouri al-Maliki, Iraq’s then-Prime Minister whose relationship with Iranian intelligence goes back decades, “We have no intention to intervene militarily” in Syria. The regime’s propaganda campaign basically worked. The U.S. was expressing misgivings about the Syrian rebellion in terms reminiscent of regime talking points by early 2012 and shortly thereafter Assad’s survival became part of a broader U.S. policy realignment.
Barack Obama came into office determined to reduce the U.S. footprint in the Middle East, where the U.S. was “over-invested,” as Obama’s former National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon put it, and the President alighted on détente with Iran as the means of achieving this. By respecting Iranian “equities” in the region and finding areas of common interest—such as fighting the Islamic State (even if such common interests are illusory)—Obama hoped to create an “equilibrium” that could police itself with minimal U.S. involvement. The nuclear deal would facilitate rapprochement, removing a thorny issue from U.S.-Iranian relations and giving Tehran access to resources to pursue these overlapping interests.
This was a fantasy, of course. But it did have practical implications. Iran has the Quds Force and other asymmetric instruments that mean any attempt to “balance” between Iran and its neighbours favours Iran. Iran saw U.S. reduced investment in the region as a chance to establish its own hegemony, and with Russia’s help it is well on the way. Since the paper agreement was the thing the U.S. wanted—rather than to verifiably disarm Iran—it meant that the leverage in the nuclear negotiations themselves was tilted toward Iran; it also meant Iran could extract concessions in the region with the implicit threat that it would walk away from the table if it didn’t get them.
To preserve the nuclear deal and Obama’s concept of a new regional order, Syria was given to Iran as a sphere of influence. Iran was informed ahead of time when the U.S. began airstrikes against IS, for example, and told Assad would not be a target—granting Assad a de facto U.S. security guarantee. Iran made sure of that by turning U.S. troops in Iraq into hostages—giving the administration a rationalization for not upsetting Tehran in Syria.
So the whole framing of the articles is wrong.
Continued........
Assad as Saviour
Within a month of Russia’s intervention, 35,000 people had been displaced from just two villages in Aleppo and 120,000 or more in total had been displaced either directly by Russia’s airstrikes or by Russian air power enabling offensives by pro-regime forces—usually led by Iranian-controlled foreign troops. Within days of Russia enabling the pro-regime ground forces to cut the last supply line from Turkey to the rebellion in eastern Aleppo City on February 3, anything up to 70,000 civilians fled fearing the imposition of starvation-sieges the regime has in place in forty-nine other locations. Many of the remaining civilians in Aleppo City are trapped for one reason or another such as they are already displaced and don’t have the resources to move again or are elderly. This was a fairly decisive case of people voting with their feet.
Russia has directly committed “egregious” war crimes, according to Amnesty International, deliberately targeting civilians and then following up with attacks on first-responders in an unmerciful campaign intended to terrorize the population into submission. These “double-tap” atrocities, against groups like the Syrian Civil Defence (“The White Helmets”) that have saved tens of thousands of lives, have been repeatedly documented. Russia has also systematically targeted civilian infrastructure like hospitals and schools. Subtlety not being Moscow’s leading skill, it wasn’t just a hospital but a hospital for children injured and disabled by its own bombing raids that Russia flattened last Monday.
Meanwhile, the Assad regime, enabled at every stage by Iran and Russia, not only bears moral responsibility for every death in this war since it met peaceful protests with live fire and turned a struggle for its spoils system into a grand religious war, but has gone some way to distinguish itself—above and beyond even the Islamic State—for the scale of its cruelty and murder. Six-hundred witnesses and a mountain of documentation taken out of Syria led the United Nations to conclude that the regime was guilty of extermination, rape, and five other crimes against humanity, as well as a raft of war crimes.
The liquidation of at least 11,000 prisoners held by the regime using torture and starvation has been revealed by the defector CAESAR. Something like 200,000 more are held in regime detention in subhuman conditions. In November 2011, barely a month after organized armed resistance had broken out, the U.N. reported that among the tactics the regime was using to suppress the uprising was raping male children in front of their families. Later the regime would cause female captives to bleed to death by inserting rats into their vaginas. IS burned a pilot alive in a cage; the Iranian-run sectarian militia, the National Defence Force, which has eclipsed the national army, burns whole families alive in their homes. And that is before the regime’s methods of warfare—indiscriminate artillery fire, barrel bombs, and airstrikes to destroy ancient cities, and chemical weapons of mass destruction and chlorine-laced incendiaries to intimidate—aimed at mass-killing and the displacement of survivors is factored in.
Continued.....
Shifting the Blame
Since both Sachs and Kinzer present a universe in which Assad is victim rather than perpetrator of the Syrian catastrophe, however, the corollary is to assign blame elsewhere. In line with regime propaganda, this burden falls overwhelmingly on the United States.
To press this argument of Assad as the wronged party, Sachs blames the U.S. for the breakdown of the April 2012 ceasefire. “[Kofi] Annan’s peace efforts were sunk by the United States’ unbending insistence that U.S.-led regime change must precede or at least accompany a ceasefire,” Sachs writes. Kinzer says the same thing: “In 2012 Secretary of State Clinton joined Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Israel in a successful effort to kill Kofi Annan’s UN peace plan because it would have accommodated Iran and kept Assad in power, at least temporarily.” But it isn’t true.
Continued.....
Sudden retreats don't mean that ISIL is defeated @hxhassan
http://www.thenational.ae/opinion/co...il-is-defeated … via @TheNationalUAE
Syria #FSA advance against #IslamicState in desert of E- #Qalamoun
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olq10RE00HI …
http://wikimapia.org/#lang=de&lat=34...43903&z=11&m=b …
pic.twitter.com/FytlJpgSNX
CrowBat....hear and or see anything more that this.......?
Unconfirmed reports of KORAL systems' are being used near Tal Abyad, Jarablus and Kilis/Azaz border towns
pic.twitter.com/FUn1br3kxB
Rebels captured #SAA mercenaries at #Kuds_Mount
#Latakia cs #Syria FEB 22
One was a camera man for info war reporting...
SCD searching for victims aftermath #RUSSIA airstrikes on #alLataminah
#Hama cs #Syria FEB 23
SCD removing remnants of #RUSSIA missiles aftermath it's airstrikes on #Atshan village
#Hama cs #Syria FEB 23
The Kurdish National Council stated the PG should stop their attacks on anti Assad opposition......YPG response....still attacking.....
FSA statement confirm so called"#Jaysh_alThouwar & allies" aren't part of Revolution & Revolutionaries
#Syria FEB23
Rebels repels #SAA infiltration attempt in #Tel_alKhudar, #Kurds_Mount, exterminating a number of it's terroristsQuote:
Translation: Recently, the so called Jaysh al Thouwar came out which is a punch of mercenary gangs who have been assembled from these who have criminal records, criminals thugs and bandits who have the same interests with the incoming money from Assad Regime, Russia Iranians militias. Their non-stop offenses against civilians have emerged and their betrayal which FSA has liberated before and carrying out Ethnic Cleansing, forced displacement and demographic changes of areas in order to help the extremists terrorists groups
allies (YPG, PKK & PYD) under the commander of the so called "Syria Democratic Forces", to take control of Northern Syria for separatists goals.
The entire world sees terrorism of PKK and Jaysh al Thouwar, which are trying to besiege Aleppo city with Russia air support and Assad criminal mercenaries troops. So, we Aleppo Revolutionaries, assure what is called "Jaysh al Thouwar" and it's allies and SDF have no relation with the Syrian Revolution or it's aims in anyway & means,
We FSA call on the fighters of Jaysh al Thouwar who still believe in the principles of the Revolution to return to our Revolution side and take principles to defect from criminal gang which has committed crimes against civilians & home land.
#SYria FEB 22
#Latakia cs #Syria FEB 23
SAA terrorists shelling Grad Rockets targeting #Houwayz village
#Hama cs #Syria FEB 23
Rebels gain control and advance over residential building in #Sheikh_Maqsoud, clashes ongoing with #PYD terrorists
#Aleppo #Syria FEB 23
Clashes between the two terrorists #Isis & #PYD in outskirts of #Sharkrak village
#Raqqa #Syria FEB 23
RUSSIA airstrikes targeting #alCastelo road in the #alJandoul roundabout area
#Aleppo cs #Syria FEB 22
Reports rebels regained control over #Qarouj village, heavy clashes in the area #Turkmen_Mount
#Latakia cs #Syria FEB 23
ProAssad/Putin troll attacks on long time Twitter Syrian activists....by using a twitter form of a distributed denial of service attack...meaning bombing Twitter Support with over 300 negative complaints thus Twitter then deactivates that activist account......
Basically Twitter is not following up on the complaints but rather actually supporting the Russian/Syrian/Iranian info warfare.
This has been and is occasionally still a problem on the Ukrainian twitter side....where Twitter suddenly deactivated over 50 accounts in one run just based on proRussian troller complaints.
A heavy and long running cyber attack on KSA today from both Iraq and Syria...since early morning and sustained.....is not your normal hacker ...points to an organized and professional attack....multiple attempts at installing backdoor trojans.
Assad manipulating ceasefire text language. Actual text says 'other terrorist organizations designated by the UNSC. assad then states and all those groups affiliated to AQ and IS. Actual text says IS, JaN and those DEFINED by UNSC.
Typical Assad...stretches the so called ceasefire OR does he actually channel the true Russian interpretation of what the US thought the US had agreed to BUT failed to nail down word for word exactly how Russian defines each word of the text.....Unless one has the endurance to nail down every word and have it clearly defined in both English and Russian Russia will always "reinterpret them for you"......speaking from personal experience....
KORALS and plenty of similar other Turkish equipment are deployed down the Turkish border since... was it spring 2015?
They were crucial for muting regime's comms during insurgent assault on Idlib (city): no surprise if they're messing around with Russians, IRGC, and whatever other 'progressive Jihadists, pilgrims, tourists and terrorists' are fighting on Assadist side now.
News
Only Russian air strikes today so far target #ISIS in eastern #Homs province.
#Assad' artillery keeps targeting #EastGhouta.
Assad stated two things this last week and just after yesterdays announcement of CoH AND they take on an interesting perspective...when coupled with a comment from the previous week which caught everyone off guard.
1. late last week Assad made one interesting comment...he would be around for 10 years and would rebuild Syria which has the connotation of being around a long long while since the Russian AF has virtually flattened and pulverized all towns and villages held by anti Assad opposition forces.....
2. THEN two hours after the US/Russian announcement of the CoH Assad again stated he would be holding parliamentary elections on 13 April 2016.
BOTH Assad press statements were totally ignored by the US and Russia meaning no one made a single pushback/support statement either on his staying forever and rebuilding Syria to his holding elections...WHICH IMHO is totally strange.
Remember right after Munich 1938 talking about the then supposedly coming CoH Assad in an interview stated he would fight forever to restore all of Syria.....for that the Russian UNSC Ambassador Churkin supposedly "reined him in" with the comment he had to get onboard with the truce......
So Russia supposedly reins him on one comment but not on the other two???? Why is that????
In the Putin speech last night to the Russian public when he announced the CoH...he mentioned something the MSM did not pick up on the translation...he used the term...."we can hold Assad now".
Did he actually slipup and mean "hold" him for the ten years or so IMO I think so....because if you look at the Putin proposals for Syria he does not foresee Assad leaving "unless he is voted out by the Syrians themselves"...which is not about to happen anytime soon.
If you read the Assad statement on the election it was carried also by Sputnik......and a snap election would then grant him via the Russians proclaiming it was a valid democratic election since they will oversee them another 5-10 years in office.
So my core question is ...is the silence between the two... US and Russia a "tacit agreement" to allow Assad to remain in power in the hopes of then combatting IS ...there has been some chatter that one solution would be the rolling in of the FSA into the SAA in a newly reformed SAA which I am not sure how the memories of the SAA genocide of the last five years is to be washed away by a "new and improved SAA".
Assad seems to have a stronger proxy in this fight than the Russians..if one thinks about it...the Russian previous GRU Commander paid with his life for approaching Assad and asking for him to step down if the intel reporting is accurate....indications were that he had been ambushed after his meeting with Assad and then rushed to a Lebanese hospital so it would not appear as if it was a Syrian "accident" where when the news broke about his death the first response out of Moscow was he died in Moscow until social media uncovered exactly where he had died.
Besides what does one do with all of the transnational Shia jihadists still inside Syria nor does it assume the responsibility for bringing Syrian, Shia and Putin war crimes into a court of law if the rule of law is to be reestablished in Syria.
Provocative question is Russia a proxy of Iran and vice versa and who does Assad really answer to...it might be the RuAF and their new weapons, but the bulk of the fighting forces over the last four years as been Shia provided by Iran along with the funds for their pay...which for me makes Iran a stronger partner to Assad than Putin.
Remember Putin holds an unrestricted SOFA signed between Russia and Syria thus Putin plans on being in Syria for a very long time for come with or without FSA and the Sunni's.
Relying on an unreliable man, As #Putin clearly demonstrated in #Ukraine, a ceasefire is a tactic, not a goal
http://uatoday.tv/politics/nyt-relyi...in-596962.html …
Russian soldier in Tartus Port, 2013
pic.twitter.com/uKeJ5YtmAS
RUSSIA airstrikes on #Khanasser now
#Aleppo cs #SYria FEB 23
SAA airstrikes on #alMarj area
#Dasmascus cs #Syria FEB 23
3 #US_Coalition airstrikes targeted #Rawefah, #alHawaeqah & #alJabeileh neighborhoods
#DeirEzzor #Syria FEB 23
US_Coalition carried out airstrikes targeting #alHazam_Alakhdar village in #alAbu_Kamal
#DeirEzzor cs #Syria FEB 23
Isis vbeid attacked #SAA in #Khanaser moments ago
#Aleppo cs #Syria FEB 23
Rebels destroyed #SAA pick-up w/ machine gun in #Almasasna checkpoint exterminating 3 terrorists
#Hama cs #Syria FEB 23
Rebels destroyed #SAA bus loaded with it's terrorists in #Aziziyah village
#Hama cs #Syria FEB 23
SAA shelling IRAMs targeting #Darayya now
#Damascus #Syria FEB 23
One man died and dozens wounded victims of #ISIS mortars targeting #alJoorah and #Qossoor
#DeirEzzor #Syria FEB 23
SAA executed 12 of it's officers inside #alRaqeeta airbase due they refused to fight in #Aleppo - #Hama - #Khanasser Road
#Syria FEB 23
Regime has lost all contact to its garrison in Khan Nassir (said to have been 'several hundred strong').
Despite reported 'dozens of Russian air strikes' the place is under assault by the Daesh since this morning, and should now be considered as under Daesh control.
With this, the IRGC-Ba'ath-Russian conglomerate in general Aleppo area (plus the NDF-contingent inside Western Aleppo) are cut off from all supplies (except whatever they might be able to haul in via Aleppo IAP). The gap between them and Ithriya is about 20km wide. Unless somebody there reorganizes NDF's defences, I doubt Ithriya is going to hold out for very long.
First fuel shortages have been reported from western Aleppo already yesterday early morning. Now we'll see if the 'regime' can reverse the situation...